First days in Canda - Spendng alot of money

Landed in Canada 5pm Thursday - mid day Friday New Zealand time. Airport travel was a mess; cruised out of koru club in wellies to find the plane was just about to board. Got about three hours on the flight to LA. Was feeling very sweaty and gross on reaching LA airport.

LA airport is freaken massive, like huge. Was a race against time to get to next plane. Spent alot of time in lines. Once through custom's couldn't find our way upstairs then had to go through security. It's made. Four checks between two planes. Made it just and then waited half an hour why they kicked someones bags off the plane.

Talked to some sweet old lady next too me on the plane up. Got her number so have a place to stay in Yukon if necessary. Get a Canada's number. Done, Boom. Slept on the plane for about an hour. Woke up in some sweet droll

Vancouver airport was low key as compared to LA. Caught up with the boys. Sky trained it to the city. Checked into the backpacker's, showered, got on it. Bars were pretty empty but got the D floor going somewhere. Home at three Friday morning

Woke up Friday hungover. Made it to free breakfast (toast with jam, apricot jam here is amazing) which comes with the accommodation. Found a van on Craig's list, found our way to the burbs on sky train and random bus. Public transport here is amazing. The power of a lot of people, so fast cheap and easy. Van looked and sounded all G so purchased. A GMC Safari with 150,000 on the clock for $2000 Canadian.

Cruised around the water front last night. Very nice. Someone very smart put some effort into design down. Bed by ten.

Saturday - made an attempt at visiting bike stores, failed epically, Ants found a second hand bike on Pink Bike. Caught a boat across the harbour to check it out. Steal of the century. Very few/no large bikes for sale on net. Tomorrow's job is checking out a store and see what I can haggle. There are bike's in Revy too so no rush. Need to get insurance too and then Monday, pick up Van and start the trip to Revy

First impressions on Canada.

• People in Vancouver are ubber friendly, like better then NZ so far
• Weed is everywhere
• Pizza here is amazing
• There is no wind (amazing)
• It takes a while to get over people driving on the opposite side of the road (have freaked out a number of times looking in cars and thinking no one is driving)

Overall loving the holiday so far. Two more days in Vancouver. Big night tonight and then Boom buy a bike and roll out of here Monday.

Peace, Andy.

Crazy man - it was crazy

This weekend Beijeman bro's racing took on the Crazy man team duathlon. I did the run. Following a big month of racing in March I really backed off the training in April feeling that the body was a bit over worked. Crazy man is a tough run so as long as i bet the average time of an hour fifty i was gonna be stocked.

Having done a couple of practice runs on the course I knew it was going to be tough and pacing myself would be key. My strategy was to nail the downhills and flats and walk any up hills as fast as possible to conserve energy. At the half way mark I was feeling a little bit nailed. The great thing about team events is that some stage in the event someone is going to cheer you on. This bit of extra support put me in a good place for the final climb. On reaching the summit of Mt Lowary my legs were starting to pack it in. From here it was 4 km to the finish, mainly downhill. Motivation was sliding and running downhill fast was not on the agenda, a situation that has happened before. At this point a voice crept into my head "if you can't run downhill you might as well pull out"... Thank you Anthony Thompson. That was all the motivation I needed to destroy the last 4km, get cramp with about 800m to go and pull out a time of 1hr 42 minutes. Pretty stocked with this time considering i haven't been doing much running and I walked every up hill. Next year it would be great to go under an hour thirty for the 18km course.

At the transition area Mark and I swapped bibs about as smoothly as possible. Mark passed alot of people during the mountain bike to bring us home 6th out of about 20 teams in a total time of 3 hours and 36 mins, 36 minutes of the leaders. Plenty of room for improvement.

Next up is the wainui six hour. Should be a good achievement just to finish in one piece, and then Canada

Boom

Andy