Some of you have been following me on FB and Twitter so you have a good idea of what is going on, but for those of you that aren't I will catch you up on what is going on. But first below are some links on how to stay up to date with the latest information on camp:
US Military Cycling Team fueled by FRS Facebook Page
My Twitter
See what kind of rides we are doing via Strava: http://app.strava.com/athletes/199228
Travel Day-
I left Korea at 0730 Saturday morning from my apartment to head to the bus station (2130 Friday night here in FL), and started what was scheduled for a bus ride, 3 flights and a shuttle ride. Everything went as planned, all flights were on time, no fee for the bike and 31 hours later I arrived in FL at 2330 on Saturday night. I got the bike put together and got in contact with the camp director and the team manager. Come to find out there was a local ride Sunday morning, but they were meeting up at 0530 in the hotel lobby. I figured no better way to kick the jet lag than a solid local group ride, so after about only 1h30m of sleep I was wide awake and slowly got ready for the morning. My coach said do whatever I needed to do to get the legs opened up, so although a 2 hour group ride might not of been ideal it was awesome, see Day "0" for more on it...........
Day 0-
So I briefly covered the morning of Day 0, but here is the rest of the day. Once arriving to the group ride we got the bikes out and ready to go. It was myself, Bill (Our Team Manager), Sean (Our Team Director), and Andy(Long time Team member) and myself. I had never met any of them, they had never seen me ride and I am just the "new" kid here at camp. All the knew was what they had seen on my resume which is just mediocre as a cyclist, at best. So they gave the spill of how the local ride works and how it was going to be pretty fast with some local CAT1/2's and some PANAM National Champs. Well crap, I guess my legs really are going to get opened up, nothing better after 30 hours of travel. Well the ride took off and no more than 5 miles in the attacks started. Pretty quickly we had Andy and Sean off the front and I got tasked with marking people that tried to bridge up to them. Eventually myself and one guy got out into no mans land in between the peloton and the break. I was told to do nothing and just ride his wheel, why would I do anything when we had 2 guys up in a break of 3. Yes it was a training ride, but this was a fierce training ride. There were a lot of guys mumbling in the peloton and telling myself and Bill to do work, but O well we were just there defending the break. Sean got lead out by Andy and got the first sprint, pretty cool to see the Stars and Stripes ripping apart a local ride. There was a second sprint towards the end of the ride and I got into some good position and then got my legs ripped off by some sprinters, great experience but hard to sprint for a line when you have no clue where the line is.
After the ride we headed back to the hotel to get ready for everyone else that was arriving to camp. I was able to get in a quick nap and work on some homework while watching the SuperBowl and then Day "0" was a wrap.
Day 1-
The morning started off with staff and rider introductions and then we headed out for an 80 mile ride. It was at a casual pace, double paceline and just getting to know everyone. The weather was great, got some good tan lines. Once we came back from the ride there was Subway waiting for us for lunch and then we had some downtime. With downtime comes nap time, so 1h30m later I was up from my nap and headed to uniform issue. The new Primal Wear Kits are sweet, and after today (Day 2's ride) I can comment that they are super comfortable. After uniform issue we had a Team Briefing on "Social Media". I learned a few things, but really enjoy the social media aspect of things and know how important it is to market products that you like and that you are sponsored by. I eat this stuff up and try to get as much exposure for the great companies that sponsor our team, so twitter and FB are key to this. This blog helps out a bit as well, but the amount of people you can reach with 1 single tweet is amazing. For example we are trying to get our Team Page more "Likes" on FB, so I tweeted it and with the help of some great people that 1 tweet spread to over approximately 24.5K people, all in a matter of 6 hours. So yes, social media is AMAZING!
Day 2-
Today started out with team pictures and individual pictures and then we headed out for 90 miles. Today was different than yesterday, we split up into 2 different groups. The Masters and Developmental guys and then the Elite guys. By quite surprise I was sent to work with the elite guys, which was amazing. We worked on a rotating pace line and riding in close proximity. I don't have the opportunity to ride with this amount of cyclist in a training environment at this high of a level. It was awesome to get feed back from all the guys on the spot. They were able to point out the small things that I was doing wrong and then help me with the simple things as peeing on the bike, without peeing on yourself. As a triathlete, when in race situations you don't stop or slow and you just go (refer to my Kona blog). I was also able to learn how to properly pick up bottles out of the car and get motorpaced back up to the group at a high speed. All great things that you typically don't get to work on during an everyday training ride. This evening Jim gave us a briefing on Nutrition, obviously an important part of training and racing. He is a nutritionist in the Air Force and gave a great briefing. He is also the developmental team director and I look forward to bouncing some nutrition questions off of him throughout the week. I feel extremely grateful to be riding with the elite guys and just soaking it all in. Like I said in my post on FB at the start of camp:
1 comment:
Its like I was there! Thanks for the read.
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