Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Giro del trentino

Giro del trentino is underway for 2012 and myself and my champion system team are here in the beautiful trento region of italy ready to rock and role. Yesterday was what i like to call the men's 8+ which in cycling terms is a team time trial. The secret to these is very much like rowing, team work. That mean encouraging, looking out for each other and most importantly respecting each others strengths and weaknesses. Do all this and you produce a nice smooth team TT. We did just that. To be able to maintain a paceline, that being nice even pulls on the front and not having guys changing every 2 seconds which inturn illuminates recovery. We aimed for 8-10sec pulls, more if you were fresh and had the legs for it, which give the rider changing from front to the back plenty of time to get back in line, take some deep breaths and get ready to storm through again. The final catch is you need to finish with 5 guys so there enlies the importance of going the teams speed. I love these days so while my experience is limited I take on the role of back patter and doing what I can to keep spirits high, just like I enjoyed so much in rowing.

The result for us was a great ride, led from a technical stand point from our most experienced man in the area, craig lewis, we were smooth from the gun. We traded really good even pulls early on and in the final part those of us with a little more in the tank pulled for a little longer. We achieved our goal of not finishing last, we are not nieve and understand on the whole we are the weakest team here and also did not have all the neccessary equipment for a blistering TT. Our disk and super fast wheels which are crucial in such a discipline are locked in customs!! One of the bonus's of having stuff sent from china!! So we made do with what we and did a really good job and it was certainly the best display of team work within this team I have been appart of since we were in taiwan, I great day had by all.

As for today, well was a huge success with mattias freidaman, whom is our german sprinter shooting up the rd in the breakaway and taking the sprint jersey. The rest of the day for us climbers was not so great, we had hoped to set up chris butler, our demon climber for the stage but we got a bit out of sorts on the decent so nothing really happened! Anyway good news is we now have a jersey to defend so I can't wait for tomorrow.

Good night

Cjw
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

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