Torre Del Mar training camps

We have started running some early season camps down on the coast to guarantee the weather and give us and our regular guests a bit of a change. After trying a couple of places we have settled on Torre Del Mar, only 30 mins from Malaga airport with excellent climate and cycling. We are currently in the middle of our two weeks for this year and it has been excellent. We use a brilliant hotel on the seafront offering half board and the feedback has been great. Keep an eye on our website or join our newsletter for next years dates.

Costa Blanca bike race

Last week I raced the 4 day Costa blanca bike race with my friend Tim. We have always raced well as a pair and had both trained hard for this. Day 1 was a frantic 40k  with the usual fast start but we got away well and hoped for a good position. I had a very rough patch half way round after coming back from the UK unwell, but we got the to finish and had 1st place master 50.

Day 2 was a 15km time trial which we were both quite nervous about because the finish had 1km with ramps up to 30%. If you are not strong on a day like that you could lose minutes. We rode fairly steady along the seafront towards the climb and rode well and ended up losing 1 second to the guys in 2nd place, nothing.

Day 3 was another shortish 40km but with 1600mts of climbing and we were both feeling good. The guys in 2nd went off hard straight away and faded quite quickly so we edged past and never saw them again, the best way to race. We carried on pushing hard and passing as many as we could on the single track and it payed off, we gained another 6 minutes.

 Day 4 was the longest at 57km and the profile looked quite tough. The guys in 2nd were still putting up a fight on the early single track  jams but wearing a leaders jersey gives you a much easier run through the traffic and we got away comfortably. There was some quite technical descending towards the end with both of us taking tumbles, more nerves than anything I guess. Once we passed the 10km to go marker we were rolling towards the finish line with the smiles starting to appear. We ended winning by around 20 mins, A perfect week where the training had really paid off and luck was on our side. Next year?