Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Well, it's a rest day for the Tour riders which is good after yesterday's brutal stage over the Toumalet and up Huatacam. After watching the stage, I'm beginning to wonder if anyone really wants to win this race. The main GC guys all sort of spend the last climb marking each other and not really doing much else which means that the guys a ways back on the GC keep winning the stages. I can understand Evans doing this as he's going to put about two minutes into everyone else on the final time trial so he doesn't have to win anything.

The big loser was Valverde. As I wrote earlier in the week I thought he'd run out of gas before the Tour was over but I honestly didn't expect it to be this week. Maybe he can recover a bit and go for a stage win now that he won't be marked but I think it's all downhill from here on out for him. He takes one more big packet on a climb and I'm thinking he may pull a Moreau and fake an injury or illness to leave the race.

For me today it was another trip on the Pain Train at Tuesday Night Worlds but this time I gave as well as received. The team divided into two groups to do some race tactics work. I'm not sure how much we actually did but my team did some attacking and I put in three hard attacks to see what I could do. My third attack was a great move and I got a really nice gap and it looked like the group might just let me go when our resident former pro, Chad M., decided to bridge up to me and see if we could make something stick. While the group might give me some rope, they weren't going to let him get too much room off the front and they made short work out of our break. Still it was a good effort and I got some practice at giving it a really hard surge and then settling into TT pace. What I need to get to the point of being able to do is being able to put another surge in about two minutes after the first to see if I can't break the elastic. I got dropped on the big climb in the last part of the course but that's not too unusual. I have the power but I'm carrying too much weight to climb well. One of my goals for the coming off-season is to lose a pound a week of weight until I'm down below 150 lbs. That should give me some more punch on the climbs as long as I don't give up any power.

Tomorrow's a medium mountain stage on teh Tour with a big Cat 1 climb so I see a break getting away on the climb and staying away to the end. Cunego is definitely one of the guys who might try something to get away on the climb and Millar might try to form a break early though I think Garmin-Chipotle might start riding to protect VdV's place in the GC. Another person I could see doing something now is Sebastian Lang from the Columbia team. Finally, there are a couple of teams that don't have a lot to show for the Tour so maybe the Basque boys from Euskatel will try to put a guy in the break like Zubeldia. I could see CSC-Saxo send Andy Schlek out as well. So, a group of climbers gets away on the lower slopes and gets a two to three minute advantage over a select group of about 40 riders who don't bring them back.

We'll see what happens.

Thanks for Reading.

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