Haute Route Alps, Stage 2. Epic Demoralisation.

Haute Route Alps, Stage 2.

The most demoralising day I can remember....

I am not sure I wanted to write this entry, yesterday I ran out of time but this morning I have a little bit of chill time so thought I had better get it done.

People often say you have “bad legs” in cycling, I can’t say I have really witnessed this for myself. Now I can say I have, bad days for me are usually when I have had a bad descent or found myself on my own in a valley or perhaps caught in rain with a puncture. So yesterday was e huge punch in the face in regards to shock, after training really well for the last couple of months I was feeling I would do my usual of being well beaten by the top guys in stage 1 then steadily get stronger as other guys get fatigued.

Black Monday as i feel I will call it was a truly horrific experience on the bike. I have always been able to produce the same power day in day out, not yesterday. I have also experienced bonking once or twice where you get a few hours into a ride and have not eaten enough calories and your body has nothing left to move the bike. It is a terrible feeling, yesterday I had this feeling before we had even raced 10 minutes. Legs were doing as much as they could and power is so far down on what I knew I could produce.

This feeling and the knowledge we had a pretty long day of climbing almost immediately had mentally beaten me, usually I can find reasons to ride through misery. This day there was no mental strength, zero, nout, “square root of F all” (as the Ozzy guy had said to us after the stage).

In addition to the empty legs I also had a huge bout of saddle sore that I had also never experienced before. I had wore Andrea’s Punto Tours kit on stage 1 as they asked us to and I felt I should as he had been so good to me since meeting him last year. This was a huge mistake, as the saddle sore came from these new/different shorts. Usually you can tolerate saddle sore ok if you as suffering in a good way, but yesterday was a new type of suffering, a bad suffering where I was getting nothing positive from it so the saddle sore was at the front of my mind and really getting me down. As I sit here the morning after it is even worse and very painful sitting and even walking about. Not a lot we can do about it, just get on with it and ride out the saddle more often.

I can’t really write much about the stage itself, it went by with me staring down at the tarmac mostly, I did however enjoy the Bonette descent (which I have done several times before), the clouds had cleared a little and the views were as usual incredible! You do forget how stunning the Mercantour region really is!

The final bit of misery we were saved from by our Punto Tour guys! The time was off from the top of the Col d’Izoard, and our guys drove us down to the finish village. I LOT of poor sod’s, maybe 90% of the field had to endure the descent and I saw a few people carted off to the Emergency centre after this horrendous experience. We saw many people shaking and weaving across the road. I really think there should have been buses to take people down.

Well, that day is now over (I’m not regilious, but THANK GOD)! Today luckily is the Time Trial, a day off of sorts although 12k of near on 9%, not that much of a day off. We shall see how that goes and hopefully I feel it is worth starting stage 4 and not quitting the race.

Hopefully that has cheered some people up, ;-) thanks for reading!