Get around, get around, I get around....

When it clicks, it's beautiful. When it clicks, there's nothing that can hold you back and the world just flies. The music is pumping on the iPod, the wind loses all importance and there is almost no traction with the pavement. Your heart rate slides in perfectly with the beat of the music and you get that marvellous tunnel vision which allows you to shut out everything that doesn't belong - the sound of the traffic from the A6, the comments from the old guys who can't believe that there's a woman in Lycra in the Casa del Campo who isn't selling sex.

I have a new weapon in my armoury. I bought MIND GYM, by Gary Mack, and if you're looking for a great book to help you get over yourself and your mental obstacles, you could do a hell of a lot worse than this book. Carlos Sastre estimates that 90% of cycling takes place from the shoulders up, and in my case, there was a lot of work to do with that 90%.

I was not athletic when I was growing up. When I was a kid I suffered from severe athsma and allergies (not helped by carrying around the typical extra ten pounds that a lot of teenage girls get saddled with) and in the 80s, it was widely believed that athsmatics should abstain from any kind of overly aerobic exercise, should it result in an automatic trip to the Emergency ward. So I didn't really do anything. I swam competitively for five summers, something which I tried to do when I got to Saint Lawrence (and dropped within three months - couldn't handle the highly Republican, trustafarian vibe.) Except for a period of three years when I was in Toronto, and tried to lose weight and be gorgeous to get back at a couple of losers who really weren't worth the effort, I basically did nothing until I got Ellie.

Every day is a struggle to bury my self-image of being useless at sports. That's why I like cycling: it's one of the few sports (with the exception of swimming) where I don't feel like a total goof or an uncoordinated fool. It's one of the only sports where being bottom-heavy is a potential advantage - especially in a country like Spain, where everyone's so slender, bodies drawing a straight line down from the thorax to the knees, and do not always have the legs to propel themselves quickly and with force.

I wrote Yago yesterday with my results of climing La Marañosa - I did the four and a half kilometres in 11 minutes 1.7 seconds. I told Yago that I wanted to do that climb in under ten minutes before Easter. He wrote back and said that he thought it was difficult. Ah, yes, I thought: Difficult....is not impossible.

Not only do I want to have the best cycling legs in the Comunidad de Madrid, I want to have the strongest mental game going. For once in my life, I am going to be mentally unsinkable.