Lying flat, doing nothing.

Sipping coffee, snacking occasional fruit, listening to music. Rest days are for good.

Training has been pretty decent. I've got plenty of good hours into my legs during the preparation phase, now one more week of this and then a sort of recovery week. After that I'll start training really. So far it has been mainly unstructured riding and getting ready for proper structured workouts, but now we are getting closer to the beginning of the real training season. Other than that, the weather has been very much favourable lately.

All racing is still far far away, but all in all the main idea is to train a lot, race a lot and have two peaks during the season. The two peaks have not been decided, neither discussed yet, but they will wrap around time trialling and pursuiting, as if everything goes as planned. I'm hoping to be able to race the weekend stage races in Sweden pretty much as they're pretty good trainingwise. But that's about racing then, it is still simply too far in the horizon to talk about.

Off the track completely, it has been superb to follow alpine results during past weeks. Guys are doing just great: 1^st, 4^th and 5th Europa Cup giant slalom, what do you make of that? Romar 16^th in Lake Louise DH world cup opener? Räsä started well placing 6^th in North American Cup opener? That is one hell of a start, keep it up!

It is all good!

Torre Pacheco Velodrome

We did spot a new (for me, not as in lately built) velodrome today. I just might bring my track bike here in the spring - the surface is a bit bumpy, but very well usable for some more intense intervals. Today I did a couple of laps and went to the beaches for some quick lunch and coffee. A good way to go for a rest day.

And today, after two weeks my training year went over 1000 kilometers and 40 hours. Sot, lets stay on that path!

Angry dogs make good training company

Climbing.

Towards San Miguel de Salinas

TT training.

Maybe the header is exaggerating, but the incident itself was intriguing. I was just riding up the hill, when I heard some pretty aggressive barking and the next thing I notice is that there is hell of a big dog running to me. I was kind of afraid so my solution was to be quicker than the beast. That's what I did, but the only thing was that I'm not the best of forms and the thought that if I hit the wall now, I will be eaten or something crossed my mind quickly. Luckily though, after a while in the pursuit the dog found something more interesting and left me alone, but still my steady pace effort was ruined – too bad.

Otherwise, training has been as good and solid as it can be. Some rain, some sun and good miles. Heart rates have been quite on a higher side yet, but now they are going down to normals. So, all is good training wise and I'm feeling fairly confident about the progress.

On the bonus side down here is the cost of eating out. Chinese dinner for two including appetizers, three main courses, dessert and a bottle of wine is 16 euros at the cheapest. What would think I'm eating here most of the week? Besides chinese food is just superb and occasional glass or two of wine does no harm whatsoever – it actually is good for me as if I believe my father, and why wouldn't I? And another good excuse for eating out is the fact that there is no dish washer in our house, and also that the hand wash we have sucks.

It is pretty much all good here.

PS. I didn't go to the coming season yet as the wheels ain't quite rolling yet, except the downhills. And honestly, I don't know too much about the coming season either. The only clear thing I'm looking forward to is progression at the moment.

Start your engines!

Greets from Orihuela Costa. First couple of days packed of the new season are in the bag. I should say they were somewhere between awful and horrible in a way. Yet again, first rides after the break are always the same: heart is racing, power is somewhere etc - so that was nothing new, absolutely nothing to worry about. After the first day off the legs eased up a bit and I felt better on the very same bike, which was pleasant. Today's ride was postponed by the heavy rain fall here, so it ain't all sunshine here. But luckily the rain should be gone tomorrow.

Anyway, the start has been alright maybe even encouraging as stated by my Powertap. As a big time side note: Thanks to Petri Hietanen at PHZ for fixing my wheel! I had never had a snapped spoke before my Powertap Heds and since then, let's say less than ten in a year. Now that Petri fixed the wheel, it works perfectly!

To clarify, I'm now in Spain and will train here practically over the winter. This was a possibility for me, which I and my family took. More accurately I am in Villamartin, nearby Torrevieja. We chose this place as it has access to hills and mountains, but also offers good proper flats for time trial training. Just graduated from Uni, no army and I am between studies – we decided to rent a house from Spain to get everything out of training during the winter months, now that it was possible. So far so good. The main plan for following weeks is to follow the guidance of Fausto Coppi. The legend once answered when asked why he was so good: ”Ride your bike, ride your bike, ride your bike”. Then after a general preparation we'll go to more structured training in a form intervals and all that stuff.

As you may also notice – the design of the blog has changed quite a bit. The current design is more or less permanent depending on my artistic inspiration – which ain't my strongest side. The change in the design hails from rest-day boredom and the feeling that it has been very same for quite a while and started to look older and older – time for a change. Besides; I haven't been on track for ages. Still, don't get me wrong – I'm still a track cyclist very much, but also do race on road a lot nowadays, and I simply thought that this photo looked fairly good in the header.

I'll go more into the coming season once the wheels are really rolling.

It ain't all sun in Spain.