You know my least favorite thing about racing at this level,
especially in Spain? It’s that we don’t start until 1pm on many days. Nevermind
that that means the race is in the hottest part of the day, that’s not even
what bothers me most. It’s because I’m an old man that likes to eat early and
go to bed early, and get up with the sun and have breakfast early. No, I don’t
particularly enjoy being awoken by my body clock 2 hours before breakfast and
having dinner at 10pm because our race didn’t even end until nearly 7. I got
into bed at midnight yesterday and slept 15 minutes at a time from 7am until I
finally gave up at 8:30. Like I said, I’m an old man.
Guess what?! Today’s stage was hot! The break got away
fairly quickly, but it took a while for the field to finally stop attacking
behind. Then it became a massive coast-off, as none of the teams with GC riders
wanted to take the front. For the second day, Orica refused to put even one
rider up front even though they led the race. And so the gap continued to grow…and
grow…and grow. It ballooned to nearly 15 minutes before Garmin took over and
set what would be a most uncomfortable pace for the rest of the day.
We had a handful of climbs to contend with before the final
cat 1 finish climb. We were never going extremely fast, but everyone was really
suffering. All the guys were staying busy shuttling bottles to Warren, Lawson,
and me the whole day. The plan was for us to support Warren as long as we could
on the final climb.
The 20 minutes before reaching the base of the climb were
actually really hard, as everyone wanted to get their climber into the base in
the perfect position. I got pinched off from the guys early on, just before we
went single file. We stayed single file for a long time, and I didn’t have the
legs to get back up to them. I wasn’t so far back, but every time somebody sat
up and left a gap, I had to use more energy to close it. The legs I’d been
saving were wasted because of bad positioning.
I did nothing the whole day so that I could help Warren at
the end, but by the time we got there I couldn’t do anything. So I’m a bit
frustrated about that. Thankfully the others got Warren to the base in second
wheel, and he had a great climb to jump into the top-10 on GC.
We’re well into the stage-race vortex now, as we frequently
forget what stage we’re on (another good reason to rip the completed stages out
of the race book). My legs can tell that we’re a week into the race, but our
soigneur just told me that my legs are feeling better each day. I’ll take his
word for it. The upcoming stages will provide some more opportunities for John
to win, so I’m excited to see what we can do.
6 down, 15 to go!
