My Week - Rod Ellingworth

Race Coach Rod Ellingworth takes us behind the scenes at Team Sky as he tells us what his job has entailed over the last seven days.

Monday 28 December I concentrated on the final preparations for the Tour Down Under. I want to make sure that the seven Team Sky riders are all keyed in together and doing the same thing. They've got 10 days when they get to Australia to prepare for the race. I did the training plans for that and sent them out to all the Sports Directors and senior staff. And then it goes out to the riders. I also spoke to all the riders just to make sure their final week leading into that period is correct. And then I spoke to the nutritionist Nigel Mitchell to get a travel plan in place for the guys travelling out from Europe to Australia, to make sure there's everything in place food-wise that they'll need to reduce any travel issues. Tuesday 29 December Had to get everything over to Helen [Mortimer, Operations Manager] and Fran [Millar, Project Manager] for the camp. I did a full timetable for the camp including meal times, when we are going out cycling, when we are getting back, making sure we've got time worked in for physio sessions and so on. I also needed to making sure we've got all the equipment we need - the rollers, turbos and other cycling equipment - and make sure people know what they are responsible for. That all took quite a while to make it presentable. Then I was with Tim Kerrison [Tech Advances] in order to make sure that the other Sports Directors who haven't done the recceing, know all they can about the roads. I've been out there twice so wrote out detailed descriptions and added them to big print outs from Google Maps, just to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible. We'll be going out with a big group of 19 to start with but then will split up into small groups of three or four and do different rides. So the other Sport Directors will cover and assist the riders on those sessions and obviously need to know exactly where they are going. Whilst this work is going on you are always speaking to your riders, sorting out anything that crops up. Wednesday 30 December I had two riders doing heat chamber work the day before, in preparation for Australia, so I spent a bit of time getting feedback from them. They had a bit of trouble getting over to Manchester on Wednesday because of the weather in the UK but managed to work it so they could get the temperature pretty high and do a session at home. It wasn't ideal but it was a good compromise. I spent time catching up with them and a few other bike riders. Bradley [Wiggins] was one of those - just chatting about bikes and positions - and Geraint Thomas was another. Also I finalised all the things for the training camp. I was going through all the efforts and making sure I was happy with what I had organised. Spoke to Dave B [Brailsford, Team Principal] and Carsten [Jeppesen, Head of Operations] just to give them an update of where we're at with things. So quite a general day really. Thursday 31 December More work on finalising and getting the routes marked out for the training camp next week. Just going through the efforts we need to do again - how long they are going to take, how many kilometres we are going to cover in that time and so on. Then if the riders need an hour or two hours warming up before they do those efforts we need to make sure we've got the right roads for that. Then after those efforts they've got normally two or three hours of general conditioning riding. So making sure I've got all the maps and all the information to cover all that is what's taken the majority of the day. I finished a little earlier than normal and we headed out for something to eat and a few drinks to mark the start of 2010. Friday 1 January Did a bit of bike riding on New Year's Day which made a bit of a change. Just had a few things to finish off for the training camp which is going to be held in Valencia. I was keen and I think Scott [Sunderland, Senior Sports Director] also was to have somewhere different, where no one has really been before. However that does throw up a bit of extra work because we obviously don't know the roads. That was one key thing. Secondly we didn't really want to clash with any other teams whichever venue we settled on. The basic thing is you want to go bike riding with your team but the biggest thing that gets in the way is the weather. But we didn't want to over-travel. We looked at different locations - South Africa was considered. It's a similar timezone, has the weather right now but a few other things racked up a bit. So we did a bit of a survey on about 10 or 12 different venues around Europe and looked at the weather stats over the last 10 years. We looked at Majorca, a couple of places in Italy, a couple of other places in southern Spain, one in Portugal and so on. And it actually came out that on average over the last 10 years Valencia was the best place to go. The three basics were temperature, rainfall and wind conditions. So that was when we started to look more closely at the area. I've been out twice now and recced the roads and done quite a bit to make sure everything is going to be right. Saturday 2 January Just spent some time speaking to a few of the riders. The title of Race Coach is something a little bit different but I didn't want to just stick to the traditional role of a coach - doing the recces, organising training camps, dealing with some bike riders. I wanted to have something that was a bit more geared towards the bike racing because ultimately we are a bike racing team. It's not about hitting massive numbers in training, it's about the performance in bike races. And with that comes not just the physical aspect but the mental preparation, all the challenges that you've got coming up. And I wanted to cover all those areas. It's what it says - it's about racing and how we get better. You have one bike race and then you review that and try to get better for the next one. That's the process. Being really close to the riders is so important and that's what I've found over the last seven or eight years. It's why I've moved out to Italy. I live about 12 kilometres from the rider base. I wanted a little bit of distance so it feels like I'm going into work each day. But I'm there, I'm in people's faces all the time. It's vital because sometimes it might be a case of seeing when people are tired and need to just step back and stop - you can see it in their faces. It's contact coaching. Sunday 3 January The Jayco Bay Crit started on Saturday in Australia and Greg Henderson won Sunday's race, with CJ Sutton second, so I've just been in contact with the guys to see how they felt on the back of the training they've done. We're not going to change plans too much so that was okay. I spent the rest of the day looking ahead a bit. The world road race at the Commonwealth Games is likely to feature a few Team Sky riders so I've been working on that. I also looked at all the climbs in the Tour de France and the Giro, focusing on what sort of altitudes they'll climb to and thinking about what recces we'll need to do. I just keep chipping away at things. I'm then off to Valencia on Monday for the training camp. I know the training might not suit everybody because it might not be what they've done in the past. But it's a team training camp, we're about bringing the team together, that's why I'm putting team efforts in and a lot of team exercises. This is an area where I think we can take huge steps forward. You don't want to lose what's unique about cycling - it's very special and we don't want to change that - but I think there are a lot of simple background things you can change whereby the team will look and function exactly the same as a traditional team but actually the engine will be quite different. I will be challenging plenty of things and people's thinking if I think there are better ways of doing things.

(Rod was talking to Jonathan Turner)