Busy times and moving on and racing; Ricco and Hansen in the Giro d'Italia.

It has been a while I've been told. True, but I have written a fair bit. The only thing is, I have been hitting the save button instead. The result is that I have a long post which I now find a little out of date. In it, I wrote my final thoughts on the Tour de Tablelands. Mainly on the ITT and on the last stage and how I failed to achieve my goal.

A good exercise as I can draw a few conclusions and learn something. For everybody else, just another I rode so strong, did most of the work, drag the bunch and got swamped by the sprinters... story. To avoid the "every racing cyclist writes that sort of stuff" comments, I choose not to publish it now and concentrate on the next race and other Training and Racing topics.

As I mentioned previously, for the next couple of months our racing calendar is full of Open Events. It makes it hard to choose what races to enter and what races to skip. In the past, I have raced without much planning and without a structured program so I entered all the Open races in the calendar and club races. To illustrate that, from March to September 07 I raced fifty events (Open and Club races).

No doubt I had some good results, the main one been up graded to race Masters A level, which is pretty much as high as I can go. On the down side, I got burnt out! Yes, just like we read in books and specialised mags. I rode a little bit in October, went on a six weeks overseas holiday and came back without any desire to train and/or race.

Cutting the story short, I decided to try a different approach and go on a structured training regime, decided to prioritise my races and focus on getting the best results (winning!) I can on the races that meant the most to me.

It doesn't mean I won't race any other events, races are good for training. It means I have to be careful with events which are fairly demanding on my body in the weeks preceding a race marked "A" on my yearly plan.

And this is it for racing:

• 24th May - club crit. championship (B)
• 25th May - Avanti Classic Open (B)
• 31st May - club race (C)
• 6-8th June - Tour de Sunshine Coast (A)

Giro d'Italia

It is one of my dreams to be in Italy at this time of the year, as this race is my favourite Grand Tour. I can't really say why but it must have something to do with an old DVD I have which features, not only Petacchi and his team winning 8 stages but a huge number of attacks by single riders, all trying to elude the Saeco Team on the mountains. And making the race even more gripping, it featured an amazing contest in between Saeco team mates, Simoni and Cunego, battling for the Maglia Rosa.

In 2008, the race is just as Grand. In the first week, we have Australian Adam Hensan (best domestique in the world, Croc Man and Australian ITT National Champion) putting out a fantastic performance in the early stages and Ricardo Ricco winning two stages. I couldn't be happier!

Can't wait to get the DVD.