I’ve been in Belgium for almost a month now and I feel so much better than when I first got out here. We had a 10-day training camp in Majorca last week which was tough but so beneficial. The training camp was like nothing I’ve done before. 10 days of solid, quality training; most of it consisting of climbing and occasionally doing sprint efforts, up mountains!

It was strange getting back into the rhythm of climbing up longer hills after the short sharp hills of Belgium, as the longer climbs took up to 50 minutes and then there was also the problem of going down the other side! At first I was descending down the hairpins of the mountains like an absolute granny as I was so nervous, but by the end of the camp I had become a lot more confident and actually started to relax and enjoy the descents.

The team morale was also really good, as well as myself and Academy team mate Lucy, there was Olympic champion Nicole Cooke, double Paralympic champion Sarah Storey and two riders from the mountain bike Academy, Annie and Lily, who were on a break from mountain biking to do a road block with us.

The only bad thing about the camp was the weather. It was really disappointing to say it was March! With two days of the camp left it had started snowing so we did a double day on the turbo and for the last day of the camp the first major climb had a no entry sign at the bottom so we decided to give the hills a miss! We still had a hard ride though, five hours and 149km on the flatter roads where most of the snow had cleared.

Over the weekend we then had chance to recover before hitting the training hard again this week. Yesterday was another good ride of five and a half hours around the course of the Tour of Flanders, a World Cup race in April, then tomorrow we have a power session on the turbo in the morning and an afternoon ride with some Zone 3 efforts (Zone 3 being a heart rate of 147-160bpm, so just out of your comfort zone!)

I’m really enjoying training at the moment and enjoying the feeling of getting fitter, we have quite a lot of racing coming up too so that’s obviously good motivation.