Alison Shanks

World Champion 2012

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:06:34 +0000

This update is definitely VERY delayed, but I still wanted to write and share with you what an amazing feeling it was to win in front of what felt like a home crowd in Melbourne. We have had so many Kiwi’s travel across to Melbourne to support us and your cheering really does make a difference. To be able to stand on that top step again and hear the NZ national anthem play was so special. To produce a personal best time by 1.5sec to make the final took a massive ride and then to back that up in the final to take the win was a day I will never forget. I would also like to mention a thank you to National coach Dayle who allowed Craig to call my race – this was so special to have Craig there track side and we really have a unique understanding.
It has been so humbling to read all the messages of support, so thank you very much.

The last few weeks in NZ have been full on!! Lots of off the bike commitments as well as the day to day training.
After the Olympic team announcement we enjoyed a week long team camp in the Hawkes Bay which included the Club Nationals Time Trial as well as the Road Race. Was great to be back racing on the road again and I enjoyed racing my Avanti EvoII with Di2 (amazing!!), and even got a sprint on to win the bunch kick for 2nd place in the road race, while Reta Trotman an Otago team mate was super strong all day and took the win solo.

I have now skipped town, well country actually and am in Monterey, California to begin the final Olympic campaign build-up. Its certainly nice to leave the thermals, arm and leg warmers behind and replace them with the necessary sunscreen!

I’m really excited about the next few months as we build, and build, day by day to August 3rd & 4th – our race days.

Will keep in touch, and for more regular short updates follow me on Facebook.com. Search Alison Shanks

Thanks for reading, its lycra time!

Ali

London World Cup

admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 04:23:48 +0000

I’m home from the London World Cup with some mixed results, but definitely a good taste of what to expect come the Olympics in August. It was an amazing experience to see the new velodrome and perform in front of the insanely patriotic British crowd.

We were disappointed with our Teams Pursuit ride to finish 6th and in a time that we could bang out in training any day of the week. We came to London under a lot of training load with the results not a major focus of this World Cup, but whenever you step up onto the start line on the world stage you want to win, so mentally it was a challenging competition when the mind is willing but the body a little tired. We have assessed the ride in great detail and with the World Record being broken twice at the meet, first by the Aussies and then the Brits in the finals we have some challenges ahead of us over the next few weeks and months. Exciting challenges though that the team is ready to step to.

I came away with the Silver in the Individual Pursuit. I was pretty happy with my ride, again always gutted to miss the gold, but under the training load it was still a solid performance. The atmosphere I experienced in the final when racing against Joanna Rowsell the Bristish girl was next level! 6000 screaming Brits, and the noise was just deafening. It was amazing to be a part of that and see the enthusiasm there is towards track cycling over there.

London is certainly looking ready for the Olympics and it will be another level of intensity when we arrive back in July.

Before then though there is plenty more training to be done and seconds to be found. Right now I’m catching up on some sleep after our trip around the world and back home! Then I’m heading to Auckland for Saturday morning Breakfast TV with Toni Street and then the North Shore Weet-Bix Try event on Sunday.

Here are some links below of the media coverage while we were away – its great to see Track Cycling getting some good ‘air time’ and thats helped by you guys showing your support, so thank you!!!

http://tvnz.co.nz/othersports-news/three-medals-kiwi-cyclists-video-4733114

http://www.roadcycling.co.nz/TrackTalk/shanks-takes-silver-in-london.html

http://tvnz.co.nz/othersports-news/kiwi-cyclists-test-olympic-velodrome-video-4724828

National Time Trial

admin — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:09:05 +0000

The first race of the season has been and gone and it was a pretty good hit out to start 2012 with a bronze at the National Time Trial Champs in Christchurch.

I was so excited to be racing on my brand new Avanti Evo2 with Di2!! It is the most amazing machine I have ever ridden.

I had a pretty good ride and gave it everything. It was a tail wind on the way out where I was sitting on 50km/hr at times. The stiff head wind on the way home made for a testing ride and at the finish line I was totally spent. I finished up 3rd with my two teams pursuit team mates Lauren Ellis and Jaime Nielson finishing 1st and 2nd. Of course I was a little bit disappointed not to win, but if you are going to get beaten it may as well be by your own team mates!

We are now down in Invercargill for a 10day track block. We then head home again for a few more weeks on the road before the next World Cup in London 17th – 19th February. This final World Cup acts as our test event for the London Olympics and we get to race on the brand new Olympic Velodrome. Till then there are plenty more laps to ride – I hope everyone has had a great relaxing holiday break, even if not so sunny this year.

The racing season has begun

admin — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:10:11 +0000

I am currently sitting on a plane to Miami, on route to our final destination Cali, Columbia for our first World Cup of the season. Six flights in total and two days just to get there.

The team is still on a high after coming off a great week of racing to kick off the season at the Oceania Champs in Invercargill. In the Teams Pursuit we set a new national record of 3min 19.7seconds, the fastest ever sea level time and only 0.2sec off breaking the World Record. It certainly was a great way to start the track season in front of friends, family and kiwi supporters. Inside the Invercargill velodrome they had three big gas heaters cranking the temperature up to 27deg and the warmer it is the faster the track conditions for racing. Couple the fast conditions with a team that is in good fresh form and that’s when you get national records being shattered. It was a great feeling to come together and ride that fast.

I then backed up the next day with a huge personal best in the Individual Pursuit to take the gold – but more importantly for me I went sub 3min 30sec. I had only broken 3min 30sec one other time and that was when I won the World Championships in Poland in 2009. During the past two seasons I have had several rides in the 3min 30seconds ‘point something’ and I definitely started asking myself where I could find those extra few seconds, or even milliseconds to break back into those elusive 20’s. So to see 3min 28.4second up on the scoreboard was deeply satisfying.

But the recent performances weren’t a fluke. The whole season is mapped out. In fact our Olympic training began way back in May where in America we spent three months on the road building our engines and getting strong. I am fitter than I have ever been and now at the beginning of the track season that hard graft work is already starting to show. But, we are off to a World Cup now, it’s another step up to greater international competition and being Olympic year every country will be upping their game. So that means we have to also continue our progression. We can however head into race day with Kiwi confidence, but we still want to and need to go faster, and that’s what we will be aiming to do in Columbia this week as we take another step up the ladder to the ultimate goal of gold in London.

Home

admin — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:39:33 +0000

There truly is no place like home. After three months away in America racing on the road and putting down the hard miles it is always a treat to come home. It is true; once you leave and travel the world you realise how lucky we are to live in our beautiful country. Of course we see some interesting sites, training among the Armish people’s horse and carts in Pennsylvania, racing through the Cascade snow capped mountains in Oregon and enjoying the sunshine of the California coast. But you never forget how special New Zealand is.

Its been even more exciting to come home to everyone a buzz with the RWC fever. I managed to get home in time to head along to our new Forsyth Barr Dunedin stadium and see the England v Romania game. That’s the thing about sport that just amazes me – who would have thought I would be going to a game to support Romania??!! Sport has the ability to bring everyone together, and even more so when it was raining and a howling southerly outside to get into our cosy stadium and enjoy the atmosphere was very satisfying

It has been a rather chilly few weeks acclimatizing from the American summer to the crisp spring weather and now I am gearing up to head down to the track in Invercargill next week. It will be our first full NZ track squad camp of the season and with race season looming the pressure for selections will be starting to mount. The first phase of our race season begins with the Oceania Championships in Invercargill 21-24^th November and then on to the World Cup in Cali, Columbia 30^th November – 3^rd December.

Off the bike I also have a busy time. I attended the UK Trade and Investment Function at the Cloud in Auckland with the NZOC which was an exciting event and made London Olympics seem a lot more ‘real’. On display there were some fantastic Kiwi inventions including the Yike Bike www.yikebike.com which I thought could come in handy when my legs got tired!!!

A couple of weeks ago I also judged the Beef & Lamb Secondary School Burger competition in Auckland and it was amazing to see what these young kids could produce under pressure. I had the best job, to taste their creations and they all did an amazing job.

I also got to visit a few primary schools in Auckland with my role as an Olympic Ambassador. Being greeted with such enthusiasm made these visits a lot of fun. Bucklands Beach School singing was fantastic and they presented me with the biggest handmade gold medal I have ever seen. Awesome! But, no pressure!!! My role as an Olympic Ambassador is ongoing also with regular updates on the www.nz2012.com/blog and other activities around the country.

This season I have also become an official ambassador of the Weet-Bix Kiwi Kids Tryathlon, so I can’t wait for that to get underway. Hopefully there are plenty of kids out there who are using the school holidays to start their training for the summer series.

So that’s about it for now. Time to hit the road and head out to the velodrome.

Catch you all again sometime soon

Arrived in Kutztown, Pennsylvania

admin — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 01:58:44 +0000

Hi Everyone

I’ve arrived in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, USA to join the rest of the NZ Womens Track team.

We will be based over here for three months, escaping the NZ winter, putting in the long road km’s and getting some good racing in amongst it all as well.

So please let me when it warms up again in NZ and I will be back home……..

I do hope to keep you updated on what’s happening and will be sure to tell you of any links where you can follow our races.

For now, here is my latest blog in my role as Olympic Ambassador

http://www.nz2012.com/blogs/alison-shanks/building-engine

Ali

Outward Bound

admin — Sun, 08 May 2011 22:10:06 +0000

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10724243

Alison Shanks was almost at breaking point.

She wasn’t in the last stages of a gruelling 3000m pursuit as you would expect – but confronting her fears on an Outward Bound course.

The cycling champion is accustomed to high-pressure situations but the recent course presented a series of intense physical and mental challenges.

Along with 13 other members of Bike NZ’s high performance programme, Shanks completed the eight day course in the Marlborough Sounds.

“At times it was brutal,” recalls Shanks. “Sometimes I thought, ‘what I am doing here? I just want to go home’.”

Shanks admits the group were pushed to the limit by the tough Outward Bound instructors.

“At times you think, ‘oh, my gosh, I just want to punch you’,” she says of her instructors. “But you come away from it realising that, while they put you in some testing situations, they try to find your breaking point. It was good to be tested in a new environment and in completely different ways to what we are used to. They tailored it so that every single person is pushed out of their comfort zone by the end of the course.”

Over the last month Bike NZ, Swimming NZ and Rowing NZ have sent high performance teams to Outward Bound as a critical training step towards the London Olympics. While each course consisted of typical activities like rock climbing, sailing, tramping and the overnight solo experience, the focus was less on physical endurance and more on team building, resilience training, mental toughness and personal challenge.

One of the biggest adjustments for Shanks was the constant uncertainty, never knowing what would happen next. Like many athletes, cyclists live extremely regimented lives. On their training camps they are given daily schedules-when to eat, when to sleep, when to ride-often weeks in advance.

“I like to know what I am doing and where I am heading,” Shanks says, “but all that went out the window. They would say to us, ‘right, you are going out in the bush for two nights and have 15 minutes to get ready’.”

There was also the challenge of spending every waking hour- literally-with her team-mates.

“At one point we were given a groundsheet, a fly and sleeping bags and told to set up camp in the bush. All 14 of us were packed in like sardines trying to keep warm. You can’t help but get to know your team-mates.”

At another stage the group spent a night at sea, all squeezed together on an old boat. Even back in camp, the mixed group shared a communal bunkroom.

“As a team-building exercise, it is pretty unique and you could say pretty extreme,” Shanks says.

The athletes had the added test of “terrible conditions”, one of the worst April’s the Outward Bound staff could remember, with almost constant rain and gale force winds.

For Shanks, one of the greatest challenges was the high ropes, where she had to walk on a thin wire 5m above ground.

“I definitely had some moments up there,” she admits. “Obviously you are harnessed on but the mind seems to play some funny tricks when you are way up high and told to jump across a 2mgap.”

The dreaded early morning swims in the chilly Marlborough Sounds was another memorable experience. Jumping into freezing water is difficult enough but is compounded when the air temperature is five degrees and you have a cold shower afterwards to ‘warmup’.

“If there are 13 others jumping off the wharf into the water, you can’t really say no because they are all going to be screaming at you to get in the bloody water,” laughs Shanks.

There were also plenty of light hearted moments during the course. Shanks describes the scene on the boat: “There was no wind so we had to row, using these old-style oars. They don’t really work and we were all completely sleep-deprived.”

A naked backflip by Eddie Dawkins off the top of a launch was “one of the funnier moments”.

“He decided to get naked, which was a big shock for us all.”

As well as team building, Outward Bound is also about finding yourself and identifying your values. The cyclists spent two nights in the bush in complete individual isolation.

“I really enjoyed it,” says Shanks. “We are always on the go and in constantly changing environments. But there we had no reading material, no cell phones or i-pods and no option but to sit in the bush and just think. It was a good time for me to take stock of where I had been and where I wanted to go.”

After a month’s break, which included the Outward Bound course, Shanks was back on the bike last week ready for the long haul through to the London Olympics. The female track team have a camp in Invercargill starting next week, before Shanks heads to the US in June for three months of riding and racing.

2011 Season……Done

admin — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 22:05:45 +0000

Home! Another season done and what a season it has been.

A full season of World Cups with Olympic points up for grabs and now a Bronze in the Teams Pursuit and a Silver in the Individual to finish off the season at the World Championships in Apeldoorn, Holland.

We raced hard and put everything out there on the track. But it was a little disappointing to be racing for the Bronze yet again and not the Gold. The standards we are setting for ourselves within Bike NZ now mean that there is only one truely acceptable result – the Gold. I think this mind set is a credit to were the program is now at, and while we equalled our best ever medal haul at a World Championships we are still not completely satisfied.

The Individual Pursuit final was an amazing race to be a part of. When you lose by 0.3sec the initial reaction is pure disappointment. There is nothing that replicates that sinking feeling I felt when I crossed the finish line with a seemingly simultaneous “BANG”, “BANG”. Of course I pray that my ears were playing tricks on me and that the first “Bang” hadn’t come from the other side of the track, but deep down I knew. Still I looked to the score board for confirmation and saw it there in bright lights a glearing ’2′ beside my name, and a big bright ’1′ beside Hammers. Still I gave it everything out there and executed a well planned race that made Hammer fight for the right to wear that prestigious Rainbow Jersey and this year I have to be satisfied with Silver. Hammer went faster, so for now she is the World Champion.

http://tvnz.co.nz/othersports-news/shanks-pipped-post-gold-1-27-video-4088085

Another special part of the World Championships this year was having my Mum and Dad in the stands. It was their first ‘Big’ live cycling meet and they certainly had their share of action. They had to contend with the very vocal Dutch supporters and both wore their New Zealand emblazoned supporters clothing with pride. Dad said it was a great feeling to be a Kiwi supporter and the respect that everyone has for “Kiwi’s” around the world made him so proud to be supporting our team.

So its the end of the season – time for a break off the bike, some relaxation and a refresh. It will be the lasts real break before beginning the long haul through to the London Olympics. I’m excited about the challenges that lie ahead and I want to thank everyone for your support this season. This is just the start and we are going to need all the support we can get during our quest for gold in London. It is such an awesome feeling knowing that when we compete we have you cheering us on back home. It makes me so proud to be a kiwi and race for our wonderful New Zealand.

Ali

2011 World Track Championships, Holland

admin — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:02:22 +0000

Hey Team

Its race eve for us girls here in Holland at the World Track Cycling championships.

Just thought I would let you know if you want to try and follow the racing over the next few days there is apparently this link to Eurosport that will stream the racing live.

http://t.co/uw9eaVi

I haven’t used it before so no guarantees, but worth a try. Also, ther eis always www.tissottiming.com that has a live timing update component available.

I’m all ready for race day……..tomorrow. Us girls are just biding our time now, had our last training session and now its the waiting game. The boys Teams Pursuit and Team Sprint are on tonight, so we are getting a little of the race vibe feeling flowing through the camp already.

We think our qualifying race tomorrow should be around 4.30pm (Thursday Euro time) and then if we make the finals they are scheduled to be around 8pm.

Then the following day is the Individual Pursuit.

In case you were wondering here in Holland we are exactly 12hrs behind NZ.

Really looking forward to getting out there and doing the business now.

Catch ya

Ali

Manchester World Cup

admin — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 23:34:15 +0000

Boom – to Manchester and back in 8days – a quick trip, on and off the track!

While it is always disappointing to be beaten, we have to take a lot of positives out of the rides at the Manchester World Cup. The team of Jaime, Lauren and myself posted our two fastest times ever, it just so happened that the Brits went super fast and posted the fastest sea level time ever. Beating us in the final by 1sec. We were the World Cup leaders heading into the competition – hence racing in the sexy white skinsuits!!! And with the second place result came away with the overall World Cup Title for the season.

We can take a bit of confidence in the fact that our finals ride wasn’t perfect, with me hitting two pads on one of the corners and causing a bit of chaos before we got the team back together to finish strongly. Learn from mistakes is all I can say!

I found a link to our race on You Tube , you don’t see me actually hit the pads, just the aftermath of me going up the track when I should have been on the black, but then we pull it back together and the Brits pull away from us in the second part of the race. A few things to work on over the next three and a half weeks leading into the World Championships in the Netherlands.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuTJkX-tJEk

I’m heading down to Invercargill for Nationals on Friday, but some sleeping and recovering to do before then! And Dunnos has provided perfect weather for doing that. Wet and cold!! I think Manchester weather was almost better, and that’s saying something!!!

Photos from gettyimages.co.nz