Tour de l'Abitibi

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I will be doing Tour de l'Abitibi in late July. It is in Canada and is the only UCI Junior event in North America. I have got to start preparing my training for this 6 stage race and I just can here to see if anyone had any advice other than what a few coaches have told me. There will be team from all over the world there so it will be hard.

It will be very hard. Speak to your coach. You are on a national project? Speak to the national coaches.

Expect to do the hours required that a Cat 3 Elite would need for a 1 week stage race. Think about the hours the races cover over the week, you'll need to do those hours in training.

If you can upgrade to do some Cat 3 or Cat 1/2 racing to get some speed in your legs, do so. Junior events in North America are usually too short and too slow to expose you to the speed and duration required to race against the Europeans.

I should be good as far as speed. I started out the year as a Cat5 and am now a Cat3 with enough points to go Cat2.

Be prepared for crashes, these juniors are like dominos, at least they were 4 years when I went. I hope you can ride at 40mph in junior gears too (in the pack). It's windy up there and real flat. I remember hitting 46mph in the pack spinning my butt off. Last I knew there was an ITT that started out in a mine a couple hundred feet below. That was real cool......as long as you aren't very tall, because you'd be climbing in the saddle the whole time.....not much clearance.

The circuit which every stage finishes on is hard. And yes, these juniors are fast. Equivalent to cat 1/2 here in the states.

The food is decent, actually good because you are always starving. (I never ate just 3 meals a day). It's a fun atmosphere, good times if you don't get dropped every day.

If you get a flat, good luck getting back on. That was me on at least 3 stages. The resulting 3 hr time trials over Canadian tundra were character building. Never before could I see the pack 10 minutes up the road, there are some real long stretches like that.

If you are like me and can't recover for jack, be ready for some hurting. I could barely climb the stairs at the school by the end of the week. It took me 2 weeks to recover when I got home.

Have fun.

Be prepared to learn a lot.