Tour de la Drome

The big event had finally come around. So early friday morning everything was packed up into the van ready for the long journey into the rhone alpes region. After the 5 hour or so drive we, got straight out of the van kitted up and rode 20km to the start of the 11km TT course then rode that twice with a few efforts thrown in to awaken the legs.

The TT course was pretty decent with a 4km climb. then 1km down and 6km flat.

Stage 1,

Had an amazingly hard profile with the initial climb gaining 1000m in hight. I managed to survive the first climb and the second but was dropped on the final climb and lost the front group, but fortunately for me I crested the top and rode really hard to get back into the convoy and then by the bottom got back into the lead group 20. After this i drove hard to keep the momentum going, this turned out to be not such a great idea because there was still 30km to go which included hard cross wind sections.

It ended up coming to the line in a small bunch kick, i had good positioning just before the final corner then got swamped before the corner so had to do a bit of work on the final straight but managed 2nd so was pretty pleased how the stage played out.

Stage 2, TT

What can i say.

It was a TT it was hard, i was second to last to leave and wanted to lay down a good time to stay high on gc. With no tt bike though it wasnt going to be great. I came in 22nd and was now sitting in 11th on GC.

Stage 3.

Lights out.

Didn't manage to stay with the front bunch. got dropped with 2 kom mountains to go and couldnt regain the pelo, pretty disappointed that i couldn't hold on to my GC position but the climbs where constant and steep and ridden at a decent pace and. All i can say is luckily I packed the 27 otherwise i would have been in trouble.

That is about it,

KH