Ride of attrition

3 stages down, 2 to go. After the prologue only seconds were in it on GC. That was all to change after Stage 1...

Starting and finishing in St Meen Le Grand, the race headed out for 90km before returning to the town for five laps of a 5km finishing circuit. This was like two races in one, a road race and then a crit! As we chilled out before the start, the temperature just kept rising and rising! When we rolled out it was something like 34 degrees, which would then top out at 38 degrees during the race!!! 

With Anna Christian on one of the climbs. Thanks to Owen Philipson for the photo :)

The first queen of the mountains (QOM) came after only 13km so positioning right from the start was important. The pace was fairly steady nothing too rapid, other than after a crash going uphill (?..) where I did a bit of bunnyhopping the kerb to get round and then bit of an effort to close the gap to the top of the hill. Riding in extreme heat when you're not used to it (I mean we're lucky if we get into the 20s in the North East of Scotland!!) saps your energy and makes it even harder to stay switched on. Waves of heat go through your body and its nigh on impossible to keep cool. By the time we reached the first feed at 50km I'd drunk a full bottle and most of the second, so was almost ecstatic when I safely collected a fresh bottle of water from our soigneur. Some teams had the luxury of multiple feeds along the course where they could collect a couple of bottles at a time, one to drink and the other to pour over their head. If you happened to catch a few drops of spray as they did this, the momentary splash of cool water hitting your skin was like pure heaven!!!

Feeding from the team car during the race is also allowed. You just stick your arm in the air holding your bottle and the commissaire radios to your team car to come up to the back of the bunch for a feed. You drop back behind the commissaire car to get a bottle/gel etc. I'm never really sure about doing this but needs must and desperation for water had started to set in so I stuck my bottle in the air and got ready to drop back. Most of my team mates had the same idea so Molly came to our rescue and dropped back to the car. As she did this though the pace started to ramp up and the bunch lined out. We heard later that as she was back at the car putting bottles into her jersey Phil had shouted don't take any more! She glanced up and saw a gap had opened up to the next car as the pace had gone up. Thankfully though she made it back to the bunch weighed down with all the spare bottles, thanks Molly!!

A break had gone up the road and we were getting time checks from the motorbike. As we neared the circuit we picked up some of the breakaway, which left one lone rider. She was to hold on to her lead to take the win with 11 seconds on the bunch sprint for second. The finishing circuit rode a bit like a crit and the pace for the first few laps was pretty hard! There was an intermediate sprint with 3 laps to go, after which it settled down a bit. Coming into the last lap, the heat had finally started to really bite and having missed the last opportunity to feed (you're not allowed to feed within the last 20km), I was down to rationing the last few drops of water. There was a stretch where it was quite windy and when gaps opened up I just didn't have the legs to close it. Hayley (my Velosport-Pasta Montegrappa team mate) and I ride in together, finishing just over a minute down on the leader. I was pretty gutted not to have had the legs to stay with the bunch to the end but on reflection this was a big improvement to last year where I only managed to stay with the bunch once! The whole team all rode really well and survived the heat, albeit with varying degrees of dehydration!!

Stage 2 and it was a big relief that it was the individual TT day. Quite short at 11km, we did a recce of the course after lunch. It wasn't too technical with nice long stretches where you could really put the power down. I sound a bit like a tester, hmm not really my strong point but gave it full effort regardless! I think it's a year since I'd last ridden with TT bars (it was this race last year in fact) so the position felt a bit alien! Overall I guess I was happy enough with how I did and really happy for a fellow Brit, Sarah Storey, to take the win! Chapeau Sarah, awesome ride!!

Onto today and Stage 3, 126km RR. The race rolls out from our accommodation so we've had the luxury of a pretty chilled out morning, before lunch and race start at 2pm. 

Until next time au revoir,

Jools.