The hardest thing about today's stage was what we've endured in the last three days. Sunday we were up at 5:30AM to prepare for the Commerce Bank Philadelphia classic. That one was tough with the distance, heat and quality field. Immediately after the race we were on the road. We drove 5hr  after a 6.5 hr race. We slept in a good hotel in Albany, were up at 7AM and out of Albany by 8AM. We rolled into St. George at 4PM, a solid 8 more hours of driving. It was rush rush rush from the time we arrived to the time we were in bed at about 11PM.

Then today's start was early… 9:30. So, we were up at 6AM, or 5:30AM if you were staff.

Next a freaky thing happened, heat in Beauce. We never would have expected it to be so hot here today. It was a cake-walk compared to Philly however. In fact, maybe we faired better today after getting so heat acclimated in Philly?  Also unexpected today, was how tempered the start was. Its not like all the teams here did the long haul from Philly to Quebec… but we didn't mind. Things ramped up over the first KOM. Then got active into the first sprint. Next we had to neutralize a dangerous move of 9 riders- in which we only had 1. Heading into the second KOM a 'safe' move got away and the bigger teams were content to let that roll a bit.

With about 40km to go the break still had 6 minutes and after a little discussion on the team radio and with some other teams we decided to start to ride a containment tempo. We were riding Pinner, Randell, Erker and Zach. Sparkese came in along with TT1 and a bit from Amore e Vita. We knew the final 15km would really be damaging today. We saw this course in 2006 when the team had a mass blow out on this exact finish. We knew it would be hard. We sat Christian and Cam in reserve with Svein for the final 15kms.

When the finish rollers came, Randers and Zach sat up. Their job was done. The boys rode fantastic in the final. We didn't have to ride too much because Jake is such a stud he was still rolling the front. The field exploded. Colex from Tecos was coming back in huge time chunks with each passing roller. But we wanted the Tecos rider to win the stage. We didn't want to be in a position to be expected to defend this early. So it was perfect for us. Colex won the stage but only with a handful of seconds over an elite front group with Svein, Cam and Christian all safely in it. Next we had Jake roll in just about 30-40 seconds behind Svein's group.

So now we have 3 players in the mix — the exact ones we wanted to be in there. And another not far out of it, with Jake. That gives us a lot of strategic options coming into the next couple of days, and not a lot of responsibility to take at this point in the race. Perfect is how we are describing stage one.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Beauce, Symmetrics Pro Cycling Team, The Team. 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.