Starting the second Grand Tour of the year

We arrived in Galicia ready to kick off the Vuelta a España. A couple of days before the race, we did the things you have to do before a Grand Tour, including pre-race blood tests, team time trial sessions and trying to dial in any last details before the chaos all starts. This year’s edition once again begins with a team time trial. When we first saw the stage profile and map in the race book, it seemed pretty straightforward. Boy where we wrong. There are some solid little kickers and plenty of technical sections to make it anything but straightforward. Though we have a strong team here, our real TTT powerhouses are racing elsewhere before final preparations for the TTT worlds.

On at TTT day, we do a “pre-start” ride on the rollers for 30 minutes riding through most of the heart-rate zones. We then have lunch before leaving for the race. Once we arrive, we ride the course once on our TT bikes before driving back to the start, followed by a warm up on trainers. Then there’s the race and the cool down, which is a riding back to the hotel. Since this year’s TTT is in the evening, it means a late massage and dinner, though the race should prove to be a good show. Actually, I forgot to mention that the start ramp is actually a floating barge in the water; we have to take a short boat ride from the dock to the start ramp, which is a new one for me! Although the TTT may not be a huge goal for us in this race, we will be quickly targeting some of the early road stages. With no GC rider, we have a team focused purely on stages and many of the stages suit our riders’ strengths. It should be quite an exciting race to watch this year. I will also, once again, be doing a photo a day from the race to share some cool things we might see along the way.