Back to Belgium
Written by Steven Cozza
Friday, 22 July 2005

The other day, I hopped over the pond landing in the land of waffles, chocolate and bikes. This year has been much different than last since I ended up staying home for most of the summer. I can’t remember the last time I was home for most of the summer, so all the smells and colors were unfamiliar to me. After my horribly awful ride at the Tour de Georgia, I began to refocus and train very hard in the months of May and June. I finally proved to myself that hard work pays off. Not only was I feeling really good on the bike, but I was starting to win and get results as well. One of the things I have started doing differently, that has really seemed to help, is I am now instead of setting goals of winning this race or that race, my new goals are to feel good at races I want to do well at and in doing this, the results will come. Everyone wants to win let’s say Nationals, but instead of that being your goal, how about making your goal to just feel great at Nationals? I started to visualize myself feeling at ease going over climbs and pushing down on the pedals with no pain and only strength. This has really seemed to help me a lot the last couple of months.

After doing well at Nationals, I decided for the month of July I would do the Cascade Classic right before returning back to Europe. The race is held in Oregon every year in the town of Bend. So my friend Sterling, who races for Monex, and I headed up to Bend late on 4th of July night. I was able to get host housing so that we could save money, not having to stay in a hotel every night for the next 5 days. I want to put thanks out to the family that hosted me and made me feel more than at home. Doing this race turned out to be a good idea for both my fitness and confidence. My confidence is climbing and has gone up so much from this race. I was able to hang with the best climbers in the US over most of the major climbs in the race so that was really good for me. On stage 4, there was a 7 mile time trial and I came in 6th against some of the fastest time trialist around. For the overall, I ended up in 17th which was not bad for me at all at this time of my life.

Now I have made it back over here to Belgium to get ready to finish off what is left of the season. Since I won the National Time Trial, I have qualified to race the World Championships in Madrid Spain on September 21st. This gives me something to really shoot for and focus on the next two months leading up to that. My first race over here will be a 5 day stage race here in Belgium starting on the 26th. I will have updates on that soon after the race. So I am focused, in shape and happy. I have never had all three of these together at once so hopefully I can keep it this way ’til Worlds. So far, all is good.

Well until next time, thanks for reading,
Steven