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After several long flights Myron Simpson, Sarah Blake (team manager) and I finally arrived in Belgium from Auckland. In between the two 11 hour flights we had a 7 hour wait in LA, where we luckily were able to escape the airport on a free bus to a car park with near by shops. It was here I first witnessed seeing Star Bucks coffee shops literally directly across the road from each other. After the flight from there into Munich, we had a short wait in the airport before boarding another smaller plane to our final destination: Brussels. Once we landed and waited a very long time for our bikes to come off the plane, we were greeted by Marc Ryan and Westley Gough who picked us up in the team van to head for the house roughly 50km from the airport in a small village called Blauberg. The accommodation is very adequate, with a large kitchen and two people to a room.
The first day we went out to a Kermesse (long criterium, this one was 13 9km laps around a village) with only Wes and Dream (Marc) being able to race, as Tom Scully and Shem Rodger didn't have the correct paper work from Bike NZ to be able to race for our federation, and Myron and I had only just stepped off the plane. So the rest of us rode around the course watching the race from different parts, there was one nasty cobble section and a few small climbs.
Training here so far has been mainly light aerobic based stuff, in mostly fine weather apart from two 4 hour rides in the rain, with the 2nd one only actually being about 3 hours of riding thanks to 4 handy punctures, until this was turned around at my début Kermesse on Sunday. We were thrown right into the deep end with a very challenging course: 27 laps around a 4.5km circuit of which featured a 1km climb with cobbled sections as well as many tight and technical corners, all topped off by a rather large 230+ starters of numerous Belgium base Cycling Teams. When faced by the climb for the 22nd time it got too much for my legs and I was dropped. It was however a good way to start, and I am looking forward to a big improvement at my second race tomorrow afternoon.
Three days after the race, it was into the lab at Leuven University for testing. Here your bike is put onto the machine, which is pretty much a windtrainer with the resistance controlled directly by a computer. The Output Wattage is set to 140W to begin with, and then every 4minutes is ramped up by 40 more Watts to 180, 220, 260 etc until your legs explode. At each of these 4 minute intervals blood is taken from your earlobe and the amount of lactate found is recorded, along with your Heart Rate from the heart rate monitor (I maxed out at a HR of 197 Beats/Min). After a certain period, you also have a mask put on, which measures your VO2, my result here was 71. The idea is to find what areas of riding you need to work on, and a return trip is planned for near the end of our stay here to check progress. Here's a photo in the early stages of the test.
The second photo was taken at the BBQ we had in our backyard with Glenn Kearney (the All Black's nutritionist) who was here for a visit to make sure we were doing it right! He has also given us a big list of recipes to get at in the kitchen, as well as recorded our skin folds, weights, etc, to find our current body fat percentages and add to his data base to be able to recheck on his return here before we disembark for the USA.
Contact me at aaron.gate@gmail.com