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Olympic Training Center
Written by Steven Cozza
Saturday, 10 December 2005
To make a long story short for the moment, after a nice and adventuresome off season, I got back to riding my bike in November. At the start of December, I came down for a ten day training camp down in San Diego at the Olympic Training Center with the USA U-23 team. The weather has been absolutely awesome down here. Nothing but sunshine here and great roads to ride on. It’s been a great break coming down here but I am totally ready to be home again for a bit before I head off to Belgium for a full season of racing. I figure I am not home that much already as it is, so I must make the best of it. The coolest part about this camp of all was being able to meet all the Parolympic athletes down here. It was so great being able to train with them and get blown away by how strong they are. Scott, a really cool dude I met down here, practically tore my legs off every time he made an acceleration. He is one of the athletes that was down here who lost his leg in an accident awhile back. His goals are similar to mine so I could really relate to him and he motivated me so much. His web page is www.OneLegMan.com . All of these guys were just so fun to hang around with and so full of life that I realized quite a bit while hanging out with and training with them. Today is now the last day of camp and I fly out of here back up to San Francisco in a bit. I am stoked to take on the next couple of months of hard training and being at home with my family and friends before I head off across the big pond. I also can't wait to get my new web page up and rolling in the next couple of weeks. I am having an old teammate of mine Alex Welch help me with it so that will be cool. The new F.A.D project is going to be great and really get the ball rolling with having people join the F.A.D of not using performance enhancers to reach their dreams. In order to get F.A.D off the ground, I am going to need support from professional athletes, retired professionals and amateur cyclist. If you are one of these and support the idea of a clean sport some day and also want to complete clean and not be cheated, please send me your name, web page, and a statement about your thoughts on competing drug free. In the next few months we will also be selling F.A.D. T-shirts which are going to be really nice to be able to wear. I am so motivated in getting this new project up and going for many reasons. While riding a few weeks ago I was thinking about a lot of things like I do most of the time on my rides and I started thinking about doping. It's funny because all through high school I really didn't get too hooked on the whole smoke pot/drink all the time like a lot of my friends were doing and I started wondering why. It came to me that the bike is the thing that pulled me away from all those things. The bike was, I guess you could say, my anti- drug because I was always out training and doing active stuff that I never had time to mess my body up with drugs and such. Then I started to think about how I am going to sooner or later have to face drugs again within the sport the has kept me away from them all this time and thought how messed up that was. Here cycling is my anti-drug and here I am having to face thoughts of using drugs with what has always kept me clean. That's insane and I want to do something about it to change all that. I am actually really pissed off that there are people in my sport that are using performance enhancing drugs to win races that other guys would have won clean. They are just cheating us and making it harder for us clean guys to reach our dreams. That makes me so mad and motivated to start changing the next younger generation's views into believing that you can win and race drug free. I have done it for the past 4 years racing in Europe and have done great with my natural and hard working efforts. If you can’t do well in a race working hard and clean, then don’t race at all. I think too many riders get stuck on oh I’ve got to win a race soon or I must not be good. That is so NOT true. What makes a great ride a great race is how you did to your ability. When I race now, I am racing against myself. Only I can beat myself into not performing well. The most proud moments of my career now are when I have done well in or have won a race and I cross that line knowing that I did it all off of hard work and not off of something I put into my body to cheat my way to the line.
Well there will be much more of this to come when I get a bit more of time to sit down and really start planning it all out. If you have any ideas please shoot them my way by contacting me.
Thanks for reading.
Steven
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