Europe Racing - December, 2015
Two years ago was my first taste of the racing in Europe and to be back representing my country is really amazing. So far we have had an awesome trip. We arrived on Thursday and did an easy spin after getting bikes built, and did the same thing on Friday. Saturday we went to Namur for training, which was very helpful to check out lines in the technical sections of the course. The race at Namur was a really unbelievable experience even though my race was ended by some flat tires. After World Cup Namur, on Sunday, we have all been recovering and relaxing.
Yesterday, after getting our training done, we had a group of kids that went to Maastricht and a group that went to Sittard. I ended up joining the group that went to Sittard. Christmas is very big over here and in the town square of Sittard they had a huge structure that had an ice rink and live music inside. They also had a huge Coca-cola truck that children could go in to meet santa, along with about a hundred other people dressed up santa running around the square. It was cool to see all the christmas spirit and how festive everyone was. We all ended up going ice skating for a little while and had live music playing right next to us, which was really fun.
Today (Wednesday), Geoff rallied everyone to do a group training together. It was one of the hardest training sessions that I have done in a while trying to keep up with all of these fast riders. We began with what Geoff called the “Devil’s Triangle”. This entailed a big triangle with cones at the corners and as we passed a cone we would have to change between pushing our bikes, shouldering our bikes, then riding and raced each other for two minutes as hard as we could go. Next we went and did a sort of madison, involving teams of two riders and each of us would do a lap and then tag off and our teammate would do a lap and we each ended up doing two laps a piece. Following this we split up into groups of four and had each rider lead one lap and the rest of the riders had to stay on the wheel. We did a few starts and then ended our training with a twenty minute mock race. By far one of the most intense and fun training days that I have had this season.
Looking forward to the rest of this week and can not wait for Zolder this weekend. Diegem and Loenhout will be soon after Zolder and then we head home. Thank you USA Cycling for all the support they have given us while over here. It is greatly appreciated.