Maggie Coles-Lyster

Soo back in the air and country traversing to Ottawa/Gatineau for the 2017 Junior Road National Championships. Firstly, shout out to mother nature for cooling down the weather, compared to the muggy heat of last year and sorry to the elite men who were caught in the thunderstorm for both the road race and time trial! Airportttts Anyways, was great to be reunited with the TaG fam for our last big trip of the year, always chill times and lots of laughs to be had with those amazing people! So for my first subtitle, I would like to call this the Curse of the Road Race. Suffered bad luck last year with missing the break and cramping issues, and this year, 15km into the race, a crack in the road attacked my front tire and flat! A slow wheel car plus some attacks and an acceleration in the pack made my chase to get back on futile. I gave it my all, and still finished the 70km race with a few dropped riders 6 minutes back from the pack. Focused before the road race start :) ...

*So now with finally a bit of downtime, I'm going through some blog posts that I'd meant to finish, but for whatever reason grade 12 exams took priority* May 3 weeks left of school... 1.5 weeks until Grad... 4 weeks until Road Nationals... AHHH. Where has the time gone?? It feels like just yesterday we had the first road race of the season. I'll try to avoid getting all nostalgic and sappy, so instead I'll do a short recount of the past 3 months. The travel started in February, when my mom and I flew to LA to go grad dress shopping with my aunt and I also managed to squeeze in a a few training days at the LA Velodrome with ex-Canadian sprint coach, Travis Smith. With Nationals only a month away, it was great to get a few days of concentrated sprint work in! A few weeks later, I hopped on a plane to Spain to join my European team, Lares-Waowdeals for a week training camp in the sun. I was really nervous going because I was flying to a new country to stay with ...

When the majority of the pack in cycling can compete at the same level, winning the race comes down to the marginal gains. Before Road Worlds last year I added a new, extremely valuable tool to my collection... the MightySat Fingertip Pulse Oximeter! Now I am still pretty new to all of the science behind the functions on it, but basically what it does is measures your pulse rate, oxygen saturation, perfusion index, respiration rate and pleth variability index. The pulse rate is pretty self explanatory; how many times your heart beats per minute. The fitter you are, the lower your resting heart rate will be, because more blood is pumped with each pulse; your heart is strengthened to work more efficiently :) One of the most useful measurements I found was the oxygen saturation. It is the measurement, as a percentage, of oxygen in the arterial blood. Higher levels of blood oxygen, means that more oxygen is being transported around the body, thus providing more oxygen to your muscles. ...

Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a good holiday season and a great start to 2017! I am writing to you from school, where I am sitting at the window watching people slip on the dreaded 4 inches of ice outside, and stressing about online calculus because the WiFi is down! All negatives aside, here is a summary of my fairly chill past 2 months :) After a successful Junior Road World Championships in Qatar, I took 7 weeks off the bike and decided to not go to Cyclocross Nationals because I was in dire need of a mental and physical break. I still went to the gym, did lots of yoga and TRX and rode my horse, Elmo to try and avoid going stir crazy! However, coming off of an amazing season and the “racing high,” then that shift back into reality, along with time off the bike is very mentally tough. Those first couple of weeks that I was off I was in a super strange headspace and would have these random meltdowns at school and the gym. Yoga was a huge asset for me then, because of the ment...