Training Camp Day 3

Started out with a pretty good breakfast. Tried the cortado this morning which is espresso with a "dash" of leche. Pretty solid. The plan for today was to try to hook up with a group for a good ride. Headed down to the boardwalk and patrolled the area up and down. Nothing looked promising. So I headed over to the Barcelo Park Hotel. Super nice hotel...one day I'll have the funds to stay at this place b/c the word is they have the best food along with a superb bike garage. Max Hürzeler bases one of his cycling centers here. So it attracts quite a bit of the German development teams along with a lot of ProTour and other professional riders. Word on the street is that Columbia and Milram are in the place. Hoping to get hooked up with one of their training rides. You basically have to know the right people and then you get permission to ride with them. Cycling is cool like that. No other sport do you get to mix it up and train with professionals w/o being super über imporante(that's a trilingua expression). I rolled around Barcelo and I saw a U19 Bavarian team. Pretty professional outfit. Then another group. I ended up latching on to the other group b/c they had a follow car with a speaker on top, so I figured this must be a pretty good one too. I rolled up to the director sportif and asked in my sorriest of Deutsch if I could "Ich fahre" with them, or "I drive" with them. He said yes. The thing about latching onto groups out here, you must find the ride leader or director sportif and get permission. Its a sign of respect and quite normal. It was a mix of male and females. They were all Germans. I found out after 5.25 hrs with them that they are the German U19 mountain bike national team. You wouldn't have thought b/c they were pretty well equiped with new SRMs and new gruppos. It was a good day to ride with them.

They decided to head towards the mountains b/c the weather was quite nice today. We did the Coll de Soller from both directions( I also added an extra 3km after the front side ascent b/c i finished with the front group of 2 then caught back the rest of the group right at the summit on my 2nd ascent). Next we descended the backside and headed toward Coll Puig. The director rolled up in his auto next to me and said that we "drive quarter more hour up, avalanche has closed road." I gave him the thumbs up and "danke." Again I was in the front group. Climbs are becoming better for me. Putting out good power and recovering quickly. Good juju. On the way back to the backside of Soller the group totally blew apart. The backside is quite different from the front. Very shady and short, steeper switchbacks. The front is very exposed to the sun. At the top I was just a minute behind the front group. The director said, we split into two groups now. One group rides 1 more hour the other group straight home. I rode with the first group. 5 of us total.

I am finding group training to be very beneficial. Unlike so many groups rides in the US which is just an attack, race fest. Here its very proper. 2x2 with 10min at the front. With the wind and undulating terrain it gives you 10min at threshold or more then recovery in the back. So you end up spending quite a bit of time in some good training zones and can cover many more kms than by oneself along with keeping the leg speed high. But training alone is still very needed to become a complete rider. One must really enjoy riding his/her bike if he/she wants to make themselves into a cyclist. Its just so incredibly hard. It was great to see the strong work ethic of these riders and the humor they were able to maintain.

The black ops in the dining room was a smashing success. Scored kiwi and pears for the room along with a spoon for post ride muesli. Leche stayed cool on the deck. The fish tonight was in a tomato sauce. Okay, but not as tasty as last evening. Chicken was good however and so was the soup. Got my rice pudding for desert =)

Tomorrow, I will probably patrol the boardwalk again and depending on the weather maybe head back up to the mountains alone if nothing looks too promising with the boardwalk. Found out the Katyusha rider I saw that was big enough to break me into many, many pieces was Vladimir Karpets. Would you mess with him? Not only does he have the wicked chops on the side but a sick communist mullet. Would you expect anything less from this giant Russian...