19th April 2011
Hello everyone! Thank you for stopping by again!
I have been training like crazy! I’ve just come back from my team’s training camp in Italy and it was very hard! It was the first time that I met all my teammates and they are all great, we have a great atmosphere in the team, everyone is super friendly with a great attitude.
We are about to start the season this week in Belgium and some other riders have been racing since February so we did some intense training to get in shape for racing. Every ride we did included amazing climbs and we had to do efforts and sprints! The first days were hard but fun and at the end of the first week we were all super tired of the hard work out we’d done.
We were usually doing blocks, 3 days hard training and one easy day. Our first easy day was on Wednesday and we arrived on a Sunday, we went for a 2 hour ride (on a rest day!). The second rest day was on Saturday and we were all super tired so we took the day off and went to the beach to enjoy the sun and the amazing weather in Riccione.
Seriously, if you are thinking of a good place for a training camp you need to try this place. It has the most amazing climbs and the view when you are climbing is incredible! (not that I had a chance to enjoy it during the efforts tho…) the weather is amazing and I haven’t even mentioned the food yet, I think everyone loves Italian food as much as I do.
We were training with Jamie Burrow he is a former pro and was riding for US Postal with Lance Armstrong, it was great to train with him and learn from all the experience he has. He is super friendly and he was always giving us feedback and advising us oh how to become better riders, you can’t get that every day so we tried to learn from him as much as we could do in 2 weeks.
The first week of training was hard but the second week was even worse (at least for me) I got a bit sick and couldn’t do all the efforts in the rides but I still did all the distance, we were doing almost 4 hours every day which is pretty hard and if you include the efforts it makes it even harder and I guess I didn’t take care of myself as I should have and I was feeling a bit week.
The thing is that when you train that hard you need to take as much rest as possible, drink a lot of water and eat good for the next day but coming from such a different continent and not being used to the food and everything makes it a bit hard for me. Anyway… I was feeling better by Wednesday and we had to do some Team Time Trial efforts and I am happy I could be a part of it. We have this Team Time Trial in Luxemburg coming up so getting the training done was important!
After the 2 weeks we were all exhausted but happy with the training and the hours on the bike. Everyone was looking in better shape every day and I think the team is ready to start this season. I leave for Belgium tomorrow, I do two races this week and then some races in Luxemburg and I am very excited to see that everything is already happening. I’m looking forward to going back to Mexico in June for the National Championships, I think racing in Europe will give me loads of experience and confidence and I really hope I can get a good result there.
Will give you guys more updates after my first races!
Nancy
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