There are three big tours in the cycling calendar. The Tour de France is the most well known of course and the season’s finale comes in the Tour of Spain. The curtain raiser though is the Giro. Mark Cavendish is the surprising early leader thanks to the Team Time Trial. Cavendish, generally considered to be the fastest sprinter in the World, had the team helping him and the fact he was their first member to cross the line meant he took the Maglia Rosa.

Surprisingly enough he then lost to Petacchi in the next stage sprint and is now looking for revenge in one of the later sprint stages but Petacchi repeated the stage victory today and has taken the Pink Jersey. Why wasn’t the Isle of Man rider in the sprint today? A little matter of some smallish mountains near the finish line meant he finished down the field.

Every day in a three week tour has something different so each specialist will get their chance. Pettachi will lose the jersey as soon as a minor mountain stage comes along and total times are taken into account. The time trialers will come into their own on a couple of stages and the mountain goats will get their way in the mountains although Van De Velde won’t be one of them this year after falling and breaking two ribs today.

As for Lance Armstrong, he twittered that he is feeling good yesterday after the first time trial but would it be too much to expect him to come back and start winning at his age?

You need to put in a lot of training to even hope to get close to these guys if you have ever imagined trying to do what they make look so easy. For those who have never tried cycling up these mountains it may be difficult to appreciate the dedication required, the pain and the difficulty involved in getting over them. In order to get the best out of yourself you could do worse than starting this programme **LINK**. If you want something a little more challenging then consider that these guys do hundreds of miles every day and try to do it yourself. For making sure that you know where you are, your speed, distance and so much more you should get one of these Garmin Monitors too

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 12:02 am and is filed under Bicycle Tours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.