Author Archive
Thursday, August 5th, 2004
Anniversary Crab apple jelly
On August 5, 2000, I married The Lovely One. It has been four great years. I don’t want to wax rhapsodic about what being married to my lovely bride has meant to me; such thoughts are hard to express well (which is why romantic poets are so highly paid) and likely to bore or nauseate […]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by Ryan Cousineau
Wednesday, August 4th, 2004
Where does the time go?
Apologies if this doesn’t work right: I’m testing the e-mail interface to my weblog again, something that has had disastrous results in the past. During a party this weekend, a very dear and longstanding friend was rather shocked that I wasn’t interested in seeing a certain very important film. I think she thought I was […]
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Wednesday, July 28th, 2004
Cat 4 Glory
So, having covered myself in glory two weeks ago, I decided to ride the Cat 4 race tonight, a one-category upgrade from my previous work. It was okay! Even on the fairly tough course we use, I was not adrift amongst the pack. Instead, I could keep up with it easily, and even made a […]
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Tuesday, July 27th, 2004
Update
This weekend was so hectic I don’t even remember what I did on Saturday. But Sunday was a morning spent rattling around in the back of a Passat, trading bicycle wheels through the side window with a guy on the back of a motorcycle, as we chased some seriously masochistic cyclists through the streets of […]
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Friday, July 23rd, 2004
A Curious Incident at the Tour
Today’s stage was a mostly flat nothing, and a breakaway of GC no-hopers got away early. That’s the kind of thing the GC leaders (Armstrong, Basso, Kloden, Ullrich) want to see, as it makes the stage safe for them (why? The short answer is that the escape can’t do any harm because they can’t gain […]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by Ryan Cousineau
Thursday, July 22nd, 2004
There’s Something Wrong Here
Hey, did you notice that the Canadian downhill mountain bike championships just took place? The top ten men were separated by 13 seconds. The winner on the women’s side, however, was Michelle Dumaresq. The gap between her and the next-best woman? 14 seconds and a Y-chromosome. Some caveats: women’s bike fields, and especially downhill racing, […]
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Thursday, July 22nd, 2004
Beginner’s Guide to the Tour, Part 3
It’s all over but the shouting. Lance managed to win yet another stage today (his third in a row, if you’re counting), and has a four-minute lead over Ivan Basso. There’s only one stage left where there’s a reasonable chance for anyone to lose time: Saturday’s ITT. Like the hillclimb on Wednesday, it’s a race […]
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Friday, July 16th, 2004
Beginner’s Guide to the Tour, Part 2b
One more thing: Cycling News has a pretty goodsummary of the Tour route, stage by stage. Oh, me? Wedding on Saturday in Yarrow (in a turkey barn!), and this week I made sour plum preserves and syrup with my mother-in-law, and built up a wheel that needed building.
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Friday, July 16th, 2004
Beginner’s Guide to the Tour, Part 2a
Oh, and Susan at work asked me a question today about how the teams decide who the leader is. I gave her a few answers: the rider has a history of big performances, the rider shows strength early in the tour, et cetera. I also gave her the historical examples of where there were two […]
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Friday, July 16th, 2004
Beginner’s guide to the Tour, Part 2
First of all, let me note something that I was surprised by: Lance went for it today! Today featured a flat start to the stage, but at the end it it two Category 1 (very hard, but not quite the hardest class) climbs right at the end of the stage, ending atop the second mountain. […]