The Manimal: Precision Bikes Racing Training Camp

This weekend the road team I just joined had a small training camp in New Roads, LA. Which is just a ferry ride over to St. Francisville, LA a great place for road riding here in Louisiana. One of the teams members family owns a nice camp on False River so we were lucky enough to have free room & board. On Saturday morning the team had a 20 mile loop that we were going to ride 4 times to put us at 80 miles and giving people a chance to peel off if they had enough. We started with good weather on the first lap, good enough to go with just a jersey but half way through the loop the weather dropped about 20 degrees and a nice mist developed. So we decided to head back to the truck and grab some more clothes to complete the ride.

From Road Biking in the South East

On the second lap we had our first victim due to the hilly terrain, Saul dropped back and we rode off without him. The weather was getting pretty nasty at this point so we decided to do only 3 laps but on the third lap add a little section on it to get us about 78 miles. A few of the other members were having problems too and we slowed the pace down to allow them to catch back up. When we reached the truck we were all pretty frozen so we quickly loaded the trailer up and headed back to the camp.

From Road Biking in the South East

The next morning was much of the same weather wise as a fine mist was prevalent but our ride was going to be only about a 50 mile ride doing the loop we did yesterday twice backwards. On the first lap 3 of the 8 had to drop off as the CAT 2's up front were picking up the pace a little bit. At the start of the second lap we lost one more to knee pain so it was me a lonely CAT 5 with three CAT 2's. I was doing a good job keeping up with them even when they picked the pace up even more but the last five miles they really started hammering and were attacking each other when I decided to let them go. It was a great weekend and Im looking forward to some road racing this year.