Around the World Team

The past week has been a good one! I've piled on more miles than ever in January that's for sure. Admittedly most of the miles were on group rides and were not "specific" workouts, either too easy or too fast, but at the end of the day it's January, and I just need to be riding, which is what I'm doing... and loving it!

My PowerTap cable seems to playing up, meaning I can't use it on the road bike anymore, only on my TT bike, and I'm not riding that very much yet. So I'm a bit annoyed about that as I don't have all the downloads and Training Stress info I had been relying on for training and resting. Hopefully I'll get that sorted soon, though not easy from here. Oh well, sometimes it's good to let go of all that stuff and ride according to "feeling" for a little while.

There have been a few things this week:

1st) Gaelle is coming back! She'll get here on the 10th of Feb and will be here for 2 weeks, so I'm really looking forward to that.

2nd) I got my flight to go down to Melbourne and hang out with Dave McKenzie for a couple weeks. I'm looking forward to seeing a new city and to catching up with Dave and his classic McKenzie antics. Just a funny guy!

3rd) but certainly not least. They have finally announced the racing calendar for 2008. It's certain now, we will not be starting the season in Africa. After our good showing on African soil in October we had been invited back for a 10day UCI stage race through Chad and Cameroon. Our DS has (probably wisely) decided that Africa that early in the season is too risky. We could very easily get sick and screw up not just our personal season, but the team's season as well.

So my first race will come just 2 days after landing back on home/French turf from Australia. That will be fun. And after that it is a fairly similar program to what I did back in 2006. After a few races we'll see how everyone is going and plan the next part of the season from there.

So there.. now that I have something firm to plan towards (specific races) I should be able to plan my training a little better.

Back home, some of the team went and joined the Pro Tour Bouygues Telecom boys for their training camp thank to our strong links with the Pro Team as one of their development teams.

Some of the team joined Pro-Tour team Bouygues Telecom's pre-season training camp. We aren't the Bouygues Telecom development team for nothing...

Some of the other riders have flown over to Perth for some sunny training, and Our Scott Lyttle pulled off a 3rd spot at the New Zealand National Champs with absolutely no training and beating a few Pro Tour guys. He's off to the Tour de Langkawi soon before getting to France to join the rest of the squad.

Some of the Team are in Perth...

So between the boys at home, the boys on the Bouygues Training camp in the South East of France, some boys in Perth, Scott in New Zealand and myself near Brisbane, I think it's fair to say the Team is blown all over the world. :-)

New Zealander Scott Lyttle was 3rd at the National Championships last week. Last year Scott did the Tour Down Under before joining us in France. This year he will do the Tour de Langkawi before joining us in France for some Spring races. Keep an eye on Scotty, he should have a good year!