Well as I’m sure you are all well aware by now, for the first time in my professional career I’m spending July watching the Tour de France rather than racing it.
I was really disappointed when I got the phone call from my director telling me that I was going to be left out of the Tour team. The thing that disappointed me the most is I never got told a really good reason why I was left out of the team. So it was left up to me to speculate, I’ve run many scenarios though my head but still I struggle.
It took me a couple of days to come to terms with the fact that all the hard work I’d put in to being in my best shape for July was for nothing, it also took me that couple of days to realise that getting pissed off with the situation was going to get me nowhere. So I’ll called up my coach and we set some new objectives for the remainder of the season, and made a plan how we would go about it.
The Vuelta and the World Championships would be my two new objectives and the first thing in my plan to prepare for these races was to have a rest. I needed to come down a little from the peak I’d planned, so I took a week off and did some other things that didn’t involve cycling.
The next phase was to head back to the mountains and basically do all the training that I did in June all over again in July. So I packed my bags and the car and drove up to St Moritz.
I have now done a solid two weeks of training here in St Moritz and have one more week to go. I feel like my condition is coming along nicely and I have already achieved a lot during my time here. By the end of the month I will have spent 6 of the last 8 weeks living at altitude and training in the mountains. I hope all this work will translate into some great condition in the coming months.
I’ve been catching the last hour or so of the Tour each day on tv. It is great to see Thor and Heinrich winning stages and my good mate Mark Renshaw doing such a great job. Now I’m going to get back to yelling words of support at the television to all my mates racing.
On a final note, I would really like to thank everyone for their kind words of support and encouragement over the past few weeks whether it be via email, facebook or twitter, it really has meant a lot to me to know how much support I have. Until next time…
Simon.
