First Day of Training

After having only 1 hour of sleep I felt extremely beat up but determined to make my 6:20 AM flight out to Vigo. I could have sworn it was 6:55 but, alas, I miscalculated. Luckily when I arrived at the airport, I saw a line labelled "last-minute check-in". At no time had this been more appropriate. I ended up being the last person to check in since after my suitcase was checked, the flight was closed. After, yet another, delay since I had to run across the entire airport as my gate was #118 and I passed security around gate #20, I had to run down steps to get into a shuttle that would take us to our plane on the other side of the airport where our plane was parked. I slept an hour in the plane and felt better.

I got in the Vigo airport and got picked up by Manolo, our DT. What a difference in weather. He told me that it had rained the entire past month (May) but it was finally clearing up. It was misty and cold, around 50F while Barcelona was over 75F the day before. As we drove to the team president's house we talked about the rest of the race season since the main part of the season was in the Spring and was wrapping up because it started in March and was about to be done by June. As soon as I got to the team prez's house, I was quickly outfit with everything
under the sun. There was a duffel bag, backpack, shoe bag, warm up suit, polo shirt, 3 pairs of socks, helmet, gloves, headwarmer, bibs, short sleeve jersey, dress shorts, bib tights, long sleeve thermal jersey, rain jacket. I went to meet my new teammates and figure out where I was to sleep.

This is a nice 4-bedroom apartment with 7 guys (including me) living there. I have a roommate (with bunkbeds no less), the two Russian guys share a room, two Venezuelan guys share a room and a Spanish ex-pro who's trying to get back into the pro ranks has a single.

After a quick nap, I went out for my first ride. I had a lot of things to adjust on the bike. I rode with Caputi, who's my roommate, through the first part of the usual group ride. We went by a small town called Tui and rode to a turn around point for a total of just around 85 km. It was a "chill" ride which amounted to over 50 miles. We then got back home and he showed me how to work the washer and to start the water heater for hot showers. I dropped the saddle a bit and I think I'll feel a bit better on the bike. I also need to get used to Campy since I've only used Shimano all this time. I brought my PowerTap hub and by the afternoon I had the wheel built up (by Oscar Pereiro's personal mechanic, none the less, who's also the team mechanic) so I was pretty stoked about that.