Buongiorno! Here is my race and training camp report.

Buongiorno from a warm and sunny Tesserete!

Close to the Italian border I am sitting high up in the mountains on a terrace overlooking the beautiful lake of Lugano.

It all started with a long drive to Schaan for the opening Swiss BMC-Cup race that was to be held over the weekend. We arrived in the Furstentums Lichtenstein on Saturday and I spent the day testing and getting familiar with the 3.6km rout. The rout didn’t really suit me as all the climbing was done in the first half of the race and all the descending in the second. But I was super excited and was really looking forward in giving a good impression to my sponsors and people that have helped me  in my first real race in Europe.

Things didn’t really turn out the way I hoped they would in the week leading up to the race, so I was a little nervous and worried. A tumble the week before caused my left leg to be quite swollen and effected my blood circulation through both legs which made recovery from my training difficult.

This race was to be my first on the awesome new Fischer bike that I received a week earlier. I struggled to find someone who could do a proper set-up with my bike so that the measurements would fit my body. This influences my power-output as well as how I felt on the bike which sadly had a negative effect on my performance on Sunday.

I was surprised with my great starting position and this gave me some extra motivation on the start line. My start was thus exceptional and I spent the first few hundred meters in a top ten position (this is quite impressive considering the line-up of world class riders).  After this my legs started feeling blocked and I dropped back places until there weren’t really many more places to drop back to. I spent the next three laps suffering through a physically challenging track. Mentally it was also a challenge as I felt quite lonely and humiliated to have shown such poor performance and being close to the last rider. Due to my incorrect bike set-up (which I only noticed then) my back was in terrible pain and I decided to throw in the towel and call it a day to be forgotten.

Straight after the race I packed my things and drove south towards Italy. The drive took us over the Alps and the scenery definitely made up for a bad day on the bike. I then spent the week in the south of Switzerland on a trainings camp with some of my Fischer team mates and others from a different team.

All in all the start to my racing season has been disappointing and started on a downward slope. I’m hoping to improve this with this week’s training camp which is in the same location as the next BMC-Cup series race. Hopefully I will have some advantage, being able to ride the rout now already and getting familiar with the surroundings.

Muchas gracias and till next time,

Martin

P.S. This picture is from one of my training rides up into the Italian mountains (I just couldn't resist riding towards the snow...).