Many of you reading this were at the dinner, so I don't need to spill the details, but it was great to have Tom Leaper as our guest speaker.  Thankyou Tom and Jo for coming and sharing your experience with us and trusting us with some special parts of your history. Tom showed us many of his jerseys and told us about racing the Giro and his time with the AIS squad in Italy, and how strong Ullrich was - Jan gave Tom 'the look' (made famous by Lance Armstrong, of course) on one occasion before launching into space during a race Tom was riding.

A few new faces, it was good to meet Teresa Goddard and Steve Fallon, and to catch up with old friends Jason 'Dutchy' den Hollander and Shane, Von, Justin and the HCC crew.  Thankyou Jess for coming too, I'm sure we'll miss you when you're in Shep, but we'll do our best to make it up there to do the Scott Peoples' memorial race.  For the rest of you, you pack of slackers, we'll be doing a doubleup at the next spin session (maybe ....) to make up for missing a night's training!  Double-up on pasta, anyway. Thankyou everyone that came, I hope you all had a good time.  Having a 'full house' makes it worth organising.  Next up is the next climbing camp in November, and maybe a dinner before then. I have another great speaker in mind, but I'll have to ask very nicely!

For anyone that noticed, I spent some time discussing the summer sprint series with Nicko (John Nicholson) and while we don't agree on exactly how to fit it in with the rest of the Blackburn summer track racing, I'm confident that we'll be able to make it work well.  I'm still hoping to be able to run it seperatly from the rest of the season, but Nicko made some good points and it may come down to a judgement call on the impact that the series would have on numbers at the regular summer track season.  Nicko's concern is that if we have two days of racing on one weekend, it will take away from the Saturday program, and he has a point.  I don't think he's necessarily right, but I understand what he's on about.  I think that the impact that the series would have if run seperatly would be minimal, and if anything, it would bring more 'foreigners' to the club than mixing it in with Saturday races. We'll thrash it out at the next club meeting ... then I can start to seriously promote the series.

Now to watch the Tour ... I hope Robbie's feeling better than yesterday, it looks like stage 1's crash really hurt him. Go Robbie! And everyone else, stay upright.