Sunday wrapped up tour of romandia and with it my preparation for the giro d italia. Since catalunya my focus has solely been on the preparation for the giro through the guidence of our team trainer paolo slongo. The preparation was very straight forward, do a large block of climbing and training in tenerife spain and then top up the engine with some race rythm with trentino and romandia without accumulating any excess fatigue. All has gone to plan and while i have far from raced in a way i usually prefer, i.e. Full gas!! I am feeling fresh and in the final days of romandia started to feel like the pins where finally acustomed to the acceleration that go with a world tour race so that was a nice feeling.
I should be optimistic for the giro, the last time i simply raced to complete for training was in 2007 when shayne bannan set my program prior to my victory in chrono championwa and consequent inclusion in the national team. Fingers crossed in the coming days i will absorb similar sensations in the muscles and the giro will lead to more success, if not for me atleast for my team! Initially I saw any racing not 100% necessary as a risk but as I found out in romandia it is always worth racing when possible particularly at this level. In this past week I discovered 2 potentially giro wrecking issues, firstly my tt bike position and secondly my transition prescription lenses in the cold and foggy decents! I had only just received my new TT bike and somthing was not right, I was get unusually blocked up in the hips and basically could not feel my legs let alone put any power on the pedals. It was all I could do simply to keep the cranks turning!! Anyways some head scratching and a few measurements with the tape measure appears to have solved the problem and a new bike will be waiting for me in napels, one I simply cannot wait to through my leg over!
The sunnies was a cracker of a situation, after cresting the highest climb in the race 3 wheels from the front on stage 4 I proceeded to lose around 15min on the following 25km decent. The reason? I could not see. It was freezing and my glasses stayed dark in the heavy fog which meant basically I could not see anything. I never take the sunnies off for safety reasons and with this race far from being an objective I simply took the only option I felt I had, go very very slow down the hill. Infact I would have been better off walking! At the bottom when our second car finally found me to say the F!U!K was I doing so far behind after being at the front for the entire race I explained the problem! A solution was quickly rectified for the giro with new non transition lenzed glasses ordered there and then and all will be tickedy boo in may. For these reasons romandie was a big success as have these problems in the giro and the consequences much greater so was an excellent week in the end and one that has left me bouncing out of my skin for the 2013 GIRO to start on saturday!!
Cjw
So a couple of what have been rare days at my european base before heading off to Naples tomorrow for the pre race fanfare and start on saturday. All be it brief
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