U6 Cycle Tour
Hey, I'm back home and I'm alive. My
first experience in stage was a nice one – well mostly. Now that
I'm home tired and caught a bit of a cold I can sum the trip up stage
by stage.
Prologue
It was 3.4k ride with a hill to finish
it up. I had absolutely no idea how to ride the hill, so I ended up
sparing power for the misery of a hill climb and figured 200m before
the finish line that I had plenty left in the tank. The ride was not
a bad one, yet I was tad disgusted with my tactics. I finished 18th
and was ready to tackle the coming challenges.
Stage 1
I woke up to a hellish rain and summed
the day pretty much up in matter of seconds: 147km + rain + gravel
road is not gonna be such a beautiful day on bike. However, I was
surprised how easily I was able to hang in the bunch and even closer
to the end got into a small breakaway attempt, which at the end went
nowhere. Then the misery began, I lost the nose piece of my glasses
and all the mud, sand and everything went into my eyes and it caused
a temporary blindness for the rest of the evening. An experience I
don't wish have again, and after visiting local hospital I got some
antiobiotics to the scars and bruises in my eyes, which helped. And
oh, at the end of the day I got stuck behind a crash and was dropped.
Such a good stage, ehh?
Stage 2
The longest one of all. It was 171km
including a bit of a finish hill. In the morning, luckily dry and
bright this time, I was yet unsure whether I was in a form to ride or
even to start as my sight was kinda blurred still. We decided to give
a go by hanging in the sun deck (end of peloton) and for my luck the
breakaway of the day went quite quickly away and all the strong teams
had their riders up there. At one part the gap was more than 10 mins
and the peloton speeded up for quite some time getting the gap
somewhere around 5 mins. At that time I still had no struggle, which
I was more than happy with. Then there went some more breakaways up
there and we just rode to the finish hill safely. There I decided to
show up what a trackie without any capabilities can do. Honestly, it
wasn't very much, as many can guess. I tried a long finishing sprint
from somewhere around 600m away and died during the last 100m totally
just trying to avoid causing any crashes.
Stage 3
My beloved criterium was on at
Wednesday. Not much to say about it. I quite don't like it and
hanging at the back in criteriums is a suicidal move in such race,
but it is exactly what I did. I could hang in there for some time but
then dropped back down to wait the bunch catch a lap. Yet somewhere
in the middle my left crank got stucked, which certainly didn't help.
I could say, that a top three would have been realistic without the
crank issue – but it would be a lie and a bad one. I commited a
suicide criterium-wise and got caught by that.
Stage 4
Hillyish and shortish road stage (75km)
consisting of ten laps with a finishing hill. Tiredness started to
feel and again I decided to hang at the back, which worked fine until
last lap when the group was blown in the crosswinds. I decided to
roll home easily and lost some time. I wouldn't like to mention the
weather, but it wasn't on our side and now I'm sick.
Stage 5
Time trial with tired legs is always
funny. We had an ambitious plan, which worked up to 10km mark, but
the time trial still included four more kilometers so I died quite
spectacularly. I got my best individual stage placing however and in
terms of time differences it wasn't so bad afterall.
Good trip except the illnesses I got.
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