5 Piece of Advice

With Gianluca Brambilla

As our factory team, Q36.5 Pro Cycling, gears up for its very first ever participation at the Giro d’Italia next week, we sat down with 8-time veteran and former maglia rosa Gianluca Brambilla and asked him to offer his young teammates 5 hard-won pieces of advice on how to tackle the Giro for the very first time.

1. Don’t eat without a shirt on

As older riders used to tell me when I started riding the Giro, afer a stage you: shower, dry your hair properly, get dressed THEN think about the rest. Often you see guys after a stage come up onto the bus, they still feel hot from the effort so they go have a shower then sit down to start their recovery meal with their hair still wet, without a shirt on… The Giro is a race won with legs but also through good health and survival and your routine needs to be geared to that. After almost every stage you will find me in the bus eating with a woollen beanie and the Q36.5 Base Layer 5 on, not taking any chances!

2. Pack sunscreen, and a winter jacket

The Giro is not like the Tour in July, it’s still May, we could be racing in the South on Monday where it could be above 20 degrees and sunny to the Dolomites on Friday where you can find snow and freezing temperatures. I’ve had teammates in the past, especially guys from Northern climates, who would get so sunburnt in the first week in the South of Italy that for two days couldn’t sleep properly then a week later they’d find themselves up in the snow…

3. Double check your rainbag

When I arrive at the team hotel 2 or 3 days before the start of the Giro I pull out my two rainbags on the bed and check each of them 3 or 4 times, making sure everything I need is in there and everything is in its place. I also always have a backup of all the items in my rainbag in my backpack so if the weather looks bad at the start of the stage I can use items from there and keep both rainbags perfectly intact, that way even if it warms up and I have to take off the warmers but then starts raining again I still have both bags untouched and ready-to-go.

4. Be energy efficient

Even though the way the Giro was being raced in 2016 when I took the Maglia Rosa is very different to the way it is raced today one rule that I was carefully following that year should still be observed: be energy efficient. In the last kilometres, when the group is going too hard for you and you are hanging off the back trying to hold on for somewhere between 20-30th place: let go, ride at your own speed, conserve your energy for another day. It’s a classic mistake made by a young rider with an excess of enthusiasm who then, the next day, finds themselves in a really good breakaway but can’t compete for victory and ends up regretting every previous day that he pushed just that little bit more than he needed to.

5. Bring a pillow

Recovery is key at Grand Tours and even just 10 minutes more sleep a night at the Giro adds up to more than 3 hours extra sleep over the course of the race. So I always bring my pillow from home, a mask and ear plugs because you’re sleeping a different hotel room practically every night and you never know if your room will be facing team buses that wake you up at 6am with their compressors going pumping up wheels or the windows don’t have proper blinds…

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Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team T-shirt Black

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