Most people can recall a humbling moment, that moment that can just suck all the confidence out of you like the Hoover 3000 working over those crumbs in you carpet. That moment, more like moments, is kind of what I’m experiencing right now at the Tour de L’Avenir. Not that I ever thought I was some amazing angel of the mountains who danced up the hills, but on a good day when I’m not suffering from a problem where my left leg gets numb and I seem to loose all power in that leg which has been hampering me since the time trial, I don’t reckon I’m to bad, then we hit the mountains here, where it seems a rider who could normally throw down some solid attacks in north America is doing everything to hang on as these guys drive up the climbs. One on hand it’s not too bad for one day in the mountains with these guys, but the way they seem to just keep going faster every continuing day is what amazes me most. Having made the GC split a few stages ago where we took over six and a half minutes on the field I figured chances weren’t too bad for finishing within the top 10. Well this were the humbling moment comes in, over the last 2 stages numerous riders have been clawing back that deficit with quite some efficiency, in particular one Spanish rider who 2 days in a row has made the long break away stick with full teams like Rabobank and Germany chasing all day. Yesterday being the most impressive of his escapades where he went basically off the gun with a French rider never to be seen again, the impressive part was it was going so hard off the gun that the pack was reduced to half its size within 15km and they just kept pushing up the gap to a max of over four minutes and from all accounts the French rider was sitting on for the finishing circuits, at least the last 30km. Huh. That’s humbling. Another humbling moment was the Russian rider, who usually rides for Tinkoff, who rode the front for about the first 50km on his own, the pack single file behind with a steady stream of riders getting dropped. Again: huh. Richard if you’re reading we definitely need to do something about my training, more intervals or something I don’t know, though riding with more than one legs after the other seems to go lifeless might be a better place to start. So today is the third and what looks like the hardest day in the mountains to come, three cat 1, one cat 2 and two cat3 climbs, don’t know how much more humble I can get but I guess we’ll see today, maybe I’ll be coming home a monk. Oh la la. Ciao
The Young Man

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 4:06 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.