Race day -38days check-in

Jeroen Sijbom

05 Feb 2026 — 4 min read

When Ingmar is explaining that that life gets in the way of training in all the ways possible, it may look like I'm not struggling too, well guess again! Training in the winter in the Netherlands with a bike that's falling apart is kind of challenging. Not even talking about our company that has some serious deadlines we can't miss!

Training behind the wall

When we started training in the summer, life was good. Only 2 hours of training a day. You could do it early morning or even late at night. Currently with the small window of daylight with 4 hours of training and minus 4 degrees, its getting more complicated. On top of that, in the region where I live, there is another weather complication called "black ice" (freezing rain) at the moment. Making it impossible to ride outside as you can skate on the streets.

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And as you probably may know already, I don't like my indoor trainer. Especially for long rides. So that means I'm wearing 10 pieces of clothing when I go outside at the moment (socks, over-socks, leg warmers, bib shorts, sweat shirt short sleeves, sweat shirt long shirt, cycling shirt long sleeves, jacket, buff, gloves). Although I have special gloves and sealskin sock over my shoes, -2 is really the limit. I already had some sessions where I completely lost the feeling in my feet. Only to come back after a 30min hot shower.

Training is riding from bike shop to bike shop

Complication number 2 is the state of my bike. This is not because the bike or components are not good, its just that they gave up after so many km's of training. That means intensive wear on my drive train components like cassette, chain, bottom bracket, crank set. This resulted in 3 big problems

My cassette come loose from the body causing the small chain rings to detach from the cassette and spinning without traction.
My left crank come loose from the crank set (seems to be a bad Shimano batch) after every 50km or so.
The bottom bracket gave up and needs replacement. The bearings seems to be worn.

This meant that on several training sessions I needed to go to a bike shop during the ride so they could apply a temporary fix. Luckily the Netherlands we have a bike shop in every small town above 100 citizens.

But the end is near. I wanted to completely use up my components, before buying the race setup. The wear in winter is terrible on these components because of mud and rain and I didn't want my newest components to be half way gone before starting the race. As I cant ride my bike anymore, I'm forced to replace them now (see my basket below). I installed everything myself except the bottom bracket which I dont have the right tools for.

So my bike bike is almost new at the moment. Also my custom saddle has arrived and looks really great. I still need to get used to the hard material, but I'm getting there.

Is it still fun?

Of course this is a question you ask yourself when you don't feel your hands anymore when you trying to screw your crank back on your bike in the middle of nowhere when you still need to train for 2 hours. But hey, its all part of the journey, and that's what makes it special. So yes I still love it. Having the goal makes everything so much easier to deal with.

And good the positive side I think I almost solved my back problems together Han. Shout out to him! Getting stronger every day! I also had a bike fit which was good, because the setup was almost perfect already and just needed to change some details. We lowered the handle bars a bit because I'm getting more flexible with all the exercises I need to do for my back.