More than one year after :-)

I'm back here, not abandoned, but left resting this blog. Now I'll try to be here more often!

The last year was not exactly a good year in terms of training and sports in general. It was a very complicated year. As I said on the last post, last year, a baby at home and working 600 km away from home is not exactly an easy task.

Matheus, my son, is a great kid, the kind of kid that makes you feel how lucky you are! Since every he sleeps the whole night, except for some phases where he starts to wake up in the middle of the night or doesn't want to sleep, even though he can barely stand and so on ... none of those phases lasted longer than a couple of weeks.

Working in Munich and living in Göttingen was very complicated, despite having an easy kid at home and a good boss that didn't care if I only show up one each two weeks.

About sports, well, I didn't race the Tour d'Energie, as I told before and also didn't race the "innerstadt race" (a urban 800m circuit race, criterium like). Training was a difficult thing also due to this time sharing family/work. The week I was in Munich, Fernanda had to stay alone with Matheus and I tried to rest and be as efficient as possible at work and in the following week, I tried to take as much care of Matheus as possible, so that Fernanda could rest and work, so that training got as a secondary thing. Other sports like running, climbing and skating got 100% left behind.

To try to cycle as much as possible I took my race bike to Munich and bought a new one to leave in Göttingen. So not having a bike wasn't an excuse anywhere!

This time I tried to be more "professional" on the bike. So no triple dish, a double compact 50/34 dish with a 11-27 in the back to compensate not having a 30 in the front. No need to compensate the missing 52 in the front since I'm not "that fast" :-))) Light aluminum frame (carbon is still too expensive and too much for my poor legs), Shimano Ultegra 10-speed, to be more up to date and to have better results, not that the previous 105 were bad.

A Trek 1.9 with Bontrager wheels. Cool bike!

(see the photo!)

The Munich region is flat ... flat flat flat ... you can see the Alps, but you need a train to get there (or a car) and the only altitude changes around is passing above or below the "Autobahns" (german motorways), so speed would be the focus there, and in Göttingen trying to do a bit more non-flat training ... Germany is a flat country.

Within working late and taking Matheus to the babysitter and the LOUSY summer of 2008 and some injuries, mostly caused by the lack of sport and a kid getting heavier everyday you can imagine how efficient training was ...

One thing I tried a couple of times was taking Matheus to the babysitter and go straight to the road, or come from the road already to pick him up, as you can see below ...

I did what I could :-)

Then it gets colder and you still don't have time or the oportunity to train indoor ... since it's impossible to do it with Matheus awake, actually it's dangerous since he wants to touch everything!

Also I had some contract problems (basically the funding agency decided not to renew it, since ESO, the institute that was hosting me is suppose to have a lot of money, so they don't have to pay another post-doc there and then they put lame scientific excuses to justify it ... ) so we decided to try a permanent position in Brazil, good chance, positions in the same university (yeah, living in the same city!!!), months of preparation for the examination (yes, we have examinations for professor positions in Brazil - written, didactics ...), that represent no training AT ALL. Well, the exams didn't go so well, I'm happy a good and dear friend's got the position.

This year I didn't race the Tour d'Energie, again, no training (same reason as last year) and we came back from Brazil two days before it ... I took some nice pictures of the arrival, I'll make a post about it soon ...

Then I decided to start my season, doing basis in MAY!! Now I'm still trying it, but my back injury is back ... and I'm still fighting with the bike sit. Got a San Marco SKN Pro Titanium, with leather cover ... too hard ... too professional for me :-) Then I've got a Selle Italia Flite Gel Flow ... a bit better, still getting used to it :-)

I'm back to gym also!!

We went to Italy to see (among other things) the arrival of the 13th stage of the Giro d'Italia! It was VERY COOL!!!! I'll post about it with pictures later on ...

To make life funnier and freakier I've got myself a bike GPS! A Garmin Edge 705! It's very funny!!!

But the year was not a total waste on sports! Since the end of 2007 I'm writing a column in a brazilian cycling website, from the VO2Max Magazine. The column is in portuguese, and it can be found at the "Prologo" website.

This year the column also started to appear on the printed magazine, pretty cool! :-))

I'll try to translate/adapt some of the material and post it here sometimes!

Also we started a podcast about cycling (also in portuguese) the "Radio Corsa". Also pretty cool and funny!! In this podcast we basically talk about anything and everything we think is nice on cycling ... it's starting, but it will go on!

Also renewed my MTB!! That's also for another post!