Ted King

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Today is Friday. Fact.

Well, hrmmm. Geezum crow... not much to say. I'm fishing for words here, but am coming up short. Not much to say. Stage seven of the Tour de Suisse was a toughie, but that's to be expected being the queen stage and all. Whatever the heck that means. Why "Queen", anyone know? With the exception of chess where the queen can swoop all over the board with reckless abandon, it seems that Kings are more BA. And I don't mean that in the least way to be a sexist remark, so bite your tongue thank you kindly. Kings rule with an iron fist and when I think of Queens I think of Queen Elizabeth who is about as tough as Big Bird.So scoping that Strava file, above, the super-nerd observer will notice that at 5:40:20 we stopped entirely with still 800 or so meters to the finish line. That's cause while ripping down the Albulapass and into the very fine city of La Punt, we had to stop for a train. So I may have finished __:__ behind the winner, but we were surely going to finish up a solid minute or even two minutes faster were it not for these Swiss trains and its militaristic precision.Meanwhile, you might also note that in the first hour and a half -- while tackling a category 3 climb amid the relentless attacks -- we are still averaging 48kph. Which is very fast my friends, and the sign of a tough day ahead, with still a category 1, a nasty little cat 4, and directly into a beastly HC.Back in ought-ten, we had a camp atop Bernina Pass at this gem of an albergo. T'was delightful, provided you want to train hard, eat in a relative monk-ish fashion, and have little to no entertainment. The views were fantastic and as I just mentioned the training was superb. It looked something like this back in the day, so now three years later it probably looks the same, but with more global warming and therefore less snow. (sigh)Swiss Altitude Camp - 1And on that note, Tour of Suisse is a race known for late starts (2pm'ish every day) and therefore late finishes. We just wrapped up dinner here at 11pm and I'm sleepy. Translation: g'night.