The Lance Armstrong Witch Hunt

The rain is back; well I suppose it is a bank holiday.

Eventually we give up sheltering from it and take the tent down in the rain. The rain turns out to be not as bad as it sounds once you’re out in it but it was a good excuse for a lie in. Then we head off to find breakfast.

Everywhere seems shut; well I suppose it is a bank holiday.

Eventually we have breakfast at around 1pm in a branch of Booths in Garstang. Then home to catch up with the Vuelta and the Lance Armstrong saga.

I don't like Lance Armstrong and I don't think he's innocence. I mean how could anybody defeat all the top cyclists in the world, for seven years in a row, and not only defeat them but also defeat all the top performance enhancing drugs in the world that these top cyclists have pretty much all freely admitted (eventually) that they were on.

Drugs or not, Armstrong was still the best rider in those races because he won on a playing field levelled by those drugs. I suppose it’s possible, but unlikely, that he had better drugs than the others. Maybe he was just the better athlete. Sure it's frustrating for anybody who was clean but reality means they almost certainly finished well outside the top twenty.

Stripping him of his seven titles is just pointless. Who does that leave as winners of those Tours? The confessed dopers Jan Ulrich, Alex Zulle, Joseba Beloki and Ivan Basso, that’s who. Along with the deeply suspicious Andreas Kloden.

It’s time to draw a line under this all this and move on. As Armstrong says, it’s now simply a witch-hunt. This is all ancient history. We have new heroes now.

(Monday 27th August)

Performance Enhancing Muesli

L sends me to work with homemade Granola. I’ve always avoided Granola as I have no idea what it is. It looks just like muesli and now I know it tastes a bit like muesli, although perhaps muesli on performance enhancing drugs.

Having struggled to schedule in a training run this work. I enter Friday’s Jagermeister 10k, despite having un-officially having retired from 10k’s. L joins me, despite having un-officially retired from everything fitness related, not that we believe her.

The latest load of... on the BBC website, which categorizes L has having the body of a weightlifter.

She takes that badly. Don’t know why when you look at GB’s Zoe Smith who’s been impressing us with a new British record this week.

This 'clever piece of technology' then tell me I have the body of a basketball player, rower, tennis player or a pole-vaulter. Female ones. Clearly I’m not tall enough to be a male basketball player... Or possibly I may be a male Moldovan archer. I think not, although that has just about covered everything. I’d love to be able to pole-vault.

L's sister is a 100m sprinter, a male one. If only she'd have known earlier she'd have done some training.

L would rather be a sailor, having watched Ben Ainslie and co. Sailing? She worries about getting a puncture on her bike, imagine the sleepless nights about capsizing.

MD is due at the vets tonight for his annual booster and he’s terrified. I suppose with good reason, not only did they once remove something from underneath his tail, last time they squirted the kennel cough vaccine up his nose. He toughs it out.

(Tuesday 31st July)