Niki Terpstra: Ready to Race Again After Recovery & Training!

Wednesday 27 May 2015 - 17:48

After Paris Roubaix I took a little break, which was more than welcome.

Having started my racing at Six Days of Rotterdam in January, the season started early for me, so it was time to rest a bit after a long stretch of competition.

And I did enjoy the time off, doing some of my hobbies like riding with my cars. I took the time to renew my house a bit.

 

With Ramona we decided to install a new floor. Quick-Step gave us a big help and now we are really happy about the result!

 After that, I started training again. I also went to Mallorca to do some training over there in the nice Spanish sun. :-)

I'm really happy to start in the Tour of Belgium, I have always liked this tour. It has something for everyone, a time trial, sprint race, climbing,... And especially for me, this is the race where I made my debut by winning my first professional race. It was in 2006, an Ardennes stage where we also did the Mur de Huy. So, it was a pretty tough one! I went into the breakaway kind of early with a big group. We took quite a bit of time on the peloton, and it became clear that this group could make it to the finish. In the final, with about 15km to go I went solo. This was after the last climb, and they never saw me again. ;-) That feeling was amazing! It was the most beautiful stage of the race and also no one expected me to win, including myself!

I'm looking forward to seeing how my condition is. I trained a lot but the past weekend I had a really bad cold. But as of Tuesday I felt better, so ready to go for it! Looking forward to the rest of my program.

Together with the team we decided that I will not take the start at Le Tour. This year my program is a little different than usual.  It was a difficult decision because with the start in Holland, as a Dutch rider, it would have been something special to be riding on what I consider to be home roads. But sometimes you have to make choices to find the right program. I will be riding the Eneco Tour, and after that we will see what my program is for the rest of the season.

I'm really excited to enter competition again after such a productive period of recovery and training!