Track Training Camp

I arrived on Sunday to Invercargill with the rest of the NZ Senior Track Team. The team includes 4 of 5 riders who won a Bronze at the Beijing Olympics, the 6 development riders who were in Belgium/USA this year including myself, the women Team Pursuit Squad and 5 sprinters including the two Junior World Champs from Moscow, Sam and Ethan.

We cracked into the training straight away on Monday with a morning track session, road ride in the afternoon with a meeting in between so was a full on first day! Tuesday followed a similar routine with racing Tuesday night, as did Wednesday. The first 3 days of the camp have been focusing on Madison Racing as Madison nationals are Thursday 8th October down here in Invercargill. For those of you who don't know what a Madison is, look at my previous posts about Madison cup in USA.

Roly throwing Dream in during a previous Madison

Brett Aitken who is a world track champion, Olympic Champion in the Madison in Sydney and Commonwealth Games Champion has been helping us out and we have all learnt a huge amount of skills from him in the first 3 days. Brett is from Australia and has been brought over to help us out for the first week of the 2 week training camp. Carsy and Tommo (Tim Carswell and Glen Thomson) have also been helping out with their madison experience.

So far the weather has been nice down here but a bit cold! We have to leave the heater on inside our unit most of the day and haven't taken leg warmers off since I have been here. Madison nationals tomorrow night will be a hard night but we are all looking forward to it. I am riding with Aaron Gate from Auckland and we have ridden together a hand full of times so we are starting to get a good understanding of how we both ride.

This coming weekend there are over 50 staff and riders attending the track camp so i'm sure it will only get busier! Looking forward to Oceania's in mid November I am pretty happy with where I am at the moment but have a few hard weeks of training ahead!

Myron