During an interview with Trek Factory Racing in their Behind the Stripes series, Fabian Cancellara has revealed that he will return to racing at the Tour de Fjords in two weeks time.

“We considered doing California or the Giro [d’Italia], but in the end I’ll restart in the Norway at the Fjords race,” Cancellara explained. “I’m happy the decision is taken. I don’t like it very much when things are in the air. I’m already in the air with the weather, trying to figure which way to ride out on training.”

When he starts the race, it will have been exactly two months since he broke two vertebrae in his back after a bad crash early on in E3 Harelbeke. He says that while his time off has been long, he says he doesn’t think he will have lost too much shape.

“It’s not really a matter of how much shape I lost,” he said. “I find it hard to express that in percentages or something. More than anything it’s about the routine you lose. When I restarted training I was really tired after a 3.5 hours ride. The next day I did four hours and I was even more spent. So yeah, it’s a matter of getting used to the workload again.”

“I have been pain-free since about a week. I still feel it after training, but it’s okay now,” he said. “I didn’t ride my bike for three weeks. I was frustrated and bored, because there was nothing I could do. When you crash by your own mistake, you blame yourself. The circumstances of my crash are unclear, I don’t remember much, but there was nothing I could do.”

He says that as this isn’t the first time he has been injured for a long period of time, he knew he could return to his best shape and could still produce some big results.

“I learned my lesson in 2012 when I broke my collarbone in Flanders and then crashed myself out of the Olympic road race,” said Cancellara. “The 2012 experience has helped me a lot to deal with this misfortune. My world came down then, this time it was different. Especially, because there was nothing I could do. There’s no surgery for vertebrae. I just had to wait until the pain was gone.”