‘Surtout pas de coups suicidaires.’

‘Surtout pas de coups suicidaires.’ (Especially no suicide breaks) Directeur Sportif Regis Auclair’s last words at the pre-race briefing at Les Boucles du Sud Ardèche on Saturday. I adhered to this sage piece of advice for the grand total of about three kilometres when I suddenly found myself with a rider from Etupes rapidly gaining time on an apparently disinterested bunch. Another two riders joined us and the gap hovered around thirty seconds for a time before the peleton really did sit up and the stage was set for a very long day out front. ‘Ah well,’ I thought to myself, ‘Just have to try and go for the King of the Mountains.’ I knew staying away to the finish would be a very tall order with teams like Agritubel behind ready to reel us in when the fancy took them. It wouldn’t be a complete waste of a foray because at least I’d be getting my name out there.

I had good legs and comfortably won the first two hill primes and by this time we had around eighty kilometres covered. We then came onto a long flat straight road with a headwind and we were down to three riders, the rider from Etupes having exploded on the last hill. This was when I noticed my legs beginning to tire not least because Grammaire (a rider from Dijon) was capable of riding about 3km/h quicker than me every time he took a turn on the front. By the time we hit the third climb he comfortably out-sprinted me at the top and I think it was here he realised I was on the rack. When we reached the infamous Roché de Sampzon for the first of three ascensions (a climb I was familiar with when this race was a French cup round the previous year) Grammaire didn’t waste any time in making life very unpleasant. I managed to follow for about five hundred metres when my legs gave in and I watched my ambitions of winning the KoM disappear up round the fearsomely steep hairpin bends. There was little point in insisting now and I sat up and waited for the bunch which by now was splintering under the impetuous of Nicolas Jalabert. I clung on for a while to the front group but cracked as soon as we started the next climb, this scenario repeated itself in every group until 20km from the finish I was by myself and seeing stars. As I went through the feed zone for the last time I called it a day. Still, the day’s efforts had finally earned me my own page on velofotopro.com so I was quite pleased with that.

http://www.velofotopro.com/coureur;1059;1;SMITH-David.html

As soon as the race was over and the van packed we were back on the autoroute and on our way to the Souvenir Jean Masse in Marseille. On arriving at our hotel I was slightly concerned when I noticed how full the restaurant was and sure enough the staff there had royally messed up and we didn’t eat until 10pm! Needless to say this meant no massage and some serious fatigue so I wasn’t exactly feeling too sprightly at the start the following morning. This was unfortunate because a break of seventeen went after 200metres, I have to say I’ve never seen anything like it! The only rider from the team in the move was Rémi who managed to do about three-quarters of the race out front before blowing his lights. My legs felt like they weighed a ton all day and only by dosing my efforts wisely did I managed to make it into a group that finished 2 minutes down on the winner. 37^th, not exactly spectacular but given I was paying dearly for the efforts of the previous I was pleasantly surprised to find I was actually capable of making it to the finish at all. The only other finisher from the team was Jean-Francis and the consensus was most of us were still feeling the huge overload from training camp (which included four races and three BIG training days in a week).

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The baptism of fire continues on Friday when I line up for Les 3 Jours de Vaucluse, a UCI 2.2 which if all goes well will mean I’ll have done 10 days racing before we’re even into March! The program in March is a bit lighter so I’ll be packing in some proper training then and will hopefully start to feel the benefits of all this hard work and get some big results!

The photo is of this year’s team bike!

À bientôt.