Tour Deux Sevres & Tour De Cruese

Hi every body finally got back to a computer,
Tour Deux Sevres was the last race with the NZ track squad so everyone was in fine form being the lastr race.
To start the journey we had a 7hour drive down from Teilt-winge to where the race was north of Bordeux, so after sitting in the car for most of the day we had a team presentation followed by settling into the race accomodation at a school.
1st Stage for me ended up being a disaster losing 25min as when i zent back to get some fluid for everyone a team decided to put it in the guter which had me left out in the convoy which I ended up getting dropped from. How ever Hayden Roulston had a good race winning the stage and taking Yellow and the rest of the team finished in the main bunch.
2nd Stage was more bad luck once again went back to the car to get some bottles and ended up braking a spoke in my front wheel, Which i had to do another wheel change and ended up wasting heaps of energy chasing back on then ended up getting dropped with Wes and Jessie and ending up missing time cut by 54sec so that was a bummer. To say the least we did some solid riding on the front for Rolly to try hold the break from going out to much.
I was out of the tour so had a rest day, while Sam and Marc Ryan did as much suffering as possible to keep Rolly in good nick for the finish then the last day of the tour I went for 100k easy ride in the morning on the afternoons stage. The TT in the morning was 16k and Hayden extended his lead winning it by 20secs which was good then the afternoons stage for them was all about controlling the race not letting anything get to far away, which they did a superb job all finishing in the bunch with Hayden winning the Tour. Then we had some more driving we first had to drive to Bordeux to drop off all the track squad and gear before making the 4 1/2 hour drive down to Limoux to say the least it wasnt a very early night.

Now in Limoux went for a 2hour easy ride with a few sprints.
The next day was a 6hour drive up north to Tour De Cruese which had a 25k teams time trial that night which we rode on standard rode bikes and ended up doing a resonble time considering finshing 15th team then the next day was a 156k stage that was quite hilly i ended up finishing in the second bunch around 40th with Matt Sillars, Mike Torkler end up finishing in the main bunch ahead of us. This was then followed by a long drive back to Limoux.

Coming to the end with the trackies

1st of July it was a cracker of a day real nice and hot, so i got on my bike and went for a long ride and caught up with Tom David before he heads to Junior Worlds.
2nd went for easy 2hour ride with Karl and then that afternnon Jessie, Marc, Brei, Sam, Pete and me all caught the train from Arschot into Antwerppe which is probably the biggest shopping city in belg so went and got myself some new jandals and had dinner which was pretty good, the train on the way back to Arscot took 2 hours and it only should of taken 45min as there was problems withthe railroad barriers so all the trains had to go slow so we ended up getting back at around 10.30pm not 9pm when we were thinking we would be back.
3rd did a 3hour ride with 2hours in the middle being a time trial which hurt a bit.
4th went for an easy ride with the guys.
5th Malle Kermesse/race this was 130k 13laps of 10k up by Gent. Marc Ryan ended up winning, i finished in 25th, sam 33rd and all the others had a solid ride as well. It was quite a hard race as it was wet and was a rather technical circuit with lots of turns which ment it was slippery while wet.
6th Rest Day just chilled out in Tielt did some study
7th was supposed to have done 5min efforts today but legs were to stuffed from the weekend and so i just cruised for a couple of hours.
8th Just went for an easy ride tried to dodge the rain but failed and ended up get one down pour drench me so that was nice. Made a Cake to celebrate Jessie's birthday with the others.
So the end of being with the track guys is coming up, with the last tour with them starting on Friday in the region about 2hours north of Bordeux. We are driving there on thursday as is about a seven hour drive then once the tour finishes im joining the rest of the U23 guys in Limoux which is another long drive. Going to miss being with the Team Pursuiters but on the other hand looking forward to the better roads/weather of Limoux.

Later
Chris