Time trial specialist Tom Zirbel, on his third year with Bissell Pro Cycling team, is starting the year healthy and is focusing for the Amgen Tour of California Time Trial.

The 29-year old Zirbel was diagnosed with a blood clot in his leg back in March, and a pulmonary embolism in July, but returned strong at the US Pro Time Trial in September and finished fourth with only fifteen seconds off the winner’s time.

I sat down with the 6 foot four inches tall Zirbel, nicknamed Thor by team mates, prior to the start of the Tour of California to get his thoughts on the past season and his future.

Lyne Lamoureux: What’s the plan this year? Are you going to stay healthy?
Tom Zirbel: Yeah, that’s priority one. I think I have my condition under control for the most part. I’m going to stay on medication and just kind of feather it. It’s blood thinners so you don’t want to go too high, with the risk of crashing, I’ll be above, you know, normal.

Lyne: What happened last year?
Tom: It started after the Tour of California, the symptoms, cramps in my leg, and they just persisted for weeks at a time. The reason I didn’t get it checked out earlier is that I could ride once I warmed up like 20 minutes with the blood flow I could actually ride and race. So I just let it go, but then when my blood pressure went back down, it got so bad that I couldn’t walk on it. I have a buddy Mike Friedman who had the same thing a year before, the fall before, so I just called him, It dawned on me ‘hey those are kind of similar symptoms’, just in the middle of night when I was hobbling to go to the bathroom, it just dawned on me and then I couldn’t sleep that night and the next morning got checked out and that’s what it was. Tried to come back too early, against doctor’s orders, in July just about killed myself, was back in the ER, ICU for a few days, so I think we have under control now, a nice little balance, yeah I’m actually consulting with doctors now instead of you know (laughs) self-medicating, so that’s good.

Lyne: You came back very strong last year with your 4th place finish at US Pro Time Trial, were you back at 100% at that point?
Tom: I didn’t feel like I was. I did a lot of threshold training which is great for time trial, it’s not good for road racing necessarily because I wasn’t able to keep up with accelerations like my two minute power was slow and everything. On a road where I could go for 30 minutes I could do really well. That’s all the training I did, and that’s sort of similar to how I’m approaching the beginning of this season because my goals are to win time trials at least in the early part of the season. So I expect to struggle a little bit in the road races, kind of hang on for dear life at some point, try to conserve as much energy as I can and get myself relatively fresh to Solvang. Prologue and Solvang those are my goals.

Lyne: You are usually better at longer time trials than prologues, right?
Tom: Yeah, I think of myself as a longer time trialist but I’ve had some success in the lower time trials, I did a lot of track stuff last year which was 4k about the distance of the prologue so I feel pretty confident in both. They are both primarily aerobic systems so it’s the same system working so I don’t consider a disadvantage to be shorter.

Lyne: What are your goals for the rest of the year, after Tour of California?
Tom: I hope to just work on the things I’m not really good at, the acceleration, the positioning, the tactics, I’m still learning every race. I expect with the team mates that I have that I think I’m going to learn a great deal, there are a lot of guys with great experience. Bringing Burke (Swindlehurst) and Aaron (Olson) on the program, along with Ben (Jacques-Maynes), people like Rich England, (Scott) Zwizanski, these guys have been around for years and it’s going to help, just riding next to them, I’m looking forwards to it.

Lyne: So is that what you’re going to do, just pay attention to what the others do?
Tom: I would like to… if the team wants me to develop into a GC rider and that’s kind of the indication, I need to learn how to conserve energy, be at the front, all these little nuance things that people have been around for years do everyday and I still struggle with it (chuckles)

Lyne: How long have you been racing?
Tom: 4 years, 5 years, I still feel new. I came from a running background so, the engine was there, but the tactics and everything else…

Lyne: So what made you go from running to cycling?
Tom: Injury. I’m a big dude, I ran a marathon, I ran collegiately, I ran seriously post-collegiately for a couple of years, it’s just my body doesn’t like high mileage.

Lyne: Are you looking forwards to any races this year? Or dreading any?
Tom: Anything with steep climbs I dread. But I like the long and hard races like Leelanau, Univest type races, hilly, no time to recover, just go, go, go. But no real extended climbs because I tend to struggle a little bit on extended climbs especially steeper, I can’t keep up with the fly weights like Burke (chuckles)

Lyne: Third year on this team, what is it that you like about this team?
Tom: I don’t really count last year with so few races. It’s good people, they hand select people based on their character and their riding ability and I love the management. They know how to put just the right amount of pressure of you where you don’t feel overburdened and you don’t feel stress in your life. Most of the desire comes from within, they know at this level that it’s not going to help to put too much pressure on you. They know how to get the most of you, they’ just great people to be around.

Photo c. Larry Rosa Photography

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 8:37 am and is filed under Stage 5, Bissell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.