Thursday, February 4, 2010

Safe Arrival

I have officially arrived in Spain for the beginning of training camp and the 2010 cycling season. It was certainly a long flight/travel day/night, but it was pretty well glitch free, which for me (if you ask Lisa) is relatively uncommon. I always have trouble with security for some reason. Either I forget to empty my waterbottle or I have an apple in my backpack or I forget about my mini leatherman, etc. It never ends. And there must be a stereotype alert for people who have brown hair, brown eyes, are about 69" tall, weigh about 150lbs and have the look of Matthew Busche because in my experience they usually get stopped somewhere along the line. Today they ran my backpack twice and I thought, "Oh great, here we go again!" But there was no problem thankfully; especially because it was in the Madrid airport, where I would have had a harder time pleading anything but "no hablo espanol". Not really, the people here are actually very well versed, so hopefully I can immerse myself slowly and learn some of the language.

We are having camp in Calpe on the southeast coast of Spain. When I arrived today it was mostly cloudy and a little rainy so I have been unable to see much of the surroundings. It does look quite nice so far though. The hotel/resort is nice, the accommodations are nice and food is alright. We are about 400m from the coast, so I can see the Mediterranean from the hotel. Mountains rise up around us, too; not towering, but they are definitely here and it is shaping up to be a great week of training. We got our schedule tonight at dinner and it looks to be a good load of volume, which will be really good for me. I have been down on the volume a bit, but my intensity has been pretty good, so I think overall I should be able to make a nice smooth transition for the load. I think almost everyone has arrived now. I am rooming with Tomas Vaitkus.

I would like to upload a couple pictures for you to see, but I am having trouble with the computer/internet, so that will have to wait. Alright thanks for reading, sorry if anything is a little off in this entry; I am running on about 3 hours of sleep in the past 40ish hours. This is part of my plan to stay awake until about 10pm, so I can try and adapt to the schedule ASAP. Cheers.

2 comments:

Phil Cianciola said...

Well, in our interview you told me you like to climb...those mountains are calling! Keep posting about the training...love reading your notes here.

--Hip

Eric said...

Thanks for the update Matt. Glad you had an uneventful trip. It is time to climb like a Billy goat! Adios