In part one of our interview, Garmin-Slipstream rider and Connecticut native Tom Danielson talks his Giro di Lombardia, the importance of training on days you don’t want to, fly-fishing, and why he’s riding better than ever.

Daniel McMahon: How are you? What’s new?

Tom Danielson: Good, thanks. I’m back at home just about a week now from Europe. It’s nice to be back in Colorado and back in the U.S. I’m really enjoying my down time.

DM: You did the Giro di Lombardia. How did it go?

TD: It went okay. It’s kind of a difficult race for me. I prefer stage racing, so one-day races are really challenging for me, mainly because I don’t have very much experience doing them. The years I was on Discovery, I focused primarily or solely on stage racing. It wasn’t until I came to this team, to Garmin, that I started dabbling with one-day races, so I’ve got a lot to learn.
I mean, I’m not quite there yet, but I had good form going into the race but I’m not 100 percent accustomed to one-day racing, so I didn’t really know where to be at the right times. I ended up getting caught behind a split toward the end of the race, and that kind of took me out of the final. But it worked out well. We had Dan [Martin; 8th place] in the breakaway early on.

Read the complete interview HERE.