500km, 5 days, 3 significant climbs and the discovery of a whole new meaning of the world pain and that is in summary what the ACTAS Camp was all about :P. The ACTAS road camp is run annually and this year it's main focus was predominantly to put us all through a hard block of training leading up to the Tour of Bright next weekend as well as give us juniors the opportunity to ride different and challenging terrain and to expose us to new tools which we can utilise to further pursue our careers as cyclists. There were 20 people in total n the camp and we were fortunate enough to have ACTAS head coach Glen Doney, Kris Dunn a sports psychologist and Grant Van Der Ploeg a sports scientist helping us on the trip and providing us with invaluable advice and useful feedback which we can utilise to improve our performance.
The camp started on Thursday and on the schedule for myself, the other women and the U/19s was a 130km ride from Goulburn to Kiama which we would call home for the next few days. The rest of the group started from Canberra and met us in Goulburn after a quick brew stop! It ended up being a massive day for them with close to 250km! The terrain was undulating for the most part of the ride and the weather was treating us well which overall made for a very pleasant ride! One thing to take note of would have to be the decent down Jamberoo. OH MY GOD. I don’t think I have ever been so scared of a decent in my entire life! It was pretty sketchy, full of switchbacks and narrow winding roads which added to the excitement when it came to facing on coming cars! On the first corner, some of the riders locked up their breaks and it was from that moment I decided that I would be taking it easy.. there was no point going flat out and crashing on the first day! But yeah, definitely one for the records…
I’m not going to lie, we didn’t reach the accommodation a moment too soon! The accommodation was really nice! It is located on the main street and was right next to the supermarket (which is always convenient for hungry cyclists) and cute water front cafes were only a couple of minutes walk away! I had the pleasure of rooming with Chloe, Vicki Whitelaw and Bron and Joel Ryan and was privileged enough to share a bedroom with Vicki who was more than happy to share her experiences as a professional rider and give me some useful advice! It was really nice getting to know what life is like at the top of the pro scene and learning just what it takes to get there…plenty of guts and determination just to name a few! After we unloaded all of our gear and did our post ride weigh-in, it was just a matter of feeling the wrath of the ice bath and filling up at a local Thai restaurant before heading back to the apartments and calling it a night!
So that is day 1 complete, day 2 is meant to be the hardest day of the camp…Bring on the hills!
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