US$3.78 million in the postbox

Good for:  Entertainment value and wishful thinking
Not so good for:  Presumably my bank account at a later stage

So, I collected this letter from my mailbox today:

Being an unbeliever of anything too good to be true, my first instinct was to Google it. And there you have it.  A letter that has been sent out again and again, for the last 4 years or so.  Same address, same name, same amount, same story.   Presumably hand signed too, just like mine.

Wow.  Why would anyone sit and look up new names and addresses, to send a letter to, years on end, unless there is a remote chance of success??  Turns out the story is, at some point, the sender will ask you for some money.  Duh.  What else could this be about....  Surely, surely, surely, people do not take letters like this seriously?  Please?!

I would be tempted to create a bogus email address and send this dude some abusive emails, except he knows where I live.  I blame the Danish (maybe Scandinavian since there were a lot of similar stories from Sweden) system of publishing names and addresses on the Internet.  :P

Cycling holiday across the Pyrenees

Good for:  Gaining some bike fitness
Not so good for:  Confidence (if I get my arse kicked by the guys)

So, before I decided to take on my latest challenge of 2-Ironmans-in-6-weeks, I had signed up for a cycle holiday across the Pyrenees.  Called Coast-to-Coast, with 800+km of cycling over 19,000+m of ascent from the East Coast of the Pyrenees (Perpignan) to the West Coast of the Pyrenees (Biarritz), I had my challenge set out for me.  But not an entirely new challenge, as I had done something similar across the Alps, starting from Switzerland and ending in Nice.  But I digress.....

Two weeks plus after Ironman Copenhagen and I can finally run again.  As in, run faster than the 6:20 min/km pace I was running a few days after the race.  I am back to my racing ways of 4:50 min/km of easy running, yay!  And next week we head off to France for a crazy week of cycling.

The hope?    Boost my cycle strength and do Ironman Barcelona in 10:15.  There.  I said it.  Another 17 minutes off my current PB set in Copenhagen 2 weeks ago, which was almost 20 minutes better than my previous PB from 2011.  Game on...