:: W4B photography's companion blog ::

:: Monday, January 02, 2006 ::

179 till the TdF
cycling: Yeah. As I get pudgy while winter wears on, I realized via my Konfabulator countdown timer that it is exactly 179 days till the Tour de France begins. At this point, as the above poster indicates clearly, it's a Post Lance tour despite his maybe/maybe not comments in the fall. Will Jan win? Will Basso?



Following the progress around the map counter clock around France from July 1st to July 23rd will tell. And on July 18th they will be racing up L'Alpe d'Huez! Awesome.

Here are some details from the Official TdF site:

A prologue and 20 stages and will cover a total distance of 3,600 kilometres.

These 20 stages have the following profiles:
* 9 flat stages,
* 4 medium mountain stages,
* 5 mountain stages,
* 2 individual time-trial stages,

Distinctive aspects of the race
* 3 mountain finishes,
* 2 rest days,
* 116 kilometres of individual time-trials (including the prologue)
* 22 Category 1, Category 2 and highest level passes will be climbed

I watched last year's Tour de Flanders - a one day race held in April and nothing to do with Homer's neighbour - that I saved on the PVR for mid winter motivation. I also have 5 or 6 of the more exciting 2005 Tour stages. At 3 hours a piece, I figure by mid March I will be done with them and hopefully outside and riding again. Kelly and I talked about that the other day. First good (dry and roads free of snow) day we have off together we are going to go riding.

Nothing like watching Discovery, T-Mobile, CSC, FDJ, and the others go at it on European country roads and cobblestones and 15% hills while there is snow outside here. It motivates you to build a time travel machine. And get back to the gym. When this cold - which I have aquired yesterday - is out of my system, I am there.

Carpe Diem

:: Mike Wood 11:13 [+] :: 1 comments
...

1 Comments:

Wow is it almost that time of year again?

S

By  Anonymous, at 11:54 AM  

Post a Comment