Blogs
Tue, 6 Jul 2010
Watching the Tour de France
By Helen Wyman - Horizon Fitness Racing Team
After discovering the Tour de France would come so close to my favorite training region of the Ardennes, the decision as to whether to go watch it or not was pretty much a 'no brainer'. Plus having grown up with a mother who will organise you if you stop for more than 1 millisecond, I felt it was my role to organise a fun day at the race for the girls, and a few boys too.
It was AWESOME (said with the enthusiasm of a Canadian saying the word)! Even though it rained and our training got cut short, it really was a wicked day. I had planned an amazing route on Google with quite a lot of hysteria the night before, giggling to myself as I added every nasty climb I could into my 100km route and then combined this with the timings of the tour caravan and race arrivals so we could easily watch in two places before the race.
Everyone in the house was up before 8am (which in itself was pretty shocking) and we were on the road by half past, with a lot of excitement and possibly a little trepidation from the non mountain lovers, but plenty of banter all the same. My good friend Rachel Mercer and me always get excited by hill training, and ever since we met, have always had a very healthy level of competition between us. Although we don’t always play fair... such as the time I sat on her for 4kms of today’s penultimate climb from the tour stage, before attacking her on the opposite side of the road with 200 metres to go, or like today when she actually put me in the verge so I couldn’t pass her, where she then celebrated no handed over the top of the tour stages last climb to cheers from the crowds.
We arrived on time at Coo and headed straight up our first climb of the day, and after 6 minutes of riding, got to love a good warm up, straight onto the Tour de France route. I actually think someone from the organisation studied my route last night and added it on today’s stage, although luckily the death descent was dry for us, just not for the 150 strong peloton that followed us a few hours later. A couple or maybe 5 hills later, a few looks of despair, and some great hill sprint training/competition, and we were back at the town where Stef had been keeping some seats dry for us in a little café on the course. He had started with us but felt even with his compact chainset, the prospect of a Belgian cappuccino was just too much. Just in case you didn’t know, it’s a black coffee with half a can of squirty cream dumped on top, with a biscuit on the side obviously.
Then the day got really exciting. The publicity caravan always travels the same route as the race a good hour before the riders, throwing out free things to the waiting crowds. You do have to keep remembering it’s not life or death as we scrabble with small children to get the free haribo first, and really small children do deserve the stuff a bit more because we will throw most of it away before we get home. Having said that, amongst us we still bagged 4 polka dot jersey hats, 3 green hands, some haribo, dirty Spanish meat balls, an orange neck warmer, and a pair of maracas.
With the caravan gone it was onto business; there was a small breakaway group with maybe 1 minute over the complete peloton, and they all whizzed past in seconds before we jumped back on the bikes and headed to destination two. Just a 5 minute bike ride away, we found a totally empty slight uphill place to watch, just before the last sprint point on the route, only 25km from the finish of the stage. Pete’s dad texted him to tell him that there had been a lot of really bad crashes on the last descent and the race was completed split up. As bad as this is going to sound, it was amazing to see a million different groups of riders and actually be able to pick out every individual rider as the race was so split from the crashes. As I am so used to seeing the riders on television, they still don’t actually look real when you see them in person; it’s almost like watching it on TV anyway. After cheering all the stragglers on, we sprinted the 500 metres back to the café where the car was parked to catch the finish, which was actually neutralised as a protest from the riders after the dangerous descent.
It was definitely a great day out, and we got some cracking pictures and some aching legs from the great training. For anyone that’s interested, I beat Rachel in the hill sprints competition and Simo won the signpost sprint jersey.
For more information about the Horizon Fitness Racing Team, visit www.onthedrops.com.