André Barbieri Road2Rio
This is a post that my coach blogged on his website bianchicoaching.com:
As many of you know I have been coaching Andre’ now for over 2 ½ years to achieve a personal goal of being selected for Brazil’s Paralympic Team for 2016. The Paralympics will be held in Rio September 7-18, just 6 months away so we are in FULL RACE mode as I write. What I would like to achieve with this blog is to give ALL of you an idea of the support Andre’ has received from so many friends over the past three years and to share with you on how he is progressing with his races, training, rankings and travel. Also I will share with you as his coach the behind the scenes training workouts and what we are doing and why.
I will condense my writings to short updates weekly so you have the time to take it all in and live Andre’s dream. I will start with the logistics of just where he will be racing around the world in the next six months and to all you athletes out there that compete annually this should capture your imagination.
March 16th Sarasota Florida CAMTRI ITU Paratriathlon (points) Flying out March 9th from Santa Barbara
March 19th AFRICA ITU World Paratriathlon event (points) Flying to Buffalo City AFRICA Monday after the Florida event..20 hour plane flight three days rest, then the race event. Flight home right now is a 40 hour return trip which we are trying to change.
APRIL 23rd AUSTRALIA Penrit ITU World Paratriathlon Event (points) to keep from sitting in an airplane for long periods of time (blood circulation, hydration, muscle atrophy, etc.) we’re thinking about recovering in Australia doing pre racing workouts: rest, rest and a short build for Japan.
May 16th JAPAN Yokohama ITU Paratriathlon event (points) fly home to his lovely wife Karina
To qualify their athletes, the national teams change up their rosters many times during the year. They do this to maximize their athletes to score as many points as possible for that event. In other words, why send all your top athletes to the same event when you can spread them out depending on where the other countries are sending their athletes. That means that we sometimes have to wait till the START LISTS are up to know where his next race will be. The PossAbilities program through Loma Linda University is a major long term supporter which has funded Andre’ from the very beginning. They have paid for his running and cycling legs, travel expenses and racing equipment and given him complete access to their prosthetics department. The Brazilian Triathlon Federation pays for some of the travel expenses and determines which of its athletes will go to the various races.
Also on the schedule are SPAIN in May, ENGLAND in June, FRANCE in June, HOLLAND in July. These are not yet confirmed because we are too far out right now.
OK, I will stop there for now…remember Andre’s first race is next Sunday in Florida and I will send you my thoughts after the event. The next blog I will acknowledge ALL the support, sponsors and friends of Andre’ and Karina and how Andre’ has progressed with his training in 2015 and how we did it. Thanks for reading.
Cheers! Jack
