Friday, February 25, 2011

Stages so far...

The Giro is 2 stages in and things are getting as exciting as riding indoors on a tuesday morning can possibly get!  The sufferfest

Stage 1 "fight club,"saw us riding 4 laps of to footage of the 2009 Wold Championship Road Race and featured very aggressive racing!  The riders started each lap with a 4 min TT effort to break away from the pack.  The real hurting came during an short 4 min climbing effort.  Everyone got a brief recovery to some footage of a mountain descent before lather, rinse, repeat.  In addition to the course, stage 1 also saw 23 spirited attack from a very aggressive piece of footage of the Italian national team.  Riders had to respond to each one with a hard surge, and that clip was relentless!  It would attack anywhere on the course, stalking us until we thought we were safe!

Stage 2 "angels," took us into the mountains for a climbing themed stage.  We had some warmup to footage of velodrome pacelining, complete with pulls at the front of the group.  The stage started off with 10 minutes of over/unders, brief intervals above and below threshold effort to warm up the legs.  The real meat of the stage was in the climbs!  We faced an 8 minute climbing effort 3 times.  Each climb featured footage of a different pro, which demanded different tactics to stay in contact.  We climbed in Leige-Bastogne, paris-nice, and the Dauphine against the likes of contador and schleck.  Some climbs were steady grinds, others demanded surges.

Its been great to see folks turning up for the stages each week.  Its been a steady crew of racers who brave the early wakeup to come and train.  All have put in good efforts and report ravenous appetite the rest of the day.  The workouts, downloaded from CB team sponsor TheSufferfest.com have all been tough, about as tough as you could do in an hour and still get effective training.  Im not sure what the other tenants of the brewery think of the techno-rock blasting early in the morning, but so far there have been no complaints.

Much thanks to Bikes-not-Bombs for hosting the event and the Cambridge Bicycle Racing Team for producing it.

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