Update from local Olympian, Westley Gough

Hi Everyone,

Well since my last update i have been busy preparing for and racing a couple of one day races in Belgium, doing some testing in the Lab and i have just returned from a tough four day tour in Northern France. The overall preperation is going very well and my level of condition is right on in terms of where it should be as this time, with only 3 weeks more weeks of racing here in Belgium.
I have been enjoying the racing and we have also had some success with team mate Hayden Roulston winning the GP de Wilde, which is a well known one day amateur race. I managed to finish in 16th position this day, after i made the race winning break away group along with a couple other NZ riders.

My most recent race was the Ronde de l'oise, this was made up of 5 stages and raced over four days on mostly undulating terrain in Northern France. The consistent speed this tour was raced at was unreal, right from the first stage which was 135km and raced at an average speed of 47km/h. The following days were much the same, so in four days i clocked up 700 kilometres in the legs at an average speed of 44 km/h. I was happy to finish this tour as there were alot of abandons during the race. The legs were pretty sore after hitting out for 4 days, so one aspect of training we are making sure we are doing right at this stage of the game is recovery, after such a hard tour like this so important to allow the body to recover so its been an easy three days for me since the tour, to make sure the body's feeling good before getting back into the some hard training efforts.
The entire team has also been doing some testing in the Lab, its called a basic lactate test and you can tell how your body copes with different intensities, from long easy rides to short hard efforts, the results help in making slight changes to you training programme.
Once a week we have been travelling to Ghent to train on the indoor track. The typical session usually has around 6 efforts (which might not seem like much) and plenty of rest between efforts. At the moment we are focusing on power so the efforts are only short but intense ones, mostly 1km from a standing start. One area we are sharpening up is our warm-ups. We replicate the exact some warm-up routine we will do in Beijing before each of these sessions on stationary bike to make sure we get this right because its a fine line between being not warmed up enough and being
warmed up too much. The session then ends with a warm down and the drive back home.
That's one of the great things about Belgium, its doesn't take long to get anywhere because its such a small country, even though it still has over ten million people. So all in all things have been going great, its the middle of summer here in Europe now, but its not really too hot at all and Belgium still produces the odd rainy day... Anyway hope you have enjoyed the brief update.
Westley Gough