Ronde de Porhoet - 18th June 2006

Well tomorrow bought my two nemeses, Mr Vent Lateral and his good mate Mr Gutter. 122km with 72km en ligne followed by ten laps of 5km, mostly flat or false flats, 30deg, 120 starters. About twelve English-speakers having a good yarn before the start too.

Maybe a bit too relaxed before the start, more than 5km warm-up might have been clever as what my really tired legs didn’t need was the first 10km on mostly uphill false flats with a decent crosswind, and the race really going!! In serious need of the left-hander into the headwind, we eventually got there with the race in shreds.

James Greg and I were really riding as a team, pinned down the back, and Gilles waiting for us a little further behind … so it was time to start putting the race back together. A few minutes later there were ten up the road, another twelve or so trying to go across and we had got as far as group number three, along with about fifty other people, where we found Matthieu. Didn’t find Herman though, he was off doing his thing up the road.

Personally I couldn’t seem to put the power down and knew it wasn’t gonna be a good day. Sure enough back into the cross-wind and in the gutter just out of the echelon, panic, sprint up into the echelon but not for long and end up flying backwards, luckily we come to a town and a chance to recover a bit, followed by a forest – mint!! Like forests, no crosswind!!

Anyways the recover, suffer, recover, suffer scenario was repeated enough times for the suffer bit to be beating the pants off the recover bit. Got to the finish circuit OTA and went for a bit of a lie-down. Ten minutes later and there are five of us there, all looking a bit sheepish and really hoping that Herman, who is by now in the front group of five, can save our bacon. Most of the English-speaking mafia also to be found in the vicinity of the hot-dog stand – not the best of days then.

More podium action for Mr Herman who winds up 3rd (no whimpering “I raced last night” excuses then), DS Niko turns up at the finish and doesn’t know whether to be happy with a 3rd or slightly less happy with five DNFs … fortunately he’s seen in the paper that Greg and I were 8th and 14th last night, but not that there were only 29 starters – so all is good!!

So what will today bring?? Well I may get out of bed if it stops raining but can’t see it really, Operation Recuperation before its back into the final week of big training. On the other hand, coffee and pancakes are calling …