Monday, April 23, 2007

Bjorn Andersson Checks In.....


After the first quarter of the 2007 season done I’m now back in the US training for the Wildflower triathlon and Florida 70.3. So far there has been quite a few up and downs as usual but fortunately the biggest races for me is yet to come so hopefully things will take a turn for the better soon.

My season started off with a cycling stage race in Belize in the beginning of February. I only had about 2 weeks of training after my off season for the race so I didn’t have any expectations and merely viewed it as a good training opportunity. Thanks to some good training in Tucson Az beforehand I got in much better shape than expected though and won 2 stages and was in the race lead for 5 days. Unfortunately I caught a virus and got sick the last 3 stages and had a tough time. Especially the last stage since my flight out of Belize was about 90min after our expected finish time that day. I did make the flight but needless to say I felt less than stellar sitting on the plane with a high fever after riding 100miles in tropical heat and stressing to get to the airport. My travel schedule the next couple of days was a bit optimistic as well.. The Swedish tri fed had a training camp in South Africa I needed to attend the following week so from Belize I flew to Dallas then NY and from there back to Sweden. Once home I had half a day before the long flights to Port Elizabeth and South Africa. All that traveling certainly didn’t help my health situation and once in PE I had 3weeks with all sorts of problems. I’d wake up every night with night sweats and bad leg pain keeping me from sleeping and doing anything but light activity. The plan was to race Ironman South Africa but I was a bit skeptical since once I got well there was only 2weeks until the race and I was far from top shape at this stage. I decided to train hard for 10 days and start the race since I was there anyway. Not much to say about how it went really as you might expect. I was simply not trained for it and only lasted about 6h.

So some good parts and some not so good but either way I was motivated to get back into things again and have some better races. After resting up a bit I started training only to have one of my blisters from IMSA get infected leaving me with an infection and another couple of weeks with poor training. So here I am now at founder of slowtwitch.com Dan Empfield and ex pro Mark Montgomery’s place in Xantusia Ca which truly is a training paradise. So far I have 10 days of solid training and getting in better shape day by day and looking forward to my next race Wildflower and hopefully some better future racing experiences.

Cheers,

Bjorn

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