As I speak, I am currently sitting in a caravan park in France after officially finishing my season in Euro, and not in the way I would have hoped. But before I get to that, I have some unfinished business to write about with the Holland Ladies Tour and my last race with the SwABOLadies.
Coming to France I made the rookie mistake of leaving my computer back at the Australian base in Italy and am borrowing a teammates computer to write! I have already written Day 1 of HLT on my own computer, and so to save myself the pain of rewriting it, I'm going to put it up when I get my computer back on Monday :) so in the meantime here is my write up from Day 2 of Holland Ladies Tour
Holland Ladies Tour Day 2
Day 2 of the Tour and after yesterday’s performance, I knew I had to stay in the bunch at all costs as I didn’t want a repeat of yesterday’s events - a 90km TT against me and a peloton of about 150 riders.
Right from the word ‘GO’, the pace was on again and girls were scrambling for position on the rough and narrow roads. The field at Holland Ladies Tour is no doubt by far the biggest field of girls I’ve ever raced against and the prospect of riding in such a large bunch proved daunting to most of the riders. With so many nervous riders jostling for position, the normal ‘ebbs and flows’ of the bunch were wild and untammed and the peloton was described as restless and dodgy by many of the elite riders.
I was confident with my positioning during the early stages of the race until I took what I thought was the perfect opportunity to take a sip from my bottle.
Unfortunately for me, just as I raised my bottle to my mouth to savor some much needed fluid, the peloton slowed suddenly and the rider in front of me panicked, slamming on the brakes and sending me straight into her back wheel and onto the ground. It was one of those crashes which seem to happen in slow motion, you feel yourself falling and you know there is nothing you can do about it except to accept the fact that you’re about to eat dirt and try and brace yourself to minimize the damage.
Luckily for me, I wasn’t badly hurt, I just lost half my skin in what I’m claiming was a ‘fight with a bear’ instead of telling them the relatively unexciting story that was my crash. I grabbed my bike and after sorting it out which took a bit too much time, set out in pursuit of the peloton – again. Blood was pouring down my leg and the burn on my arm was stinging as the wind was blowing hard against it. I went to jump on the back of my team car to get a hand back up to the bunch when the Commissaires of the race decided they didn’t want me to and so my team car left me, with 100km to go, solo. I chased for about 20min when my team car reappeared and apparently after harsh words with the Commissaires, they were now allowed to try and motor pace me back up to the group which was probably already half way to Germany by then. I tried my hardest to stick on the car but when we hit a rough cobbled section, no amount of screaming or yelling could tell my body to shut up and I felt that my only option was to get in the car because at that rate, I was barely going to make it to the finish, let alone in time cut.
My number 1 rule I abide by in my cycling is to ‘Never Give Up’ and today I broke it, which is no easy thing to do. I obviously had the choice to keep going but I believe that I made the most sensible one. I jumped in the team car then got panned off to the ambulance to get my wounds cleaned and some painkillers then finally left in the Broom Wagon left to my own devices and ponder what really was a disastrous and very disappointing tour for me.
That night, I didn’t sleep a wink as my arm felt like someone was constantly ironing it and I didn’t have any painkillers to trick my body into thinking that everything was OK…The next couple of days were spent hanging around the hotel, trying to tell myself that I didn’t need to eat as if I was still racing a Tour (Although I was thankful that I didn’t have to gorge myself on MORE pasta) and then I got a very pleasant surprise… but that’ll have to wait until my next post :)
Until then
Take care
xx
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