The traffic on the way to Queanbeyan this morning was incredible! There was a line up of cars on Sternberg Crescent looking to turn left at the big roundabout at Erindale Drive and then the Monaro Highway was like a parking lot all the way back to the tip turnoff. Amazing! It didn’t take too long to get through and once I turned towards Queanbeyan the road was fairly clear but it is the busiest I have seen it. It seems that the roads are always busier when it rains. I don’t know why but it seems odd. There can’t be so many people regularly riding bikes to work who take their cars on a bad days thus causing more traffic can there? Who knows?
It was another busy weekend. Third in a row where the main objective has been cleaning up the house after a week of mess. I am really hoping that it won’t be a fourth next weekend. It barely seems that you are getting home on Friday night and you are going to work again on Monday and nothing has been achieved to make life more enjoyable. I think you have to step back occasionally and get yourself out of the grind. It really is up to you to make life better for yourself. Something I am working on.
I have a workmate who is having some emotional problems caused by his professional and personal relationships. He is going to a psychologist who is giving him some strategies to work through but he doesn’t seem to even be having a go at using them. Everyday he comes into work and it’s the same thing. You ask him how he is and he says so/so, just the same. I want to strangle him! We have all gone through depressive periods and most of us will again but you don’t just get out of these situations naturally. You have to work it out yourself to some extent. This fellow exasperates me because he doesn’t even try to help himself even though a psychologist is giving him a start. I told him the other day tongue in cheek that we would have to have what the Americans call an “intervention” where his friends ambush him in a room and talk to him about his problems until he realises there is a need for change and is willing to do so. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so tongue in cheek about it!
Anyway it will be another quite busy week for me with quite a few things to do in the mornings before I go to work so I am going to be a bludger today until 2.00pm when the grind begins.
There is lots of racing going on in the cycling world at the moment with The Tour of Italy entering it’s final week after three muscle crushing days in the mountains and the Tour of California finishing in Los Angeles this morning.
The Tour of Italy has been particularly hard this year and Alberto Contador described last night’s stage as the hardest day he has ever had on a bike. Of course there are plenty of whingers complaining that it is too tough. Of course it is easy sitting here in my bedroom typing on a computer but I really think some of these guys need to harden up. Cycling was built on suffering. Some of these guys wouldn’t have lived with Coppi and Bartali and the blokes who came before them in the 1930’s if they were worried about the racing being too hard. They get it easy now days by comparison. I like the tough route. Everybody knows the course before the start. If you don’t like it you don’t have to race it. Simple.
The big news in world cycling at the moment is the Lance Armstrong investigation. A Grand Jury is hearing testimony that Armstrong used performance enhancing drugs during his career and a number of notable people have dumped the bucket on Lance. Tyler Hamilton is even appearing on the American 60 Minutes program finally admitting that he doped and revealing that he saw Lance dope. But the biggest bombshell is the rumour that George Hincapie, one of Armstrong’s most trusted former teammates in his Tour de France winning years has rolled over on Lance. You can flay Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis because they lied themselves and then turned on Lance when they ran out of money and because they are both odd individuals who are easy to take a shot at but George Hincapie’s credibility is etched in stainless steel! Lance may be in a spot of bother!
My own opinion is a bit like the tide. It ebbs and flows! I hate the drugs in the sport as much as anyone and would like to see them eradicated but I am not sure about the Armstrong witch hunt. Should he be crucified for doing what everyone else was doing? There are plenty of others who got out of doping violations relatively unscathed and some of them are still racing and for all we know are still up to the same thing.
Armstrong in many ways was his own worst enemy and that perhaps is why it is going to hit him the hardest. He was brash, arrogant, businesslike, American and he kept winning and doing it better than anyone else. Nobody likes a winner!
It will be interesting to see where it goes from here. Armstrong may have finally made one enemy too many and he may go down but he has the money and influential friends to fight this sort of thing. I don’t see the point of ripping the sport apart like this. He will never lose his seven Tour victories no matter what happens.
I know the Armstrong haters will disagree with me but I would rather let it go and look to the future. Hopefully that will be a bit brighter for the sport.
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 