Speaking of Cows

Or, "The August Long Weekend"

In our scheming for this triathlon, we thought it would be a really good idea to do a bit of reconnaissance. So to Kelowna we went for the long weekend. We roped Susan into coming along, and decided to turn the weekend into a bit of a training camp - a few runs, a few rides, and maybe even some swimming.

The first step was finding somewhere to stay. The long weekend in Kelowna can be pretty ridiculous. We decided to stay a little out of town, just out of Merritt at a forestry campsite.

The site is amazing.  Completely amazing.


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The only downside we discovered is that herds of cows seem to migrate to the lakes every morning, and proceed to moo like the world is about to end.  Every morning.  For hours.  Other than that, though, very peaceful.

Saturday we pre-rode and ran the course.  I'm pretty excited - the bike course is a lapped course, and each lap basically has one big hill, and then the entire rest of the lap is a gradual downhill to the beginning.  Which means that you are absolutely flying for about 90% of the time.  Really really fun.  The run is twisty, but completely flat, so that should be fine.   And you can't do much to a swim course.  Not looking forward to that part.

Sunday was a ride on the old highway between Kamloops and Merritt.  The route we chose is an out and back, heads northeast around Nicola Lake, and stays pretty true to that direction the whole way.  When we started there was a wind coming out of the southwest at about 30km/h.   This makes for a very fun first half of the ride.

And then to wrap it all up, there was the mandatory swim.  We started right beside our campsite, and headed out to the other side of the lake.  When we got to the other side of the lake we discovered that it was not cow free as we had thought.  Remember those herds of cows?  They seem to hang out at that lake often.  This was fairly disgusting.  Plus, when you tried to stand up to get out of the lake, you sank in to about your knees in goo.  I don't want to think about what made up that goo.  Very disgusting.