Trans Madeira day 1

Trans Madeira is a 5-day race that covers 25 stages and 200km of riding on the beautiful island of Madeira located on the east coast of Africa. This time around it will be Leo Kokonen´s second time competing at this event. We caught up with Leo after day one and asked him a few questions about how was your day out on the mountains.

Here are Leo´s thoughts of day one. Today´s stages had a great variety of pretty much everything so there was something for everyone to like about. There was some pedaling involved too so it was not all about high speed and big berms. All stages were nice, dry and flowy all in all good mix everything. My favorite stage of the day was SS5 it was steep and high speed. It´s nice to ride fast and steep stuff because at home in Finland I rarely get to ride stuff like this so it was fun and good practice too.

I kept it pretty smooth today and didn´t take too many risks, I tried to keep my pedaling efficient and not blow myself out because it is such a big race so you can´t go 100% all the time or if you do you will crash at some point. I also had to remind myself not to go too fast on the liaison because there are no set starts times so you can actually go pretty chill and take your time.

My game plan for the coming days is to keep it consistent and not make any big mistakes. Usually, my second day at trans events has been my worst day. I think I struggle to sleep and recover and then I have a hard time finding my rhythm on day two. I think I have enough experience now to pinpoint my weaknesses not to get too excited on day two and keep the rubber side down. I am sitting in 2nd place overall in my class at the moment, let´s keep doing the same for 4 more days and see where we end up in the end. 😉