With nothing much to write home about, I’ve skipped on the blog for a while, but as I slowly get back into the swing of things and with some big races coming up, it was time for an update. Something different with this blog, trying to theme it with all the gifs from Sesame Street, enjoy.
After signing off on my last blog saying I had back issues and that despite it I was still feeling strong, I thought it’d be the end of my problems after I’d tweaked my bike set-up. Turns out that was minor compared to what was coming. I was still racing, doing ok and enjoying my racing. We’d done the under 23 Scheldeprijs race, which was one big lap of 42km, followed by six laps of 17km for 143km total. Our last six laps were the same as the closing laps the professionals did in their race, which you can watch the last 6km of HERE. The part where the video starts was a solid crosswind just after a stretch of cobbles, the pros make it look easy initially, but if you skip to the 2 minute mark and watch the Bora-Argon rider on the far right (Red helmet, black and red kit) you can see he’s absolutely smashing it in order to keep on the front with the other teams. However if you look one or two wheels back, or further to the left of the screen, you can see how much easier it is for the guys that are sheltered. I’d like to say that’s where I was, nice and happy, but the bunch was strung out, in the gutter, and I was suffering trying to hold wheels.
There were one or two kermesses after Scheldeprijs until I started to come down with a cold. I took a couple of days off the bike, did some gym work and generally got bored sitting around like this. My cold started coming right, so I decided to race. Looking back on it, that was probably a mistake. It was one of the super cold days we’ve had with extremely temperamental weather. I was too hot after 20km, so tossed my jacket then proceeded to freeze when it dropped from 12 to three degrees in the space of 15 minutes as the hail began to fall. Luckily Cory was in the break, so I didn’t have to do much, which was fantastic as I was riding round with minimal feeling in my fingers which is an extremely strange sensation when you’re relying on your handlebar grip out of corners. Cory managed to get 5th, I rolled in mid-bunch, and then after battling the next couple of days with what I thought were the last of my cold symptoms, I finally went to the doctors. I kind of knew what was coming from the doctor, after googling my symptoms the night before and finding out I either had a sinus infection or a brain tumour. Turns out it was a sinus infection, I’d live to fight another day, after a 10 day course of antibiotics.
I was back to the basics, with longer steady rides instead of intervals and skipping one of the big races we had coming up. The pinnacle of the long rides was a 5 and a half hour day, 175km, solo, with rain, wind, hail, sleet and a minimum temperature of two degrees. With the weather not being the best recently, we are frequently sitting in our room looking up at the skylight to see hail/sleet/snow falling. Seemed to be every morning we’d wake up, open the blind and stick our head out the window to see what we were in for that day. Luckily now it’s turning pretty good and things are looking up. My first race back post sickness was the other day, I didn’t ride smart at all, but I rode hard to try and see where my legs were at. I managed to be in one or two breaks, but nothing was working cohesively so it fell to bits. I’m happy with where I’m at for now, so will be looking forward to getting into some big races that we have coming up over the next couple of days. That’s all from me for now, catch ya later
T.W.C
