Graeme Brown did something he'd never done before in 2015. Ride for a professional Australian team. 12-months on from signing for the Pro-Continental Drapac team, the 36-year-old will join his teammates for a training camp in the Victorian town of Bright ahead of a busy summer of cycling.
"I enjoyed it, I did plenty of hours in an aeroplane though which is a problem with a world wide schedule being based in Australia," Brown told Cyclingnews of his first season with Drapac which saw return from Europe to set up home down under. "In terms of quality it was as good as all my years as a pro. It was a good year and one that wasn’t stress and relaxing but it was more relaxed."
Riding for the Dutch Rabobank team at the top level of the sport, Brown was a regular at grand tours knowing well in advance which races the team would be lining up at. While Drapac were relying on race invitations, Brown explained his race program which wasn't too dissimilar to previous seasons having initially thought he would be racing predominately in Australia and Asia.
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"I was quite surprised as the races we did were just Pro-Continental but they were quite big starting with Tour Down Under. I did Tour of Turkey which I did with Rabobank, I did Tour of California which I did with Rabobank, and all the races were all big races. Colorado as well..."
Another change for 2015 was a revelation of sorts for Brown who spent more time training than ever before, leading to the realisation that "You don’t have to be race fit, that’s only if you cant train," he said.
"For me, I physically felt good as I had fixed periods of time where I could go out training. Originally I didn’t like that, I just liked the idea of racing, probably because the last 14 years it was race, race, race. You only had two real training periods in the year, the Australian summer and European summer. Now I had quite a lot of big blocks with up to a month between races which I found let me recover properly from a race and prepare for the next race. Whereas in Europe you have a race every weekend."
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