Now is a strange time to be a professional cyclist, and the 2020 Season will go down in history as one of the most notable. For a sport that is all about discipline,  trading the regular Grand Tour schedule for a training camp presents its own set of challenges, and the riders at Team INEOS have been spending their summer preparing for a delayed racing season, slated to start next month. For final tune-ups to the team’s high-altitude fitness, most members of the prospective INEOS Tour de France squad have assembled on the Spanish island of Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands and home to, at 3,718 metres, the formidable Mount Teide.

On Tenerife, Russian rider Pavel Sivakov, one of the youngest members of Team INEOS, is readying himself to join the peloton again this fall. Pavel took some time out of his recovery to take us through a typical day of training camp, giving us a sneak peek at how top Tour teams prepare for cycling’s most competitive stages.

Pavel’s Camp Diary

At the moment, we are preparing for the upcoming season by riding on Mount Teide on Tenerife, which is one of the Canary Islands. The team has been coming here for years to prepare for some of the bigger races of the season.

A typical day at training camp is pretty simple. Of course, it varies a little bit for the routines of each rider, but the schedule is quite similar for everyone. I usually wake up around 7:00; then I have breakfast at 7:30. We’re lucky to have one of our chefs, Jon, at camp, so the food is excellent. The menus are always different and healthy.

Our training rides don’t usually rides start until 9:30 but I go for some sort of activation core/mobility session forty-five minutes prior to heading out on the bike. The duration of our rides can be anywhere from four up to six-and-a-half hours, depending on the session we have planned for that particular day. On these days our partnership with fizik really comes in to its own. I ride a handmade Fizik Arione R1 Solid. It’s nice and stiff and distributes my body weight evenly for good power transfer.

An effort session is shorter as the intensity is much higher while a general steady ride is longer since we’re riding at a nice, steady pace throughout the day. Since we are staying at altitude, and because of the terrain of the island, we don’t have any choice other than to get plenty of climbing in every day. That’s what we are here for, after all!

We come back in the afternoon sometime around 16:00, and I then go straight for a shower. Our recovery is straight forward, we make sure that we refill our glycogen levels and repair the muscle damage immediately after each ride by having a recovery shake and a good high-carb meal. After that, we always get a massage, which is probably one of the nicest moments of the day!

As you can see above our focus is our training and thankfully, we a mechanic here who takes care of everything like they would if we were racing.  All we have to do is to put on our kits and push the pedals which frees up our evenings. I like to me time to relax, watch some movies, listen to podcasts or music, or chat with friends and family. Luke Rowe brought a poker set with him this year, so if we have the opportunity, we’ll probably get everyone playing and have a laugh together.

You can follow Pavel’s training camp progress during his Instagram takeover at fizik Instagram profile and catch him and all the riders of Team INEOS at the Tour de France start in Nice at the end of next month. –