You might remember that Eddie and myself went over to Malllorca in the summer to deliver a couple of Wattbikes to Andy Sparks, elite track coach, and Sarah Hammer, multiple World Champion and World Record Holder. Andy's been pretty busy with his stable of athletes over the last couple of months but he kindly managed to drop us an update this week before he once again is back in competition mode at the European Track Championships. He also sent us a couple of stunning photos of Sarah and her Ouch Pro Cycling team-mates at the start, and in full flow during the team pursuit where they took a comfortable victory.
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We started off late August with a 4 week training block at altitude at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs to start the year off with a good block of endurance training at altitude.
Colorado Springs is great because of not only the near 2000M elevation but also because of the world-class facilities the Olympic Training Center houses, including an outdoor velodrome (very nice in the Colorado sun), full Olympic-lifting weight room, sports science facilities and, an important part of our training at altitude (so we can get heavy resistance, which is hard to get at altitude), a fleet of Wattbikes.
We had some great weather for the camp and also some great company as the Australian, Dutch and German team were also training at the center during this time.
We also had some successful results out of this camp including Sarah Hammer and Jennie Reed setting a new track record at the US National Track Championships, Recep Unalan of Turkey winning a UCI 2.2 stage race (3 stage wins and the overall) and Sofia Arreola, who took 2nd overall at the Pan-Am Games in Mexico.
The Irish and Turkish teams are now in final prep mode for the European Championships coming up this weekend (starting October 21st) and then Team Mexico, Ireland and Mexico will head to the first World Cup of the year in Astana, Kazakhstan to chase Olympic points. Wish us luck!
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Thanks Andy, we'll definitely be keeping an eye on the results from the Euros and from the upcoming 1st round of the World Cup.