London 2012 Olympics are now just a memory and I’ve come home to ‘normal’ life – whatever that is.
It’s a weird feeling waking up each morning and not having a schedule outlining exactly when you have to eat, train and sleep. It certainly takes some adjusting but it’s a time that my body welcomes following an intense build up to the biggest sporting show on earth. London put on such an amazing show from the opening to the closing ceremony. The whole city embraced the games and it was an exciting place to compete and the crowds were vocal and patriotic.

Unfortunately, I can’t miraculously make my disappointment of not winning a medal disappear. When you work so hard for something and then fail to make it a reality it leaves you empty and pondering. But that’s the nature of the Olympics. 10,820 athletes compete in 302 events meaning there are 906 medals available. So given those statistics it means that only 8.4% of athletes competing will walk away with an elusive Olympic medal. That leaves 9,914 athletes pondering their performance and leaving empty handed. So in that cut-throat environment you have to put performances in perspective, otherwise it would eat you up and kill you. And that is my position. We didn’t come away with a medal but we produced a very credible personal best time and broke the national record by 1.2seconds. As a team we performed to our abilities and left it all out there on the track and that we are proud of. We controlled what we could and the other countries ahead of us stepped up another level and went bloody fast, something we could do nothing about.
As I reflect on what I have experienced I can’t help but feel proud to be a Kiwi. The support of family and friends who travelled to London to cheer us on truly does make a difference and then there is the nerves you feel and the goose bumps that follow as you watch your teammates compete. The butterflies were especially crazy sitting in the stands watching my team mate Simon Van Velthooven race the Keirin. It ended in a result that couldn’t have been closer with them eventually awarding two bronze medals. An amazing moment! Following competition I enjoy the opportunity to support the wider Kiwi team. Our performances on the water with rowing, sailing and kayaking were amazing with a massive medal haul and I was also lucky enough to see the BMX live.

An Olympics is not complete though without a trip to the main stadium and Craig and I were privileged to be given tickets to the 200m Bolt show and witness the 800m world record being broken. For me it is inside the athletics stadium that you realise how big the Olympics are. 80,000 spectators voluntarily fell into dead silence as Bolt (and don’t forget the other seven competitors) was poised for the start of the 200m final. Its moments like these that you realise the power of sport and the power of the Olympics. The emotion extended beyond the athletes and into the 80,000 spectators in the stands and then filtered out around the world to the billions watching on their televisions. Its moments like these that I realised my result on the racing track is just one part of my role as an athlete. Almost what’s more important is our ability to represent our country with pride and dignity and as the London slogan read “Inspire a Generation”.

Maybe this is just a convenient way for me to rationalise the fact we didn’t win a medal, after all you don’t become an Olympian without a deep competitive instinct. It’s now been two weeks since stepping off the velodrome after our race and I have talked to many people, read many emails and Facebook messages from friends, family and strangers. All retell their joy and excitement of watching us compete. And in Dunedin from the comforts of home I have reflected and realised what I do as an athlete goes deeper than just winning. I know I have the ability to inspire young Kiwi’s, bring joy and excitement to many New Zealanders and provide an avenue that allows individuals to dream and believe. And that to me is what the Olympics are about. I feel privileged to have been given this opportunity and it makes me so proud to be a Kiwi.

Training in harmony

The team has now travelled east and endured the domestic America air travel (something I would advise to approach with great patience!) to bring us to Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Kiwi cyclists have been coming to Kutztown for a few decades now. A town with one main street, one gas station, one donut shop, one bagel shop, two coffee shops, Uptown Café being our local and one Kutztown Tavern that seems to be more the staff’s style of local. During the American school year the Kutztown University turns this place into an energetic hive of partying students that sprawl out from the apartments and flats, much like Dunedin’s own Castle Street. But during summer break when the students have all gone the biggest party to rock town is a group of cyclists in tight black lycra rolling up Main St with Powerade not beer in their bottles.

Graham Miller instigated the summer influx of Kiwi’s back in the 1980’s when track racing at the nearby town of Trexlertown was ‘raging’. The Friday night racing is still a happening thing with carnival style racing where the fanatical crowd can eat their hotdogs, drink beer and watch the riders’ race around the 333m wide banked concrete velodrome. The racing was the initial draw card for Kiwi’s in the 80’s, now in 2012 this quiet university town is the perfect base for the women’s Olympic team to get the mixture of road miles in the hills and strength training on the track.

There are plenty of rolling hills and country roads that meander through the dense bush and you would have to try very hard to find a set of traffic lights during a three hour ride. Down on the flat you have to have your internal GPS on full alert as the cornfields grow visibly higher each day you can find yourself lost in a maze of maize!

The Pennsylvania area is also home to the Amish people who are a unique community, known for refusing the use of technology. This includes resisting the use of electricity, television, cars, phones, computers and tractors which are seen to cause inequality and weaken the family structure of the wider community. The Amish instead travel around on horse drawn carts and Sunday’s when we are out riding we often see the whole family making their way to church dressed in their very best. Father in a top hat and suit complete with braces and the wife in her full length dress with apron and bonnet tied and the children looking equally as smart. If we ride past church during service there will be forty or so horses with their empty carriages tied up outside, waiting for their taxi cue back to the farm. Coincidently this is the perfect place to ride past if you find yourself battling into a headwind and need a motor pace home behind a horse drawn cart.

The Amish also grow fantastic produce, and Friday’s we head on down to the local market to stock up on fresh fruit and vegies. The blueberries are my favourite splashed on top of my cereal every morning and the juicy nectarines, and then there are the biggest watermelons you have ever seen. Avocados $1 each, and fresh corn, four for $1. It’s a crazy concept to think we are only 1.5hr drive from New York city, and yet there is a whole community living a very primitive lifestyle with none of the technology that is common place in our perceived ‘normal’ daily lives. But from a distant view it appears to work and the Amish, the Kutztown locals and the Kiwi cyclists live in happy harmony during Pennsylvania’s hot summer months.

I am currently writing a few pieces for the ODT during our Olympic build-up. These pieces will hopefully give you an insight to my life on the road and other happenings off the bike. You will find the columns published in the Otago Daily Times. Keep a look out for them, but if you missed the first one here it is below.

Self-inflicted Boot Camp
From all reports it appears we skipped town with perfect timing as the weather turned to full on winter temperatures! I have to confess I haven’t endured a full Dunedin winter for seven years now, but please don’t hold this against me, it’s just all part of the job.
Craig and I have spent the last week training in Monterey, California, a little piece of paradise outside our own New Zealand. I was first introduced to this area in 2007 by Susy Pryde, a former NZ Olympian and professional cyclist and at that time our team director on the Jazz Apple team. Monterey was Susy’s training mecca and she has kindly passed on her secrets to the next generation of Kiwi cyclists, not only the secrets of the landscape, but introduced us to the people we now also call our good friends. Jeff & Joan have looked after Craig and I on several visits now since 2007 and their home is the perfect place for a self-inflicted boot camp!
Jeff himself is a bike fanatic and on our arrival at 7pm he announced to me that we would be on the bike at 7am the next morning (no time for jet-lag around here!) to ride 75km north up the California coast to see Stage 2 of the Tour of California. Jeff has ridden far and wide, always on his Bike Friday, a compact folding bike perfect for travelling and this (bikefriday.com) includes a 17day race across America. Still going strong Jeff accompanies me on many rides, always with a good story to tell, scenic sites to point out and before you know it you’ve ridden for four hours, climbed 2084m and got yourself a proud set of tan lines, which of course are an internationally renowned ‘scientific’ measurement of a cyclists training hours.
So the past seven days have been spent, riding, eating & sleeping – yup that’s it. Every now and again you have to put yourself into boot camp. This means riding as many hours, as many km’s and climbing as many meters as your swelling quads will carry you. Each day it becomes harder to get out of bed and from the first pedal stroke there is a dull aching feeling in my quads that intensifies with each hour that goes past. It’s all about stressing the body, putting it outside its comfort zone, and pushing it just to the edge of the cliff, but not over it. This tipping point is when I force the body to make the physical adaptions and that’s when I begin to build my engine.
The riding around this area is perfect, mountains, valley’s and of course California sun. Out climbing Robinson Canyon in the Carmel Valley the other day was a shock to the system, pushing 342w at a grinding 55rpm, sweating like crazy, wondering where I could re-fill my water bottle I did contemplate the temperature back in Dunedin and think of you all as it showed 33degrees on my bike computer.
Now my self-inflicted boot camp has come to an end, it’s time to pack up the two Avanti’s, three suit cases and jump on another plane down to Los Angles to meet up with my “track sisters” for the upcoming three months. This is where we begin our final Olympic training phase and inflict a new stimulus on my ever developing ‘engine’. The dramatic contrast of climbing mountains for four hours in the sun to whizzing round the wooden boards of the indoor Los Angles velodrome doing 56km/hr, heart rate at 198bpm and my two team mates in perfect formation behind me. Hundreds of training laps lie before us over the next three months. It’s all about pushing the body, continually changing the training stimulus so the engine constantly adapts, grows and transforms into the ultimate racing machine come August 3rd, our race day on the London Olympic velodrome.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

 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.