Route De France 8 day stage race - 49th GC

 Prologue - 13th place

 The girls and I road around the Prologue course in the morning.  Of course we managed to get ourselves lost on our return back to the hotel which was supposed to be a 2k ride which turned into 5k longer!  The course was a good, not too technical.    After seeing Nicole Win the Olympic road race today I was really fired up for the Prologue and was eager to get going!    My aggressive approach helped me a lot and I got my best result ever in a prologue coming in 13th place just 13 seconds behind Ina Teutenberg who won today and is in the Yellow.  Sophie Creux had a great ride coming in 12th 1 second ahead of me.

Stage 1 - Dijon

After a lovely sunny day yesterday it was of course raining today.  It was a flat course starting and finishing in Dijon.   I was feeling very good but planned to hold myself back for some of the later stages of the Tour as I usually give too much in the early stages and fade badly in the last few days so I wanted to try and different approach in this stage race especially as I knew I had good form. 

         Today's stage put an end to my good form unfortunately a big crash at about 45k saw me somersaulting in the air crashing heavily onto my hips and head.  I was sure I had broken my hip when I stood up as I usually just jump back onto my bike of I go but not this time I was screaming in pain! After a few more screams I was helped back onto my bike and got back into the bunch only to find my brakes were touching my wheel.  I tried to move them out but they were jammed so I had to stop again and get a wheel change!  I had to chase hard again and I got a time penalty for outside assistance to get back into the Peleton!  All in all a bad day!  I stopped at the ambulance as soon as I finished as I could not walk off my bike and was in a lot of Pain.     I saw the doc and he said nothing was broken but badly bruised and looking at my helmet which was smashed I could taken a lot of impact on the back of the head which would explain my headaches for the next 5 days!

       Anyway the next 6 days were just about surviving the race as I felt absolutely knackered after the crash and had no energy or strength left so I sat in and just got myself to the finish line each day.   It was a strange feeling coming into a race with great form then the next day feeling like a weakling but I was glad I got through it.

  Sophie Creux had a great tour and was lying top 10 overall on GC until the TT stage when she lost about 4 mins to Luise Keller of Columbia who was leading the tour now with 2 minutes in hand to second place Rosane Kirch of Fanini Rox.  Sophie finished in19th place overall.

Beatrice came 3rd on stage 5 after a break of 10 got away with Teutenberg wining  ahead of her team mate Kimberly Anderson.

      Overall GC: 1st Luise Keller of Columbia, 2nd Rosane Kirch of Fanini Rox, 3rd Edwige Pitel of  La Carroz, 19th Sophie Creux, 36th Beatrice Thomas, 39th Joelle, 49th Leda,  53rd Audrey, 62nd Estelle.

We are heading to the Vienne region of France now.  Time to rest before our next race which the Coupe De France in Loudon.  This is a big race for our team as we are leading the French cup team classification and Christine is leading the U23 race.

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