The Babbling Blog: The End of Training Camp

A month has passed in Tucson, presumably elsewhere as well, and within that month were the hardest, longest, and really the best weeks of riding and training I've ever experienced. Hard not to accomplish in an environment where there are few distractions from training, one single day of rain out of 28, and perfect mountain roads to work the body and skills in different ways.

Arbitrary though: With all the cyclists from out of town that come here for winter training, it makes one wonder if it makes a dent in the economy of the city. If the city planners knew, or cared, they could make quite a bit of money setting up specific travel packages or something for all the cyclists and teams that are coming here already and self organizing.

This winter's training/set up has me looking forward to race season more than ever, things will be totally different this year, again.
I'll have trained a little wiser, and way more than before, the team setup is something totally different from what I'm 'used to', not that any cycling year has been routine for me yet, always huge changes year to year. And the racing itself will be on a much larger scale - bigger races and tougher competition. But I'm feeling good and as ready as I should be at this time of year, so any doubts of getting flung out the back once the gun goes off have gone away. More specific training will start soon that should have me especially ready for the hillier races on the calendar.

It's good to be back in Canada, and back to work contributing, however slight, back to society.

The last day of camp was spent making my way by bike to Anton's appartment near Mt. Lemmon, where we set off to ride to the top of that mountain which I'd been living in the shadow of for a month. What a long ride that is - 45km from base to summit and over an HOUR of descending. As always there's lots to see on the way up, especially the change with altitude like snowbanks appearing. We might have had a snowball fight while riding up with whatever snow I could snatch from the side and toss over. I was definitely toast after that ride which brought the ticker up to 185km for the day.

Just over a month until our first race, April 10th, Tour of the Battenkill in New York. Our team will race for the first time with most of the riders together, and I can't wait! Its the tail end of 'training season' and almost race season, how time flies.

Here are some pictures from Lemmon: