Super Mario as a tour guide... not bad!

so today was a good day. not only did we do a PURE BIKE LOVE type of ride- up into the tuscan hills... but we had a pretty good tour guide too. mario cipollini is our neighbor and decided to take us around today on our 4 hour incredible ride! it is pretty cool to have a world champion and one of the legends of cycling as your personal tour guide.

mario is a great guy. he was super nice... and the ride was unbelievable! we started out with a small group ride. as we hit the hills, some of them left, and by the end, it was just mario taking us around.

i wish that i had pictures to describe how incredibly gorgeous this ride was. the hills that we were riding through are dotted with ancient little towns built out of stone and brick. they would be nestled into the hillside, often with a church perched precariously above. the roads in and out were narrow and twisty- often barely wide enough for a single car. the flowers had just come out- dotting the roadsides in white, yellow and some gorgeous bright red of large solitary poppies.

we left our little castle in lucca and mario took us on our first climb- it was 6 km long and i lasted about 2 km on the front before getting dropped... it was not bad to get dropped- i got to look at the scenery. sadly, i did not take my camera out to take pictures, since i knew that everyone would be waiting at the top and i did not want to be THAT slow!

on the descent after the second climb- i had a treat. mario is QUITE the descender. he is so fluid and graceful on the bike and he just pours himself through corners like water. i am a big fan of the downhill.... i can’t lay off a descent, so i took off after mario. he was not going that fast, so i could keep up and not feel i was pushing the envelope. he kept looking back and was clearly amused that i was on his wheel. he would then speed up a bit and see if i would stay on and would laugh when he saw that i did.

when we got to the bottom, he asked in his broken english, “you crazy?”. i replied, “yes, but only a little”. he got a big kick out of that and then we were buddies. i told him i was a sprinter, so he was helping me with my sprint a bit. it really was very cool. when he asked us what the rest of our training plan was for the week, i told him that i was supposed to do sprints tomorrow, i asked him if he wanted to sprint with me and again, he got a good laugh before saying, “sure. why no”. so, mario is joining us for our sprint workout tomorrow. pretty slick.

i put up another little movie- it is not that exciting, since i did not have my camera out when it was REALLY cool. but you do get a sense of what the riding is like. mario is on it- lying to me- telling me the climb is 6 k or so when it was 9! Click here for the movie