So a light breakfast, all kit and bike prepared..ready to go. 8:30am and the team car and team mates arrived at the house. It was pretty cold out so layered up we set off to ride to the start, 10km or so away in a town called Kervignac. With the team cars following us we were able to get a bit of motorpacing to open the legs up and prepare us for the mornings stage.
Arriving, and again all the teams present as was the huge podium, banners and organisation. Signed on I headed off for a warm up of around 30 minutes.
Now The French are not renowned for their love of timetrialling and unfortunately my team fully embraced this! The plan was to just ride 80% and save as much as possible for the final, afternoons stage. So any hopes of a good GC were forgotten and to be honest it was going to be hard to compete anyway with 90% of the teams fully aeroed up on TT bikes.
With no turbo trainer in France I set about doing a few efforts on the ajoining roads.
So 9:27am we lined up ready for the off. Normal road bikes, a rider less than most of the other teams, after losing Yoann yesterday, and no practise of a team timetrial...this was to be interesting.
Off we went and my team mate Pascal set off like a scolded cat. A relatively flat 20.5km TT with a few drags and a block headwind throughout! So getting into it we were rolling through yet I could tell we weren't going well. Compared to the day before my legs felt wooden and other than Pascal, my other team mates legs werent much better.
A few kilometres in and one of my team mates started missing turns. So down to 4 riders doing through and not really knowing where I was going it was a case of just get to the finish! So hitting the finish I can safely say it was one of the worst TT's I've ever ridden!
Not surprisingly we were smashed by Sojasun. The shock was we were smashed by 3 minutes. Sojasun, fully aeroed up and clearly flying did it with a storming ride, considering the headwind, in 24 minutes for the 20.5km.
Disappointing for us, but to be honest what can be expected, no aero aids, no practise and little motivation.
Luckily though in France the three minutes we lost is actually not reflected in the GC! It seems that they work out the GC not based on the TT times but on where the team placed in the stage.
So Sojasun won, then UC Cholet were second, so were put 5 secs back, next team, UC Nantes Atlantique were 3rd so were put 10 secs back and so on and so on. So basically we were 18th team...but seemed to be put just over a minute back so to be honest was a bit confused but just happy we weren't 3 minutes down on GC!
So a good warm down round the afternoon's finishing circuit, changed and headed to the local supermarket! Why? Well this is where lunch was put on. A good lunch it was too of pasta, vegetables, rolls and fruit. Ready and fuelled up for the 2:15pm start of the final stage in the afternoon. I knew I had just one more chance to get stuck in and couldn't wait to get going!
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