Blogs

The theme for the penultimate day is “Weary”. Everyone is feeling the slow chipping away strain of unaccustomed day on day exercise and it’s a lackluster start on the bus up the valley to where Andy the guide takes advantage of a wide expanse of snow to let us brush up on our double-gating technique. Our hands are too high, or too low, they don’t come back far enough, we stand too tall and move like stiff soldiers, so we pole up and down trying to do it right, creaking.

The third day of going skiing by mistake starts with some panic stretching, just so I can make it down the stairs for breakfast. Most everything hurts from unfamiliar movement, unfamiliar use and unfamiliar hitting the ground - calves, back, shoulders, arms, and especially those bits that join the insides of your thighs to the top half of your body. Those feel tight enough to snap if I cough.

So the cycling season returns, and we love to get engaged in fantasy games, especially trying something new. The new concept this year is that of trying to emulate the challenge of Director Sportifs picking a squad for a whole season, balancing the aspect of budgets with collating the best assortment of riders to combat the variety of races throughout a season. As well as just the racing the team needs to accumulate enough UCI points to guarantee its spot on the World Tour.

What does a pro-cycling team need to do to kick off the new season in style?  Apart from ensuring that they actually have a license that is, and preparing scripted soundbites for their riders to use when asked about a certain disgraced Texan...

I appear to be skiing. I hate skiing.

For the last few years road.cc's fantastic fantasy cycling competition has allowed us all to get in touch with out inner Team Principals and Director Sportifs as our teams battle for supremacy.  So much so that its easy to lose sight of just how tough their jobs really are.

Through the door, keys fumbled with unfeeling fingers, dump bike by the side. Deal with that later. Tiptoe into the kitchen leaving as little of the ride in puddles on the carpet as you can.

Turn heating on.

Road discs then. Everyone's talking about them, and quite a lot of people are trying to make them. But they're not ready, yet. Why is that? Personally, I think it's because making discs work in a road bike situation has been a bit harder than people expected. Even though the technology is well proven in a MTB context, there are different considerations and the usage is significantly altered on the road.

I'm here in sunny Benicassim, north of Valencia, with the Lotto Belisol professional cycling team a they undertake their last training camp before embarking on the 2013 race calendar. It's taken my eyes some time to adjust to the cloudless blue sky and bright yellow thing up there I can tell you.

It's January, everyone decides to lose weight in January, well not everyone, I was at a CX race at the weekend and there were plenty of racers with less meat on them than a butcher's pencil, so maybe not them.  I, on the other-hand have indulged over the holiday period so now it's time to knuckle down to some serious weight loss and get to my desired weight in time for the start of the racing season.