Busy October for team Cebu Cycling

It’s an all systems go for Team Cebu Cycling for the Tour of Matabungkay this coming October 22-24, 2010. About 15 executive riders will be joining this all-amateur race in Batangas.

Team CC will be fielding two, 9-man, teams. I’ll be with team A, together with SankxOntanillas, Miguel Flores, Jong Sepulveda, Tata Codina, Kiko Lim, RaldyVios Ronnie Adlawan and Aussie/Bisdak Brett Harrington. Team B is made up of Ome Rodriguez, John Gayatin, Tyre and Art Lambo and Amon Espinosa. They will reinforce with Manila’s Ernie Hortaleza, Leyte’s Phillip Sainz and Ned Revilla and Italian businessman MirkoValentin.

Team B is the stronger team and will be racing hard for the win. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they win the overall. In last week’s CORRATEC CYCLING CHALLENGE in Subic, they finished 2nd in the TTT and got 3rd place overall. The team also placed 5 riders in the top 24 out of 117 participants.

The ToM includes 2 road races totaling 190km, a 30km team time trial and a 40km individual time trial. For most of us who’ll be joining, this is the first time where we will be doing 4 races in three days. It’d be interesting how far we can push our bodies, considering that this is foreign territory in terms of experience. All of us have prepared hard for this, some even doing 500km a week. As for me, training is not a problem, because I love to go out and ride, losing weight is. The battle of the bulge is a battle that is very hard to beat. Hopefully, we can come out of the ToM having an idea of what a 3-week Tour de France will feel, despite doing only a tenth of it.

Team CC will also head for Ormoc on October 3, 2010 for the Ormoc City Medical Society Road and MTB Race. I was supposed to do this race last year upon the invitation of the organizer, Dr. Jaime Gatchalian, but inclement weather got in the way. This year, CC will be in full force and will be using this race as a tune-up and also to gauge our fitness for the big one a few weeks later.

This race, which starts in Ormoc, will head north before going back, is “just” 70km but there’s a catch: it will end up with a 12km uphill to Lake Danao, site of the biggest geothermal plant in the country. I am familiar with this climb since I have ridden this about 2 or 3 times. You see my cousin, Atit Ramirez-Cortez, and his husband, Romy Cortez, has a residence in barangay Milagro. The gradient is not that steep, in fact Busay is steeper, but it’s the distance that will punish the unsuspecting rider.

Finally, for the past 20 years, a lot has happened to the sport of cycling. Back then, I got stared at when wearing “cycling shorts”. Two decades later, everybody who’s into sports wears them, and it’s now called as “compression shorts”……25yo Italian Vincenzo Nibali withstood a barrage of attacks from Spaniard Exequiel Mosquera during the penultimate stage of the Vuelta a España to preserve a 41sec lead going into the final and largely ceremonial stage in Madrid. Nibali is the 5th Italian to win the Vuelta and the first Italian since Mauro Gianetti won it in 1990.