Lizzie Armitstead blog: Tour of Flanders, Commonwealth Games and national road race are my goals for 2014

Hello and welcome along to another year and season in the life of a professional women's cyclist.

That said, my main focus is still the road. I'm hoping for some strong results this year and I'm targeting in particular the Tour of Flanders in April, the Commonwealth Games road race in August and the British national championships in June. The Commonwealths are definitely going to be a highlight of the year, especially as a British rider. If it is anything like the Olympics, the support will be incredible and it will be great to have cycling, and particularly women's cycling, in the public eye again. But I'm not going there for the limelight. I want that gold medal. I have won silver at the Commonwealths in the past and am keen to add a gold. Plus, I really like the course we will be racing on in Glasgow. I won the British national title on it last year, so I know I can do well there. Before all that, though, my first road race of the season will be the Ladies' Tour of Qatar next month. To be honest, I'm just hoping to use it as a means of getting back up to race speed ahead of bigger events.

British momentum

The main early-season focus for my team is European classics, which start a month after Qatar, and we often find that the people who go well in the first two or three classics are the ones who rode in Qatar - they are just a bit more race-ready. So we are going there to try to get the sharpness that could be the difference between a good and bad result in a classic. I was really pleased to see Hannah Barnes didn't need any warm-ups to register her first win of the season for her new team at the Tour Feminino de San Luis in Argentina last week. She took a sprint victory on the first stage and it was great that she got off the mark so early. She is a really talented sprinter, and having another Briton, Sharon Laws, in the UnitedHealthcare team with her as well, can only be a good thing. There are British girls on a lot of different teams, but we always look out for each other because every UCI race point that we gain gives us a better chance a bigger team at the world championship, so Hannah's win was beneficial to us all. She has set the ball rolling and hopefully the rest of us can keep the momentum going and make 2014 a success.