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FEATURES: BEING THERE: HTC TRAINING CAMP
Michael Fogarty
April 19, 2011
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Michael Fogarty is the marketing kingpin at First Endurance and is a long-time pal of Road Bike Action. When he was invited to the HTC training camp in Mallorca, he asked us if we would like to see his diary following the week-long trip. That's what we have here...hope you enjoy his first person account of hanging with the big boys...
"First Endurance was started in 2002 with one goal in mind - to give athletes access to the best possible endurance nutrition available. First Endurance has a history of working closely with the best cycling teams in the world. Since inception, First Endurance riders have won more than 400 professional races; including winning the Tour de France (twice), The Giro d’Italia as well as the Vuelta a Espana. First Endurance currently sponsors HTC-Highroad, Leopard Trek, Bissell, and Realcyclist.com.
Our partnership with HTC-Highroad really stems from my long-time friendship with Ina Teutenberg. We used to race in the same group in the local criterium series in Salt Lake. Ina was one of the only girls that raced in the series. She was the only girl to ever win the race, which she did without much trouble.
Back then Ina was riding for the women’s T-Mobile team, which was being managed by Bob Stapleton. The team happened to be looking for a nutrition sponsor so Ina told Bob about First Endurance. When we first met Bob, we didn’t know anything about him. All we knew was that we liked him right away. Since then, we’ve always been involved with Bob and the team. It’s just one of those ‘no-brainer’ relationships that’s evolved over time.
JOINING HTC-HIGHROAD IN SPAIN
One of the reasons the team continues to partner with First Endurance year after year is because we’re able to do things for the team that other, larger, nutrition companies can’t. We’re able to modify existing products for the team and we can do special small production runs for the riders when necessary (i.e. special flavors, different ingredients, etc).
The best place and time to start working on new projects with the team is at their early season training camp. We ride with the team every day (at least until we get shelled) and talk to the riders to find out what’s working well and what could be improved. It’s also the best time to meet with the team doctors and trainers because they’re rarely all together in one location. This year, the HTC-Highroad training camp was on the island of Mallorca just off the coast of Spain.
DAY ONE
HTC-Highroad always does really cool stuff to make each ride interesting. Today, the riders split up in groups of three for a race to the summit of an 8-kilometer climb. The goal wasn’t to be the first rider to the top but rather to get the last rider in their respective group to the top fastest. And to make it interesting, the staff gave each team one really trick set of climbing wheels.
I’m riding a Specialized prototype bike that has an SRM on it. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. All I do know is that it said 300 watts on the way out of town. So once we got about forty-five minutes into the ride, the riders split into their race groups. They used colored bands around their helmets to differentiate each team. It didn’t take very long for the pace to ramp up. The SRM showed 450 watts for a little while and we hadn’t even started climbing. Once we got to the bottom of the climb, they left us for dead
After eight kilometers of pitches that averaged between 5 and 7 percent, we arrived at the summit. Just in time to head down with the team. There was snow on the road so they took it easy on the descent and we were able to stay with some of the guys. The riders had another two to three hours of ‘racing’ planned so we decided not to prolong the inevitable and headed back towards the hotel.
DAY TWO
This morning the team split up into groups again. We were talking to the guys from Oakley and missed the first two groups that left and tagged onto the back of the third group. Lucky for us, it was the sprint group and they had a pretty flat route mapped out. After a couple hours of riding the group joined up with (former Tour great) Eric Zabel.
A hundred and seventy kilometers later, we got back to the hotel and had lunch with Eric. He told us the Tour of California is a huge priority for the team this year. Between Tour of California, Tour of Utah and Tour of Colorado, it’s going to be an amazing racing season in the U.S.
DAY THREE
We took a break from riding today to check out the time-trial testing HTC-Highroad does on the velodrome. HTC-Highroad is known for having one of the best, if not the best, time-trialing teams in the world. Since the velodrome is fairly close to the team hotel here in Mallorca, riders can bike to and from the velodrome and not have to wait around all day for their turn to get tested.
Neither of us had ever been to a velodrome so we were really curious to check it out. Plus, we couldn’t wait to learn more about time-trialing. Aerodynamic guru Steve Hed was there and he gave us a ton of amazing insight on how they determine the best position for each rider. And Lloyd, from cyclefit.de, gave us some really good suggestions on equipment and showed us how they record the details so the mechanics can reproduce the exact same bike set-ups, no matter where they are in the world. It’s mind-boggling to see how many different people and how much work is required to support a professional cycling team. The ratio of riders to staff at the training camp here is probably close to 1:1.
DAY FOUR
The guys took a well-deserved easy day after six hard hours in the mountains yesterday. The program called for a couple easy hours on the bike with the primary focus being active recovery so the plan was to ride for about an hour to one of the neighboring towns for coffee. Not bad.
Once we got back to the hotel we stopped in the bar to see what was going on and sat down with team director Rolf Aldag. Before joining up with Bob Stapleton to run the team, Rolf was an incredible racer, himself, so we always ask him tons of questions about training, racing and so on. Rolf said he knew riders who would log 4000 kilometers in December. Think about it, 4000 kilometers in a December, on of the coldest and wettest months of the year. That’s an average of 129 kilometers/day, every day of the month.
DAY FIVE
We’ve gotten pretty used to the routine here at training camp now. Everything revolves around riding, eating and resting. The team’s logged 32 hours on the bike this week, which is similar to what they do in a week during one of the grand tours.
The program for today called for a 20k team time-trial race. Rolf told us they were going to determine the winner by evaluating which team has the most-efficient watts/time ratio. Once we got an hour out of town, the riders stopped to get prepared for the mock race. We continued on since we knew there was zero chance we’d be able to sit in their draft for any amount of time. And sure enough, it didn’t take long before each team flew by us like we were standing still.
By the time we got to the finish, the riders had all switched over to their road bikes for an additional three to four hours. This is when they split up in specific groups. We went with the ’sprint’ group for a couple hours on rolling terrain before heading up the 8km Ronde climb. We did about half the climb and then headed back to the hotel. The ’sprint’ group stayed and did the climb a second time.
We were having lunch when they got back. Leigh Howard joined us for a quick bite before heading over to the Velodrome for a track workout. The volume these guys do at the training camp is scary.
Tomorrow, one of the groups is doing six hours in the mountains. We’re considering trying to follow them since it’ll be our last day riding with the team here on Mallorca. All we’ll be doing the following day is sitting on a plane. A crazy hard day might help us sleep more on the flight, right?
DAY SIX
We decided we weren’t going to bother trying the 6-hour big mountain ride with the guys today. After all, we were getting dropped immediately on the smaller 8-kilometer climbs previously this week and figured it’d be pointless to try sticking with the guys on the really big climbs. Plus, the directors commented that they didn’t think it’d be possible for the HTC guys to do the ride in only 6 hours. We opted for a 5 1/2 hour relatively flat route with another group instead.
We saw the last few riders leaving and headed out a few seconds behind them. But by the time we go to the waterfront, which is only a block away, they were totally out of sight. We didn’t know which way any of the groups had gone. Luckily, one of HTC riders was also left behind and was drafting behind one of the team vehicles so we jumped behind the car and absolutely flew out of town. We almost got dropped just trying to stay in the car’s draft. Turns out we got out of town so fast we were now ahead of one of the groups so we rolled along until the group caught up to us. And guess what, it was the group which was heading into the high mountains.
One of the great things about riding with the team (besides the fact that we’re actually riding with the HTC guys) is that they know where they’re going. They also have a team car with them so it’s easy to get food, drinks, jackets, etc… Another great thing is that you can hang on to the car and catch back up to the team if you need to. More on that later.
Fortunately, we couldn’t have asked for a nicer day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and it was hovering around 15 degrees Celcius/60 degrees Farenheit. Once we got to the lower slopes of the climb, the gradient spiked immediately. It got so steep down right away, we started to think we were going to lose sight of the team right away. As we ascended, the pitch dropped back down to around 5% and the riders slowed down. They knew what they were facing. After approximately 10 kilometers of climbing, we had lost site of all but one of the riders. Turns out Peter Velits, the HTC rider who got third on GC at the Vuelta a Espana in 2010 and won the individual time-trial stage, likes to go extremely easy during training. Extremely easy for Peter equaled threshold for us. Anyway, he saved us. Since the team was waiting for Peter near the top we were able to regroup with the guys. While I was putting my gloves back on though, they rolled off. Wasn’t long before I was completely alone. I didn’t know what was coming up. I just knew there was still a ton of climbing ahead.
Sebastian, the team trainer who was driving the car this day, waited for me so I could come along side of him and told me to hang on the side of the car and then he accelerated. Now I’ve drafted behind cars and trucks plenty of times but I’ve never held on to the side of a car for very long and I’ve never gone that fast hanging on to a car. We were absolutely flying up the climb and motoring around the corners. Thanks to Sebastian, I was back with the group in no time. After ascending for quite a while, we eventually came to a fork in the road. The guys suggested we continue going straight to Soller while they descend all the way down to the ocean, back up the 10-14% climb and then head towards Soller. This was about three hours into the ride now. We decided stay with the guys for another 3 kilometers of climbing, just long enough to check out the view of the ocean from the top of the climb and then head towards Soller while they descended. We agreed to meet at a cafe outside of Soller and then all ride back to Palma together from there.
We probably should have listened to their suggestion and not done the additional climbing out to see the ocean. We had no idea how much more climbing was left or how much farther we had to go to get to Soller. After what seemed like forever, we got to a spot where we could see the road head straight up the mountain in the distance. It wasn’t 8-9 percent, it was 12-17 percent. Our hearts sunk. The scenery was spectacular but the looming climb had us nervous. It’s one thing to go up long, steep climbs in July but in January, with no base, it’s pretty brutal. To our surprise, the route to Soller was through the mountain via tunnel. That changed our moods significantly. Now it was time to descend everything we had been climbing up all day. The downhill was hairpin turn after hairpin turn on a road that was perfect. It probably took us a half an hour to get to the valley floor."
Once we got to town, we tried finding the cafe to meet the team. After searching for a little while with no luck, we decided to keep heading back to our final destination and climbed another 8-10 kilometers out of Soller before an equally fun descent back into Palma. When we got to the hotel Rolf Aldag and the mechanics were at the team semi. They all got a kick out of finding out what we did and told us what time it was. Turns out we did six and a half hours, whether we liked it or not. We treated ourselves to extra wine and dessert that evening, thanked the team and staff for the great adventure and then got ready for our early morning flight back to reality.
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