Re-finding Those Racing Legs
David Smith | Friday 18th July, 2008
David Smith |   |
Chasing down the break at Charvieu
Don't be decieved by the closed mouth and expressionless face, my heart rate is 'blocked' at 190bpm!
That’s me been back in
Anyway the chance to re-find my racing legs didn’t take long at all with the GP du Charvieu on the 14th July, Bastille Day. Often this race clashes with a few other events and only has a field of around 100 riders but this year there was nothing else on so more or less all the teams in the southern half of France turned up making for a 180 man start. The circuit is largely urban, 8.4km long without any difficulties in particular except from the ‘road furniture’ which always makes life interesting. It was also really windy. I’ve done some fast races in my time out here but this one seemed ridiculous, the bunch was more or less in a permanent line-out for 3 hours with the cycle computer usually displaying between 50 and 60km/h. The team missed a really dangerous 8 man break mid-race that included Gatis Smukulis and Guilluame Bonnafond, there was no way we could afford give them too much leeway so the whole team went to the front and drove it to bring back the 40second advantage. At first there were only three of us riding as the others were battling their way up the kilometre long bunch but once we got organised it only took us around a lap and a half to bring them back. I was pretty spent after that, the violent effort sure was a shock to the system and I could only really hang on after that! Three laps or so from the finish another eight man move went, this turned out to be the winner but fortunately this time we had Wilfried Exertier up front. He’s not much of sprinter so he tried his luck 2km out and nearly made it but got caught by the remainder of the move a few hundred metres from the finish so sadly finished last of the group. I came in in the bunch about twenty seconds down, the average was a whopping 45.5km/h.
I had just one rest day then before the long drive to Guéret for Tour de la Creuse. La Creuse is famous for, wait for it…cows and the fact that it’s the least densely populated départment in the whole of
The race format was particularly strange, the first stage was a 26km team trial and the second a 158km road stage. Last year this had apparently killed the race because the team that won the team time trial had the first six places on GC and therefore just neutralised everything making for a very negative race. There had been a good deal of complaints about this but clearly the organisers weren’t in the slightest bit deterred as they decided to keep the status quo for the 2008 edition. We didn’t really have a team of rouleurs suited to team time trialling but put in a respectable performance finishing 7th of 20 teams largely thanks to Adam and Pawel who were both on a good day. I, on the other hand was on a really, really bad day, my legs felt cooked even during the warm up possibly because of a whole day’s travelling in the van just before and things didn’t get any better for the race proper. I contributed what I could but blew up on a very long false flat drag about 7km from the finish. It was the first time I’d been dropped in a team time trial since I was a junior and it wasn’t exactly fantastic for moral but I tried not to dwell on it too much in the hope the legs would come round for the road stage.
True to form the road race did turn out to be a bit negative, I was really active trying to force a break of some kind but it wasn’t really happening. Every time there was a split it would be ridden down by a rider from the UCI team as they had won the team time trial. Then, irony of ironies about 40km from the finish having missed a bottle at the feed station I went back to the car (the first time I was really out of the first thirty in the bunch all day) to get one and as I was working my way back up through the peloton there was a bit of a split on the climb. The pace didn’t seem too hard at that point so I didn’t panic and went with another rider as he tried to close it. As we came over the top of the climb the gap suddenly went out and the guy I was with seemed a bit on the limit so I sprinted round him only to be greeted by the mother of all headwinds. I realised I couldn’t close it by myself so I waited for the group coming up behind and lo and behold they were all completely sc**wed and I could only watch in despair as the convoy of cars began to overtake us. At this point I realised it was game-over for the day. I really was kicking myself. If there’s one thing I’ve realised in the last month’s racing it’s that the balance between being crafty and waiting for other people to shut gaps for you and being too hesitant really is a fine one. At the moment I think I’m more on the too hesitant side so I’m going to be looking to change that in the next few races. Still, the finish circuit was a lap of Lac de Vessiviere which itself holds a special little place in cycling history as it was here in 1998 that good old Richard Virenque broke down in tears in front of hundreds of journalists claiming he had never knowingly taken any performance enhancing substances. The scenery around here was great so that softened the disappointment a little…
Next on the racing menu is a 1,2,3 race Sunday at Oyonnax followed by GP du Cours la Ville the Sunday after. Cours, otherwise known as Régis Auclair’s ‘World Championships’ as the race goes by his house is always a special occasion as (if it’s humanly possible) he gets twice as stressed out as usual and often finishes the day in tears. Last year Rémi won and Régis is still pretty emotional about it a full 12 months later, a repeat performance could result in a cardiac arrest for sure…Not quite emotional enough though to stump up the 150euro prime he’d hastily offered from his own pocket post victory, I think he very quickly regretted that announcement and Rémi still reminds him about it even now! After that there is Tour d’Alsace, a five day UCI 2.2 which I’m really looking forward to.
