Once again I find myself at another AIS cycling camp in our nations capital and this time there’s more than one strange twist. This time instead of sharing `ressie’s’ with the many strangely shaped athletes like 60 wrestlers (thank goodness!!), 20 mini gymnasts (a little scary too!) and heaps of long and lanky basket ballers. We cycling girls now find ourselves living all the way over at the physiology labs sleeping at 3000 meters in the altitude house.

At the start of the year I had seen the Canadian race stint on some of the other girls program thinking how I’d like it to be included in my calendar and somehow feeling that I’d end up there anyway.  So it was no surprise when I was offered a spot for the Canadian races, my instincts were telling me it was thing to do. So off I trotted to Canada. 

After Holland we travelled to Belgium where we’d spend the next ten days recovering and training before Fleche Wallone, another `classic’ race on the calendar.  We arrived at our new accommodation in the pitch dark and were horrified to find it atop a big berg along a 1.5 km long, rough dirt road.  Yes, we were not to be done with the rough roads just yet and once again my butt wasn’t going to appreciate this one!

Great news from Canada with "ourJosie" taking out the 4th stage of the inaugural Tour de Prince Edward Island. Featuring a big field of international pro women racers including Italians, Russians, Swiss etc this race is new to the calender, designed to follow the Montreal World Cup race held the week before. Josie had been showing great form earlier in the race taking a top ten in the time trial stage finishing a few seconds ahead of Sarah Carrigan, Olympic champion.

I guess when I started cycling I never knew where it would all end up. It was a simple case of training a day at a time for the next competition and things snowballing quickly from there.  I can't really blame Blair for not warning me that rodeo riding would be a damned good pre requisite to cycling, but in hindsight it would have been good! Not until arriving in Holland did I regret not having a few more rides of those mechanical bulls at parties or the Ekka, just to get me a little more used to being thrown around like a rag doll. Something would have been better than nothing!  But I guess no one tells you everything and some things you just have to figure things out for yourself.

Pre Race it was 2.5 degrees but warmed up nicely!

We rode the last 30km of the Tour of Flanders course the day before the race itself. As soon as I got on the overly crowded roads I knew it would be a race to remember.   More than 25,000 cyclists ride the 220km mens course on the Saturday over hills, down single track roads and over sections of cobbles up to 3km long.  There are bergs (hill climbs) scattered all through the course including the dreaded Murr, which is a steep single track cobbled climb where race fields are known to be obliterated in seconds. Cycling over the finsh section of the course gave us a good idea of what the race would be like the next day and I liked what I saw!

It’s hard to believe I’m once again back in Italy in the AIS team house. It feels as if I only left yesterday and the only real give away that it wasn’t just yesterday is the vast difference in the seasons. When I was here last June it was sunny and hot and we were complaining of not being able to sleep in our rooms at night as they were like saunas. This time round we have the heaters on, are sleeping under doonas at night and during the day are riding in our cold kit.

If you call yourself a true cyclist then you’ll probably find you have some sort of obsession with socks.  I’ve had this discussion with a few cycling mates and the obsession differs in many ways but it’s always there lurking just under the surface ready to pop out in some scary form. Cycling sock obsessions range from the need to co-ordinate socks with every piece of clothing or equipment, to the more severe obsession of needing to name and number each sock so they’ll identically match after each wash.! It’s a bad day when a cyclist loses a sock or the pure whiteness of the sock is ruined during washing and comes out grey.  However, cycling is all about image and real white cycling socks around 2 - 5  inches above the shoe (AND NO MORE) seem to be the only way to go.

It wasn’t long ago that I was sitting around Italy sipping on cappuccinos and eating brioches at the local café, taking little day trips to Milan and somehow fitting in the odd ten-day cycling tour or day race every now and then!!!

Yup…life was good…