Euro's selection TT

Hello everyone, so the past week has been a tough one for everybody. With the passing of my team-mate John Brady's wife Sophie affecting everyone at the club, I'd just like to send my condolences to the Brady family and John if you read this. May she rest in peace. Also the terrible accident in the Giro which resulted in Wouter Weylandt's life been taken, which affected the larger scale of cyclists around the world. On Monday, descending on the Passo del Bocco Wouter crashed and suffered fatal injuries to his head. I think pretty much everyone worldwide has heard about the accident so I dont want to write all about it. Still, days on, the horrific images still run through my head and my thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends at this time, as well as the Brady's. RIP Sophie & Wouter.

RIP WOUTER WEYLANDT

As of late, I've been taking it easier (training-wise), recharging a bit. These few weeks of the year seem to be the only ones I'll get to take easier. With big plans in the coming weeks and the Junior Tour only 6 weeks away, I won't have any time to recover properly so I decided to use the past week as a sort of taper week and I also got a lot of stuff sorted. So nothing too interesting happened!

Today, Saturday, I traveled to Dublin to compete in a Selection TT for the European Championships, which are in July. This TT was a Squad event and no TT bikes, bars, helmets etc. were allowed to be used. Sign-on was at the Emmaus Centre in Swords, and that was the meeting place for minor talks and the roll-out. We all rolled out around 11.30ish to have a look at the course and get a good feel for the conditions. The course (8km) was a pretty bumpy one with not many flat sections. People may argue but to me there was elevation on the main road, maybe not as bad as the "Long Gaul" (or "Naul" not exactly sure) but to me it felt like elevation! Without a great warmup I headed out for my TT, straight away I could feel the effects of not having a warmup done and the cross/ head winds on this section didn't help either! Once we turned off the main road after roughly 4km and a strong wind was straight in our face. At this point I was already feeling like muck, and we hadn't even reached the climb! Don't know what was up with me today, but as soon as I turned off that road its almost as if my body had ran out of energy, my arms, legs and chest were all feeling terrible and I haven't felt that way in a while. Anyway, want to wrap this up soon so lets just say the climb to the finish wasn't too pleasant, about 3km in length and pretty steep in parts! After the TT I got cleaned up and headed back to the Emmaus centre where we had a quick chat and got the results before we left for Fermoy again. I finished in 6th which I guess was respectable enough but I wasn't the happiest. There has been better days, both for me and Cycling Ireland!

Tomorrow I'll be racing, so there should be an update again soon. Stay tuned!

Eoin