8.9.08
I am not sure where all the time goes!?! The past two days have flown by, yet I can’t really remember what I did! We have been training a lot on the road course/time trial course. Each time that I ride the course it seems to get a little harder. I have been dialing in the course as much as possible… I like to break the course down in sections and work on how I can ride each section. It is during that process that I keep finding more hard sections than easy sections. The course is either climbing, rolling up a false flat, or winding through a fast technical section. All of this should play into my favor for the time trial!
With this being my third time at the Paralympics I should be use to the down time! We keep a schedule while we are here but there is still a lot of free time. It during the downtime that my mind likes to work me over. I have been working towards this goal for many years, and I just do not want to screw up. I want to have the best day I can have on my bike and I want that result to yield a medal!! Now that the competition has started here, athletes are winning and they are losing. It has been said “that’s why we race!” because any one thing can happen and everyone has a chance to win. My time trial is on Friday, and Friday is the day that I am going to ride like the wind and stand on top of the medal stand!
Brooke and Barbara visited the Village yesterday. It is nice to have them here in China. We enjoyed some McDonald’s for lunch. We had to sneak them into the dining hall! Brooke does not like to break the rules! After lunch we decided to take a trip outside the village to a place called Silk Street Market…so a small group of us piled in a couple of taxis and were off like a herd of turtles! Now, I have seen my share of traffic living in Atlanta, and I have experienced traffic in LA, but I have never seen or experienced traffic like we did going into the heart of Beijing!! It was bumper-to-bumper or bumper-to-back-of-left-quarter-panel the whole trip. The way that the Chinese people drive is very different. They do not respect the lane that they are in and they like to use the HORN. If people drove like that at home there would be a ton of road rage! Here the people cut each other off and blow the horn, yet nobody seems to get upset. I also noticed that most of the cars on the road are new models. While we worked or way into Beijing you can not help but notice all the tall buildings. The buildings look like NY City but for miles and miles and miles and miles. There are many skyscrapers of all shapes and sizes. We passed one building that looked like a pair of pants! I guess with over a billion people you have to have a lot of buildings.
The Silk Market was an experience. It is a building with floors of copy cat items ranging from polos, electronics, golf clubs, jackets, silks, pearls, watches etc. You name it and it was in the place. You have to be ready to negotiate and ready for high pressure sales. The salespeople in each shop do not want you to leave their stall without buying something. They will use every bit of English they know in a effort to sell their goods. Brooke is great at this whole process. Brooke, armed with a calculator, starts the bidding. It goes down like this: “Sir, Sir, Mr American, you like my stuff? You need a some pearls to take home to family? Come in, Come in I give you best price…you my favorite… I give you best price. Where you from, where you from?” When you get down to the price of the item, it’s like a game of Texas hold’em. The salesperson types the price on her calculator in yuan. Then you immediately take that number and divide by 2 on your calculator. Then divide by 6.8 to get the US $$. Then you decide how much you really want to pay for the item and make an offer via your calculator. It is a very fun process! Brooke and I were in one shop and we were haggling over a silk top for Brooke. After about 15 minutes of back and forth I said, “Let’s go… you don’t need that!” So we walked out of the shop. We were half way down the aisle when the salesperson came running after us shouting, “Wait, Wait, I give you best price.” We stopped and Brooke started to haggle again in the middle of the aisle. Brooke won! She got the silk top for 80% off the original price!
Today, it’s back to the road course for some more training.