ROGER KLUGE
This month has been busy, we had another baby girl born in June. My daughter was super excited to have a little sister, the first week she didn’t want to go to bed at night or just went pretty late - normally she goes to bed at seven or eight o’clock, but it was always around nine or 10, and then she’d come out again asking how the little one was doing, why she was crying, or just to cuddle her. For me and my girlfriend it’s like everything has started again. We had this four and a half years ago when my first daughter was born. At first you think, how do we do this, how do we do that, but we haven’t forgotten everything! The nights are a bit sleepless, especially for my girlfriend. The rest of the day the baby sleeps a lot. She’s quiet, not crying too much, only saying something when she’s hungry.
We have a week-long training camp in mid-July so I’ve got three more weeks at home. I had eight, nine days off around the birth, but since then I restarted training and we’re looking forward to the first race. The training is getting more specific with more and more intervals. The Tour of Poland is my first race and that’s in five and a half weeks. That’s not so far any more if you look back where we were three months ago. Many other teams are already on training camps, but I’m happy to be home because after the racing starts in August, it’s busy. I may be home for two weeks in three months.
The last two weeks my training has been building up, with some standard endurance blocks or strength endurance. The intensity will come in the next week, especially with the training camp - we’ll go way harder. Mentally you know now the training is more important. One or two months ago if you were not motivated, you’d maybe do one or two hours less, or skip training without stress, but now we really try to follow the plan.
There will be no time for work between races. The news came out this month that the National Championships in Germany will probably happen the weekend before the Tour, so that’s one more race for me; starting at the Tour of Poland, Wallonie, the Nationals then the Tour - in between each race there’s only about five days.
Caleb wanted to do San Remo so I’m in Poland with John Degenkolb; for me it’s the same job, preparing the sprints, so it doesn’t matter if Degenkolb is behind me or Ewan. I would have liked to do San Remo too, but if I look at preparation for the Tour, those little stage races are probably better going into a three-week stage race. I have good memories with Degenkolb in Poland though - in 2012 he won the last stage and I was his lead-out man, so we are reunited and hope I can go with him for a win again.