And They’re Off!

Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa! Today is day 2 for Taylor and me in South Africa. I left Boulder on Monday, was delayed departing from Denver to Dulles and barely made the flight from Dulles to Frankfurt.

Once in Frankfurt I met up with Taylor. If you’ve ever been to Frankfurt airport, you’ll understand that it is a bit of a maze. First, your plane lands … then you get on a bus. After a 5-10 minute bus ride, you are dropped off at a massive terminal that is relatively confusing. After about 8 text messages back and forth, I finally met up with Taylor as he was arriving from Venice.

First, we grabbed some lunch. The menu was full of German delights such as rump steak and potatoes, sauerkraut with white sausages, and the like. We decided to stick with basics — pizza for me, and an Asian wok dish for Taylor. We thought about getting the apple strudel, but the lunch took so long that we weren’t in the mood to wait another 30 minutes for dessert.

After lunch, we had a little time to kill and went to one of the Lufthansa airport lounges to chill. Lucky for us, the TT stage of the tour was on TV. We watched for a while, but didn’t get to see the finish as we had to leave for Cape Town before the stage was finished. We boarded the Airbus 340-600, a monster of a plane, and found our seats. We scored big time as our seats had electric hook-ups for our computers (no Internet, though) and reclined completely to form a flat bed. The flight was 11 hours long, and we each got about 6+ hours of quality sleep — not bad at all.

When we arrived in Cape Town it was 5am on Wednesday — cold, wet, and pretty dead. And by cold, I mean cold – probably about 45 degrees and raining. Taylor’s luggage came first while mine did not come at all. If it was just my bags that didn’t arrive, I wouldn’t have been too worried — but I had taken Taylor’s track bike, time trial bike, and my road bike from Boulder … so not having them arrive with me was a bummer. The agent assured me that they would arrive the next morning at 5am on the next day’s flight … and that they would deliver them to the hotel in the morning.

Our initial plan was to go straight from the airport to the Belleville velodrome, where the track races will take place … so even without a track bike, we did just that. We met Colleen Hayduk one of US junior women’s racers and chatted with the New Zealand team for a while — they have a huge team of 13 athletes, just for the track events! The track doesn’t look to be the fastest track that we’ve seen, as it is concrete and it’s not heated inside (and it’s not warm … did I already mention that it is cold in South Africa right now?), but 250 meters is 250 meters.

After our scouting mission to the track, we hit a little café for some breakfast and then dropped in to check out a bike shop next door. It was a pretty sweet shop and they had signed jerseys from Mario Cipollini and Jan Ulrich hanging on the wall, so they must do some good work there. The guys in the shop knew of Taylor, and asked to have a picture taken with him. They also asked to have Taylor sign a jersey for them before he leaves … hopefully one of many colors if you know what I mean.

Next we drove to our hotel in Cape Town, the Cape Milner Hotel … a comfortable spot to stay. It continued to rain the rest of the day and we just caught up on email, had lunch, built up Taylor’s road bike and relaxed through the early afternoon. Then we took Taylor’s bike and a set of rollers to the hotel gym for a little spin.

Taylor did some short opening efforts while I sat on the loudest exercise bike that I’ve ever ridden on for all of 3 minutes. The boredom of riding a stationary hotel bike is bad enough normally, but when you throw in high pitch screeching and loud grinding into the mix it gets old really quick. I decided to do some upper body exercises since that was the only other equipment in the gym to use.

After the first two sets of upper body strength training exercises that I’ve done in about 3 years, I moved onto doing some lunges and core work. After T finished his ride, we had some dinner at the hotel restaurant. After a long day, T finally got to sleep around 10pm and I followed an hour later.
I woke up this morning (Thursday) at 8:50am feeling much better than I had in any of the past couple of days. I still only had the same clothes that I had left with on Monday, but at least the sun was coming up and I got the first full night of sleep in about 4 days.

After breakfast, I checked-in with the front desk to see if our bikes had been dropped off, as they were supposed to be. Unfortunately, nothing had yet arrived and so I had to start the search. I started making calls to check on the bikes and my bag. After a couple of hours of endless waiting, re-telling the story about how important it is that the bikes get on the next plane, etc. I felt comfortable that the bikes should be arriving on Friday morning – please keep your fingers crossed for us!

Then we hit lunch and greeted the rest of Taylor’s family as they arrived just after noon. The first order of business was to build up Connie’s sweet coupler bike built by Lennard Zinn … fortunately her bike fit me rather well (after I dropped the saddle about 3cm — man she’s got long legs!) and Davis provided me with a kit to wear — thanks Team Phinney! Taylor and I then headed out for a nice 90-minute ride along the coast. The views were spectacular and in my mind, Cape Town started to get a bit better every minute. We finished off the ride with a nice high-speed descent back to the hotel and got ready to have dinner and to celebrate Davis’s birthday. Now, it’s time to get some sleep as I’ve got a 5am trip to the airport to — fingers crossed — pick up the bikes! Tomorrow is Friday and Taylor’s 3K pursuit is on Saturday … we’re getting down to the wire. Stay tuned ‘till next week!

Neal Henderson is the Sport Science Manager at Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. He is a USA Cycling certified coach and works with a diverse clientele at BCSM. He has been Taylor Phinney’s personal coach since 2006 and will is traveling with Phinney and his family in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics.