March 24, 2009 (Clermont, FL) – Today marks a well deserved day off for the para-cycling crew down in Clermont, Florida. The first week of the training camp was certainly busy for both the athletes and staff. In addition to adding up and around 500km in the past 8 days for some riders, the week was filled with many very important activities.

“With this group, or any group, logging up the miles is one thing, but success at the highest level will never come if you don’t pay attention to the finest details. This is the reason we are spending a lot of time on measuring everyone’s position and analyzing their pedal stroke for example. We are also paying a lot of attention on post training stretching and core strength workouts. As well, we spent 3 days with a sport nutritionist where she was able to do complete body analysis, bring them grocery shopping and other such things;” mentions camp head coach, Luc Arseneau.

Another important item we spent a lot of time discussing is the vision towards London 2012. With its past successes, this group will now benefit from extra funding from Sport Canada / Podium to enable it to become a world class para-cycling program. With this in mind, Canadian Cycling’s CTO Jacques Landry was also around earlier in the week to meet and discuss such plan with the athletes.

“Today, the word is out… we don’t talk cycling and we will have a bit of fun all together; something very important to build upon if we are going to work hard together for the next four years. The camp resumes on March 31, so we still have 6 solid days of work in front of us before we all return home;” adds assistant coach Sébastien Travers.