It is Sunday 10th March today, we have been in Santa Cruz for 10 days now and certainly have not been twiddling our thumbs. The plan was for some hard training last week, we have done some long rides, racing hill efforts, even some mountain biking. On a few of the days it has even rained! It seems to rain at night, occasionally it is still wet until 10am but the sun always seems to appear sooner or later.

The mountain biking was excellent. Jody had been mountain biking here before and took us to the nearby state park. The plan for the ride was to check-out our new bikes, stop and make adjustments as necessary, have some fun riding our bikes. We met about four American on the ride all wanting to stop and chat. As I was sitting on the ground every ten minutes to adjust my shoe plates this was not a problem. The first guy we met was telling us about all his best downhill tracks. He was building them up to be something special. Jody was just taking it in his stride - he knew most of them. So we all thought this is just talk.... Jody darted off into the woods and we followed. After a few yelps, near misses, massive drop-off, technical roots we reached the bottom in one piece. We asked Jody if he knew it was as technical, he answered "yes". Did he not think to warn us, obviously not?  This was probably the most technical descent I have done in a long time. There were three others that were all more technical.

Saturday was the Santa Cruz club run, it was more along the lines of an unofficial race. We met up at 8:00am, luckily just outside our front door along by the harbour. When we arrived there were already about 50 people, as we made our way out of town on the Pacific Bikeway more and more people joined the group. Once we reached the open road the numbers were up to about 80. Along the route there were designated sprints, hill primes just like a race. At the first sprint there was a crash. There was some "through and off" were the pace was up to 50 kph. Then the ride hit the rolling hills this split the group to bits. They all seemed to love it!?

Tomorrow is a full American road trip, all day in the car to drive to Redlands about 400 miles, ouch.

9:00 am Stage 3 - The Sun Road Race for Men - 174 km - Redlands to Oak Glen
9:45 am Stage 3 - The Sun Road Race for Women - 130 km - Lake Matthews to Oak Glen

Friday 1st March the mountain bike team set off for America. The aim of the next 26 days was for some good quality racing, both mountain bike and road with some more warm weather training thrown in. We all arrived at Heathrow with more luggage than you can imagine. Riders all had a bulging bike bag with road and mountain bike squeezed in along with a case or holdall. Simon Burney (Team Manager) had it under control, Virgin opened a special desk for us and checked us in with out batting an eyelid. With a big tailwind the flight to San Francisco was less than ten hours. The pilot gave us a good view of San Francisco before we landed with all its bridges and islands, we could even see Alcatraz the infamous prison.

We waited in the airport terminal with all our luggage around us as a van and two min-vans were hired, it was hard to believe all this luggage had been moved half way around the world. It was even harder to believe that it all fitted into the vehicles. We joined the cars heading south out of  San Francisco heading for Santa Cruz, this was about a two hour journey. Three condos had been booked close to the harbour area. This is a nice place was my first thought! Our condo looks out onto the harbour and just down the road is the beach. This is a real California beach town, surfers, bikers, scatters, all the beach lifestyle people. At night seals can be seen resting on the beach and in the day they are replaced by people catching some sun. The people that are surfing and are waiting for the waves look very like the seals that they have replaced in their black wetsuits.

Phil Dixon & I across the road from our condo

We have been out on our bikes the past couple of days. The first day was an easy ride on some quite roads, easy as we need to get over the flight and jet-lag. This included the ride back into Santa Cruz on the famous U.S. coastal road Highway One. Today we did 4:45 hrs, a ride out south towards Watsonville before doing two 1:30 hr laps, this was again not too hard. I was already beginning to feel better from the travelling. The sunshine helps, it was around 20'C.

I will write some more in a couple of days. Wednesday week is the start of the Redlands road race.

PS. more picture in the "photo gallery".

Barrie