"I EXPECTED THE FIRST WEEK TO BE CRAZY”
I am feeling alright post-Tour. I’m pretty knackered, but it’s nice to have got it done, nice to be finished. However, I’ve got a hard three weeks behind me now. I don’t have any experience of other Tours, I did the Vuelta last year, obviously, and this was another level, really. I expected the first week to be crazy, and it was, but it never really stopped, it never chilled out. Every day that could have been a breakaway saw a big, big fight, and it seemed like pretty much everyone after a week or two was capable of winning a stage, and so they all fought for it. Maybe the Vuelta wasn’t more relaxed, but the level just wasn’t quite as high. Whereas on one day at the Vuelta there were 10 guys going for the win, there are about 50 at the Tour.
The spectacle and everything add to the drama. Once you are into it, it feels a bit like any other race, but then you step back and you realise what you are in. There’s not really much you can do to recover during the race. You have to chill as much as you can, eat as much as you can, drink, and make sure you get plenty of sleep, then wake up and get yourself going again. You have good days and bad days, but a lot of the time it is just mental, it is up to motivation.
I was pretty much fine in terms of the crashes. I was happy to get through the first week unscathed. One small crash, but some of them were pretty scary and I was fortunate to avoid them.
Put it this way, one topic of conversation between me and my room-mate is that in this race’s third week, we’re so tired we’re finding it harder and harder to climb up the team bus steps, let alone anything longer. In the first week we were bounding up the bus stairs barely noticing they were there. Now I’m always counting the number of times I have to go up and down them.
Having to eat food can be a big hassle if you’re exhausted, but actually here it is not so bad. However that’s more due to the team chef being very inventive and keeping the menu varied than my having an appetite. On the other hand, when you’re riding flat out for a month, there’s no getting away from the physical exhaustion you feel every single day. The first couple of hours each stage are the worst. After that your body starts to warm up a bit. I’ve been lucky. No crashes, so no injuries, and that is critical in the third week. But even so your strength is on the limit and any effort ends up being far more costly than you’d imagine it could be.
I can’t compare with other Tours because it’s my first, but all my friends and teammates say this has been a Tour with a lot more to handle than usual. Every day something’s happened. There have been massive crashes, big names pulling out, lots of battles every day, and all at a really fast pace.