Not many people can attain such a cult following. It happened with the Victoria government paying Tiger Woods to come to Melbourne to play a game of golf and the deal paid off handsomely.Lance Armstrong twittered " who wants to come for a ride in Glenelg with him and Robbie McEwen and close to 7000 cyclist turned up".
The guy has won 7 Tour De France. In an interview, a reported asked "Lance, what are you on?" (trying to instigate that he was on drugs). His reply "I'm on my freaking bike 6-7 hours a day".
The Tour De France is the pinnacle of cycling. Basically, it involves cycling anywhere from 120-200+km per day, everyday, for close to 3 weeks.
SO I asked myself, what could it be like cycling a stage of the Tour Down Under in Adelaide. We started at 6.30am and the professional racers will ride the same course but starting at 10.30 (so we got a 4 hrs head start). 8000+ riders signed up, and we got the SA police closing most roads for us out of the city, you could not ask for more.
160km...with a hill thrown in. It reached 12-13% gradient at some parts.
Australia's version of the devil girl greeting you as you get past the final climb.
This guys obviously did it on a MTB.
8000 riders, so you need plenty of rails for bikes.I finished in 5.5hrs. Frankly, I dun think I couls do it again the next day. The legs were actually pretty good but the neck was stiff as!
No picture of me after the race. Mate said, I looked like 'shit'. U get cramps in places you never thought possible.
Here's me in the final stage race in the City itself.
Saxo in the lead
Lance, the man himself in the pack.
HTC protecting Griepel
Australia's Cadel Evans
And Mike, the Guy flys in, in his private Jet Stream, he flew out the same night. Its pretty hard to get close to him.PS: Cat, there was actually study whereby a client with kidney failure decided to eat heaps of bananas and died from the potassium overload! His heart could not take it.
I ate 6 bananas that day!!
5 comments:
I'm not surprised about the bananas (but am surprised about Lance having his own Gulfstream! Damn, no one told me riding a bile can make THAT much moolah!).
When I was an intern and we had all these old patients who's K+ levels were low, I kept asking the nurses to feed them bananas. It was that or giving K intravenously which can be pretty dangerous fi I got the calculations wrong.
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/livestrong-to-donate-250000-usd-to-haiti
Not only that, he has private plates on the planes tail!!
In the hospital, its easier to give them SlowK+ then force them bananas
Err...banana can kill har?
Oh yeah those guys on the MTB had it easy. Looking @ the climbs u got, they would have better climbing gear ratios. LOL.
Only if your kidneys are stuffed or possibly some heart problems
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