On our second day in town we started by getting up early for a team meeting and to watch the team time trial of the Tour de France live. It's cool to see Lance looking so strong. After which we had dinner sponsored by one of the rider's parents at their house in Denver. They got lunch from Chik-fil-a, but the best part was the salads: one had strawberries, cherries, almods, and spinach while another had grapes, apples, walnuts, and spinach (it was a little like a Waldorf salad, but no celery and the dressing was different). We've had salad every day and those two were by far the best we've had. It's rare that I go for seconds on salad.
Later we had a friendship visit at Craig Hospital outside of Denver. Craig Hospital specializes in helping people recover and adapt after spinal injuries. We got a tour of the hospital, but more fun we got to play murderball or quad rugby with their team, The Harlequins. Quad rugby is basically rugby played in specially-designed durable wheelchairs; it's actually a Para-Olympic sport. Two of the guys we played against were on the US team that won a gold medal last year in Beijing, which was pretty awesome. Quad rugby is a blast, but it's pretty hard - and those guys were clearly going easy on us. What was also amazing is that they were all just normal guys who were quadrapalegics or parapalegics due to completely random accidents - things that could happen to anyone. It really made me think about how I would react to a challenge like that.
Afterwards we had dinner provided by another team member's parents. They made steak, which was the first time we've had that on the trip. Also they provided cheesecake, which was delicious. Then we crashed because quad rugby is tiring and our agenda for the next four days was rides of 100, 90, 95, and 95 miles.
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