So tomorrow at 6 am I'm flying to California. 30 members of my racing team and our coach will get on a charter bus to San Luis Obispo for 8 days of serious cycling. SLO is GORGEOUS, and VERY bike friendly. A pro-tour team, High Road, is based in SLO now. You can ride your bike on the highways there. The weather is lovely, the scenery awesome, it's just glorious.

My coach lived there for a number of years, so he knows the best routes to ride and has them pre-planned. We ride as a group at the start of each day, then we all go at our own pace and break up into ability groups. My first year, I was in the slow group, the group that got left behind at the bottom of every hill. Last year, I was NOT in the slow group. I stuck with the fast group for way longer and then fell in with a couple guys making a small medium-ability group. I'm excited to see how I do this year. I know my fitness has improved.

While it's training CAMP, there's no actual CAMPING -- we stay in a hotel with a fabulous breakfast buffet and then ride our bikes down the coast and up and down the mountains all day. There are different distances on different days, ie on Monday we can choose either a 50 mile ride or a 106 mile ride. Some days have challenging climbs, other days we'll work on skills like pacelining, cornering and sprinting. After our rides -- which sometimes last 6 or 7 hours -- we eat and recover and eat and nap and hang out. Its great to get to know some of my teammates better.

I have so much fun at camp, I've been looking forward to it all year. When I come back, I'm faster and stronger -- I can SEE and feel all the muscle I've built in just the one week -- and ready to start racing.

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Just a note to say that Whole Foods carries this AWESOME British cereal, Dorset Cereals. It's a mix of grain flakes [oat, wheat, barley] w/ nuts & LOTS of wonderful fruit. The fruit is the only sweetening, and it's decadent. One of the varieties even has big bits of coconut in it. It's got tons of good carbs and a bit of protein [more w/ milk, yogurt, or soy milk]. We got a variety pack of Dorset Cereals at the Waitrose when we were in London in December and had some for breakfast every day. SO delicious. I'm thrilled to find it here.