Second part to season has started 08/04/2009
 It’s been a while since the last review of a race was posted or anything for that matter. It has been a busy and tiresome time. Since my last post I was about to go off to Ireland and race. Well I headed off to Ireland and race but only did two days of racing because my knee had started to play up again. This was due to my pelvis twisting and it was being very reluctant to stay in the correct position for multiple weeks after I got back to Belgium so there were many trips to get it corrected and ongoing physiotherapy to get myself back in the correct position again. Putting together some good training while this was going on was far from ideal and made the following weeks training rather rubbish only doing 2hrs of races and not finishing a thing for a few weeks. Things started to come into line about a week and a half before the team and I were about to head to china to race in the tour of Qinghai High Lakes which is a 10 day tour that is at altitude, it ranges form 1900m-3900m this year and we were based at around 2500m most of the time apart form three day which we slept at 3000m. Turning up to this race with less then ideal conditioning was always going to be a challenge and I found out it was hard to just get through the stages and to the finish in one piece. The climbs were long, hard, and there were many of them! It was most likely the best thing for me to get me back into some sort of shape for the second part of the season. Toward the end of the tour I started to find some legs and on the last day managed to get into the break away group then made the final split but once again the peleton didn’t let it go very far and the split got caught with 7 kilometers to go. During the time I spent in china I saw some rather neat stuff from spending a few days in Beijing to riding up to some crazy villages in the mountains, to seeing dudes living in tents on top of massive mountains and the monks cruising round on motor bikes. The travel took 2 days at each end to get there and back and basically wrecked ya. I got back and spent 4 days doing easy rides and then I raced again in Germany and the race Sparkassen Giro – Bochum. It was a 14 kilometre circuit and we rode round and round until we clocked up 180 kilometre and then it was a sprint for the line. The course had two small little climbs in it which slowly broke up the peleton and group of 50 or so riders got to the finishing line to contest the win. Due to my shocking bunch position on the last lap up the climb I got dropped and had to chase back on so I ended up about a minute down on the lead and kicked myself for my incompetence. It was a lesson learnt so hopefully no more. For the next few months I have got my race plan sorted and will be back racing most weeks and training will be much more structured to finish off the season strongly. Next on the race plan is a pro kermese then another UCI one day race     CommentsBB Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:45:43 Hey Loags, Leave a Reply |
