The 2007 First Annual Slow Food Cycle Tour

This past Saturday, the Vancouver Slow Food folks organized a cycling version of the Circle Farm Tour in Agassiz.

My darling wife and I packed our car, put the bikes on the rack and after leaving our delightful daughter with her doting grandparents in Chilliwack, arrived at the starting point and were on our bikes by 9:30am.

It was a splendid way to spend the day - we visited the eight sites on the tour and had a pleasant spin through the pretty countryside in Agassiz. It was almost completely flat too. Five hours later, pleasantly sated and with pannier bags full of goodies (mostly fabulous cheese from Farm House Cheese), we headed back to my parent's place.

The finale on the tour was the Valedoorn Farm dairy, the twelfth largest dairy in BC, with 400 cows, half of them milkers, the other half everything from new born calves to pregnant cows. They produce about 14,000 litres of milk a day.

Every cow has an ear tag, and the tags use RFID chips to talk to the milking machines, which in turn provide all manner of data to the farmer; and the daily report gets sent to his Treo.

Three people run the farm, and it's a 24/7 operation. Our "tour guide" told us he's up every day at 4:30 and by the time the last rounds are done, he's up until midnight.

The weather was mostly nice, though we did get caught by a little drizzle, but it was a fun experience. I'm definitely going to do it again next year.

Flatlining

I took this week extra easy. I did go to the Y on Tuesday morning for spin class, but that was mostly to help me recover from the Saturday ride. I'll make up the missing pieces of my 100 workout next week by going every day I'm not doing the spin class.

I took my bike to the shop this morning to repair my broken spoke, which they said would run me about $25.

I took a look at my fitness "spreadsheet" which mostly keeps track of my weight and after 27 weeks, the graph looks pretty flat. It's down from where I started, but to misuse an analogy, if it were a stock in my portfolio I'd sell it for under performing.

Of course, all the good food and beer and wine I've been drinking can't possibly be contributing to my lack of weight loss progress *koff*koff*. Ironically, it's not escaped my attention that in the past, when I've taken weight off, it's been in the fall or winter, when summer's party's, my summer preference for beer, my love of ice cream, and so on, are much more easy to forgo.

Oh well. As a good friend of mine says, fit comes in all shapes and sizes - and a good thing that's true.

The 2007 MS Vancouver Scenic City Bike Tour

For the second year in a row, I signed up for the MS Bike Tour here in Vancouver. They changed the route from last year, no doubt in part because of the mess that Stanley Park is still in, so instead of 60km it was 65km. It was also a LOT of hills. A lot of them. Fortunately, on the whole, they were not as nasty as the steep monster down Slocan.

For the record: 3h 13m to do the ride this year, and my heart rate monitor claims I burned 3,102 calories. I didn't eat that many calories at the best event bbq ever after the race, which is put on by the Terminal City Club.

My company's team came in 2nd for overall fund raising, at a little over $6,000, of which $2,188 was me (not including the extra amount everyone on the team received for group activities like the 50-50 draw we ran last week). If I were a "team", I would have come in 7th.

My darling wife and beautiful daughter were on hand at the finish line, and my daughter rode her tricycle alongside me through the finish line, wearing the "Club 1000" cycling jersey I received for my fund raising effort. She looked really cute and many photos were taken.

I'm definitely signing up again next year. :-)