The joys of being on an elite-amateur cycling squad are pretty much endless.

For one thing, there’s all that delightful bike racing. The NorCal season is nice and long. Hard to believe, but the ’08 racing has already started up in our neck of the woods – at least for some enthusiastic folks. On the TCB Cycling end of things we’re still ramping up for the race season and we got the ball officially rolling with the ’08 team camp a couple weekends ago.

No two team camps are quite alike, and the TCB Cycling camp plan definitely didn’t fit into any sort of team camp template. We got things going with a little Karate Kid style cross-training at the Alameda Habitat for Humanity site building sub-flooring and window/door hangers. Building stuff is hard work. It’s no wonder to us now that Daniel was able to defeat his foes the Cobras after building strength & discipline by doing all those chores that Miyagi gave him. And he won Ali’s heart to boot.

We weren’t really out to win any hearts at training camp—just get in the mode to win some bike races.

After warming up with a day of home-building we headed north up to beautiful Guerneville where we expected to find sunshine and warm-ish, dry riding. Well, at least we found Guerneville—and a cool coffee shop. However, our ol’ pal the sun opted not to make the trip with us. And then we learned the hard way, from our cheery little 120-pound elfin route guide, that all roads around Guerneville go up. Someone in the office mentioned to me on Monday that he didn’t know one of the ridges we rode was connected to another ridge we rode—but it turns out that if you ride far enough, and up enough long, steep hills, any ridge is connected to any other ridge as long as there’s not an impassible body of water or deep gorge or village of ogres in between.

So the Saturday ride ended up being a little rough. A couple of the guys on the team—the ones who can actually climb—probably had a blast. One thing’s for certain, they had hours of peace and quite at the rental house before the rest of us showed up.

The plan to cook a big pasta dinner together on Saturday night was aborted due to the fact that cooking anything would have been a stretch for most of us. The endless climbing had done all the cooking—and we were done. So we ordered a lot of pizza & some good beer then tuned in for the NFL playoff highlights.

On Sunday it was more of the same.

And in a week we’ll be racing. If there’s a team called the Cobras racing in NorCal this season I’d bet on us.

Check out the team camp video on YouTube.