No Moose Yet, TT Nationals Incoming

Two weeks down in Finland and I can confidently say that I know what (the southern part of) country looks like. In hindsight, I knew what it looked like after day one.

After two weeks, I stand by my original statement: Finland is beautiful. But it is also all the same. Endless forests, endless lakes, roads that gently roll but never really become hills. You can ride for hours and feel like you've barely moved.

The biggest unaccomplished mission so far? Still no wild moose. I was promised moose. No moose. Most exotic finds are a black woodpecker and a wolf crossing the road. You can find both in the Netherlands, so my expectations are not fulfilled.

What I am confidently getting into, however, is Finnish food. The discovery of the trip is riisipiirakka, a rice-filled pastry that is dangerously close to perfect cycling food. As a Dutchy, it immediately reminded me of rijstevlaai. Most people eat them warm with egg butter. I eat them warm with cottage cheese and banana (duhhh). I even put them in my pockets when going out riding.

Another thing that has become impossible to ignore is the Finnish obsession with saunas. There are apparently more saunas than cars in Finland. There is a sauna in the office. Many people have one in their house. And then another one in the garden. If there is a building, there is probably a sauna somewhere nearby.

The other national treasure is coffee. The Finns drink more coffee per person than anyone else in the world, which should make them my kind of people. Unfortunately, we seem to disagree on what good coffee actually is. Most people here drink very light roasted filter coffee. The kind that keeps you awake but doesn't necessarily make you happy.

Last week we ran out of coffee at work. Since we are in a small facility and bring our own packs for the filter machine anyway, I figured I'd do something nice and pick up some coffee from the supermarket. So I bought Italian coffee. Apparently that was not the correct one: they made that very clear. Not every coffee-loving country should be trusted to drink coffee.

Although mission-moose is still open, I did finally completed a mission that has been four years in the making. Ever since I started working with one of my Finnish colleagues, there has been an ongoing joke that one day I would visit Finland, go to his summer cottage and cut down a tree. So that's exactly what we did.

Apart from cutting trees in remote forests. I also spent some time in Turku. Finnish cities feel surprisingly familiar. Once you leave the countryside and enter a larger city, life starts looking a lot like life anywhere else in Europe. The biggest differences are found outside the cities, where forests, lakes and summer cottages seem to take over everything.

The biggest cycling news of the week is that I officially got a spot for the Dutch National Time Trial Championships. A few weeks ago I wrote about my qualification attempt and whether it would be enough. At the time I wasn't sure, but my ranking ended up high enough to make the start list.

What makes the national TT championships interesting is that everyone lines up together. National elites (like me), continental riders and WorldTour pros. It's one of the few moments where you get a direct comparison against riders who do this for a living.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I already hoped there was a chance I'd get selected, so I quietly kept training as if it would happen. So I continued the focus on threshold work. Going slightly over, slightly under, and repeating that in intervals.

Today I mixed things up a bit, I did 20-40s (no, not 40-20s). The idea is to keep up the higher end again. Too much threshold work can make you feel too much diesel-like. I was happy that the session felt decent as I have not been feeling great overall.

Since the qualification TT the body and legs are don't feel like I would want, a bit empty. Heart rate doesn't really want to go up, resting heart rate is unusually low. The textbook explanation would probably involve words like fatigue or overreaching. But purely from training load I haven't. The overall picture might influence it. My rhythm here is different from home. The days are long, at work we're trying to get as much done as possible during the three weeks I'm in Finland, and workouts get squeezed into whatever gaps are available. That means early alarms, long workdays and a bit more balancing than I'm used to.

The bigger problem is that my TT bike is still in the Netherlands. So my preparation currently consists of doing all the fitness work without actually riding the bike I need for the race. When I get back home I have four days before nationals to spend as much time as possible in the TT position, and hope muscle memory does the rest.

One more week in Finland.
Four days of panic preparation.
And then Nationals on the 24th.

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