Evening from a sunny Czech Republic. Just wanted to send a few words from day one of the Tour de Feminin in Krasna Lipa. It’s been a pretty good one and there are a plenty of smiles in the Rapha camp (I’m riding for a combined team under the Rapha Condor name). We arrived yesterday and by the sounds of it we’ve been lucky in our accommodation. Even our shared room in a boarding school with no curtains is better than the wooden sheds that some other teams are staying in. Plus the food is good, so I’m pretty happy :o)
The first stage didn’t look too daunting on the profile, a hill after 20k, another at 103k and 116k in total. However, I have learnt never to trust the little scribble in the race programme. We’ve just completed something that was much hillier than and other race I’ve done this year and all in boiling hot sunshine.
With 175 riders starting, the peleton was a pretty crazy place to be and the girls are very aggressive over here. You have to ride with your elbows out or you quickly loose your place. The roads were closed though which meant we had a lot of ground to play with, my favourite being the stretch of the motorway which was entirely free of traffic. You’d never get the UK police shutting the M25 for a bunch of bike riders!
The pace was quite changeable with quite a lot of hills that broke it up a bit and other times where there was what seemed like a kilometre worth of single line tracing the road. After one of the primes a couple of attacks went which I tried to go with, the first I was successful but we got sucked back up and the second I succeeded only in dragging the bunch across. Another attack came straight afterwards and I had been brought back into the fray of the bunch and I couldn’t get round the riders. I made a few calculations in my head and realised with 60kms and the biggest climb of the day still to go I would probably be better off sitting in and getting some rest. After about 20kms we caught them so I’d made the right decision.
The countryside around here is gorgeous although I didn’t really get a chance to look at it properly. Our badly translated race programme informed us it is ‘grooved’. There were also a fair few spectators out, especially in the towns. I may have worried one or two of them when I had to traverse through a building at one particularly sketchy corner – it was either that or go on the floor. Another spectating highlight has to be the rather large man who stood up from his plastic picnic chair to give a cheer and then promptly fell over backwards when it collapsed under his weight when he sat back down.
The group was largely together until the last climb which came with 13km to go. It continued for 9km and at first it didn’t seem too bad but it just kept going up and up and up just when I kept thinking it was about to level out. The further the climb went on the more riders I went past until the crest when I realised I was in the top 10, with only 3km to go. Unfortunately, the last stretch was all downhill which isn’t what I’m best at and there are some quite big girls riding out here! I was determined not to let too many people pass me and I came into the finish line in 21st place, 9 seconds down on the leaders. The Rapha team had a great day in the saddle with 4 of us in the front group, Ali Holland in 22nd @ 27 secs, Anna Fischer in 36th @ 37 secs, Corrine Hall 62nd @ 2:22 and Rachel Przybylski 146th @ 21:30.
Stage two tomorrow in scorchio weather once more. Three large loops and two smaller loops with a lot more hills. I’ve eaten loads, the compression tights are on so now all I need to do is fall into bed.
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