How important is this to you?
Very!!!
Yes have spent about 3 months base training - our summer season is 12 weeks away (a 12 x race series over 4 months) ...been doing about 150km / week mainly on the road / hills with a 50km endurance ride each week.
Start the build phase this week and will up the intensity but had a off season race yesterday and although faster than before (by about 3 min overall) ... result still the same great start - fade - passed - hang onto the end (blood in the mouth kind a stuff).
I'm happy with the training and didn't go out for a win yesterday, just wanted to benchmark my training against the competition...thats all going well but I need a new race strategy to finish strong.