Ever been to France? I have been maybe even to much for my own good. I think France is one of those countries you either love or hate and having done almost 6 months worth of projects over here I am really leaning towards the latter. After 5 days of racing here at the Tour of L’Avenir, the U23 version of the Tour de France, its been nothing but crosswinds and crashes and I am actually looking forward to hitting the hard climbing days in the Massif Central over the next 4 stages. There is no doubt that these are going to be some of the hardest days of racing I’ve done but at least then when the guy in front of me blows if much easier to close the gap then when its going 60kph in the crosswind with a train of orange Rabobank boys going like it’s the last 200m of a race instead of the 165km still to go. The country side of northern France just seems so desolate, its not really forested, not really cultivated, so spread apart and provokes a lonely isolated feeling. Usually I really don’t mind living in the country and actually prefer it to city life but here it’s just to much, I need internet. When you on the road during a big tour all you do is eat, sleep, bike, repeat. You are always trying to get the maximum amount of recovery so there is no walking around town or the hotel even, the only walking I do is room to massage, room to food, room to van. So with all this feet up time the internet plays a key role to keeping sane, keeping in touch with the outside world. During a stage race you really have no idea what’s going on outside your little bubble that’s the race, your reading material is the race bible, profiles, results and the topic of conversation most of the time is trying to predict what is going to happen the following day, though we’ve learned that here you may as well use the magic 8 ball to try to predict strategies. It really does get to be a bit to much biking and I think that’s another reason I really like to race with my boys at Symmetrics, cycling always seems to be a secondary topic of conversation at the dinner table and especially in the room which I usually share with Dwanyer. For that reason every time I get to call Amber it’s a real treat, where the only real talk of strategy is planning out our activities for when I get back and let me tell you that cant be soon enough, just 4 more stages at this race and couple timbit challenge races at worlds in Germany. Then who knows maybe a quick little vacation might be in order, still strategizing on that one. Ciao
The Young Man

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 11:57 am and is filed under Christian Meier. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.