On Saturday February 23rd, 2008 the inaugural Tri For A Cure Spin a Thon was held at Absolute Endurance. About 40 people registered for the event with all the funds raised going directly to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. The event featured swag bags for all participants, GU and GUO2 for nutrition and hydration, a silent auction with items from Wheels of Bloor, Absolute Endurance and Running Free and a DJ (DJ Pep) who kept the tunes going for the 4 hours of spinning. We had 4 guest “spinners”; Tara Norton, a professional triathlete who started us off with a warm up. Mark Martel a spin instructor and Ironman athlete who revved things up and pushed the pace a bit. Darko Ficko, a team rider for La Bicicletta, hammered us with an intense interval set and Merrill Collins, another team rider for La Bicicletta, finished us off with a super sprint set.
Absolute Endurance donated their space for the event. It was the perfect spot to host it. For those that didn’t want to lug their bike and trainer, they had 10 stationary bikes available. They were also generous enough to hook some of us up to computrainers so we could ride against each other. There were 8 us of that were hooked up to the computrainers. We had hoped to be able to ride the Ironman Switzerland course but they didn’t have the full course loaded up so we road Ironman Lake Placid instead, which is a challenging course in itself but on the computrainer it’s 10 times harder as you don’t get to coast on ANY of the down hills. The sweatfest began at 1:30 and went until 5:30 pm. I have a hard time spending 2 hours on the trainer so I was skeptical about managing 4. The 4 hours went by really quickly; the guest spinners were fantastic, they kept us entertained and motivated. DJ Pep was awesome, he played a great range of music to keep us all going.
The event raised over $3000 with all proceeds going to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. It was a fantastic event that hopefully will be come an annual one.
