Matt and simian friend
Well, that definitely was a good time to go south to do a bit of bike riding!
I’m sorry for you all who where at home suffering in the cold but I have to say that watching news reports and reading peoples’ Twitter updates about how bad the weather is and how they’re fed up of training in the garage already, makes me feel that little bit better about every kilometre I’ve ridden that day under clear blue skies!
To be honest it wasn’t all plain sailing, we had a couple of days in Alicante with a bit of rain. The roads over there are so slippery in the wet we had to take it fairly steady and keep to the “flat” roads and out of trouble for a couple of days so we only managed about 3-5.5 hrs riding.
It was pretty hard to call it a training camp as it was in a different environment to the usual. No team director there shouting orders and looking over us as we ate our ice cream in the evenings! So it was pretty cool to just chill out and enjoy 10 days of pedalling and having fun!
The general daily routine was :
08:30 – wake up
09:00 – breakfast
10:00 – training
Training for me was pretty low key stuff, just building a base and getting a good level of fitness and holding a good level of body fat ready for next week’s HTC camp in California. I did two blocks of four days’ riding between 3-5.5 hrs with a steady day of 1.5hrs in the middle.
The legs and body were still feeling good coming out of a hard 10 days of training so I’m sat on the plane now pretty happy with my accomplishments.
For any of you that are planning on heading south to the Alicante area, you have to check out the cafe at the top of the col de Tudons. Its a pretty awesome place. We stopped there twice during the week and both times were greeted with a bit of a surprise.
At first we thought the owners must have had some type of big cat fantasy as there were pictures and models of big cats wherever we looked. So me being me, (a cheeky scouser) asks ” have you got any real lions or anything then?” The women replies “yeah hang on a minute” next thing a little lion cub trots over, cool as day! One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen, I’m already on to the missus to see if we can get one as a pet!
Anyway we thought this place was so awesome we had to come back. So the next week we paid little Peter the lion a little visit and took some more photos. So, picture this, five cyclists sat in a cafe, drinking a coffee. Pretty normal stuff (apart from the lion cub strolling around at our feet), next thing is one of my mates shouts out at the top of his voice “****ing hell, a monkey just walked in” I thought it was some kind of joke until I turned around and saw a big monkey sat on a bar stool, cool as anything! I haven’t laughed so much in a while!
My sides were hurting! You couldn’t write this stuff! The things you see as a bike rider, hey!
I love my job!
Next stop, Belgium (-8deg according to the pilot). Good job I’m only there for a day, then it’s sunny Californi-A !!
Rock on,
Matt
