Euro Trip I

by: Christian Helmig

Our trip to Cali was fun but colder and wetter than we would have liked – as a result a lot of us came home with a nice cold and in my case the 32 hours of travel didn’t help either. Right after the final stage of Redlands (well, after another great dinner at our host family) I packed up all my (wet) gear and got dropped off at LAX by Doren in the middle of the night (4 am) – a day and a half later I arrived in Dossenheim near Heidelberg in Germany, which I call home in Europe. It took me the better part of a week to get over the cold but maybe I just needed that time off. Since then I’ve been enjoying my time home, even doing some yard work after training 😉 Riding is great here, finally I have some “real” mountains to climb, not just those 2 minute efforts we have in Dallas. Weather has been pretty unpredictable though, which is typical for April in Germany. A couple of days ago I left for a ride in bright sunshine just to get hailed and snowed on 30 min later – by the time I was back home I was dry again, thanks to another hour of sunshine followed by tornado-style winds in the last 20 min…

Besides riding a lot I’ve been catching up with friends and family. There’s another hard week of training in front of me followed by a relaxing weekend with the girlfriend at a wellness hotel – just the right thing to let the training take effect and recharge before the trip back to the States and the next big race with the team, Joe Martin. The team is looking great and we should have a real shot at doing well there so I am already pretty excited about it. Until then I’ll savor the time home though and make the best of the great riding here.