WCMCC Wandi Road Race - A Grade :: 25th May, 2014

After AP's win last week at the season opener at Herne Hill, the banter between combatants during the days to follow mounted the pressure on the team to try and back up the win with another which meant keeping the pressure on other teams preventing them from making an upset. We figured that anyone with a Unicorn-Specialized jersey would be marked. It would be up to us to wear down our opponents until one of us could get away from the field with relatively fresh legs. It would certainly be game on!

WCMCC Herne Hill Road Race - A Grade :: 18th May, 2014

Having had my fill of summer criteriums, I was more than ready to switch back to road racing and get the winter season under way. The hope was that the training I had put in over summer had been enough to better deal with the demands of the longer version of the sport and to be more competitive within the peloton and maybe, just maybe, obtain some results for the team. With the Wandi event scheduled for two weeks ago cancelled due to course complications, this morning's Herne Hill event would be the season opener and with Collie being the only race I'd participated in since the UWCT Qualifier at Perry Lakes, I was more than ready to get stuck into things.

SWCC Tom Lowry Memorial Road Race - Collie :: May 4th, 2014

I would be riding the 2014 Tom Lowry Memorial road race as a first timer, but not the first time in Collie. I still have vivid memories of the nasty little hills just to the south of town that inflicted so much pain on riders, especially myself, in last year's Collie-Donnybrook Return. Thankfully this visit to Collie would see the course avoiding those longer hills in favour of shorter ones and would also find me a little stronger than I was back then. I was out of race practice but I have been spending good hours on the bike both solo and with team mates (and competitors), so I went into this race with a fair amount of confidence but goal #1 was to ensure I actually stayed with the race group for the duration and to make a solid effort for the team at the end if it came down to a bunch sprint finish.

BWA Scody 5 Dams Challenge :: 6th April, 2014

This year's Dams Challenge has produced some amazing results and stories of suffering, sacrifice, team work and even gallantry and sportsmanship. And at the end, the elation of crossing the line makes all the hard work worth while. Many of us had spent weeks training and preparing for the challenge of riding a long distance in the hills while some of us were dropped in it at the last minute to fill in for a rider who was unable to make it. Either way, the mental toughness to ride through these courses was demonstrated by each and every rider who fronted up to the starting line. Congratulations to everyone who took part in either the 3 or 5 Dams rides this year.

3 and 5 Dams Challenge - Final Training Week

Welcome to the final training week!

Months have become weeks and weeks have now become just days! The hard training is now done and our final task is to taper down from the hard training to some basic workouts to help maintain the level we have reached as the remaining days turn into just hours. This is not about suddenly toning down our efforts to just recovery rides with the intent to be fully recovered and expecting to go in "fresh" for the event. This is about maintaining a level and allowing the work we have done to come through and be completely ready to take on the challenge in a peak physical (and mental) condition. I'll also cover some "do and do nots" in this final edition of the program as part of our final approach.

3 and 5 Dams Challenge - Training Week #12

Welcome to Training Week #12.

This is it, the final week of hard training before we taper into the event on the 6th of April. This week we will lift our intensity and climbing efforts for the last time and test ourselves in an effort to see how our training has worked for us to date. We will re-introduce strength training on Thursday to help put some final conditioning into the legs. This could be our hardest day given the previous day's endurance training so expect it to hurt just a little bit due to the fatigue already in the legs. On Sunday, we will lift our hills climbing efforts for each level (3 or 5 dams) to see how we are going with the hills climbing.

3 and 5 Dams Challenge - Training Week #11

Welcome to Training Week #11.

This week, I wanted to cover some of the dangers of training at the level we have reached. Although it is unlikely that any of you will encounter any of these issues during this twelve week training program, you should certainly be aware of some of the risks that we as athletes may face when training at consistently high intensity and how to identify the signs that you may be doing too much. Two conditions that we may encounter are overreaching and overtraining. Both of these conditions can quickly ruin the hard work that we put in to conditioning ourselves for a specific event such as the Dams Challenge.