Germany with British cycling

We started the trip on Monday morning heading towards the Channel crossing. Unfortunately there was a crash on the motorway so we got delayed by a couple of hours. But when we eventually got past we where swiftly through the tunnel and into France where we stopped at a hotel for the night and then continued on a journey to Germany in the morning. It was a full day of travelling, and once we got there, we got settled and went to bed. The next morning the first thing that hit me was the heat. It was 30 degrees outside which made it hard as I have not been used to this coming from uk weather so this took a few days to settle into. But luckily our rooms were in the basement so they were cooler than everyone else’s. This was vital as it meant that we could get a good night sleep. The next day it was the first road  stage of Saarland. It was tough in the heat but there was showers every so often so it was quite pleasant, as you get the drizzle from the roads spraying up onto you to cool you down.

Around 30 riders went up the road in the race and I managed to jump off the front in the final stages. I managed to have a handful of seconds on the bunch but the leaders had over two minutes so it was not the way that I wanted to start the race. The second day was a hard day, but nothing drastic happened. I came off that pretty much with the same time on GC. By the third stage, the legs were slightly fatigued going into it, but this was to be expected. It was going well until I came down in a crash with about 1 1/2 laps to go and had to swap bikes, but unfortunately my back brake on then second bike was rubbing, so the amount of power that I was putting down did not correlate to the speed that I was going as I was losing a lot of it due to the rubbing. I rolled over the line about five minutes down in a small bunch. Then we had the TT in the afternoon on a airport runway. I knew going to the TT the legs were fatigued and I did about 50 W lower than I would’ve liked to have done. Then on the final day, the legs came back and I was in a good physical position to get a good result, but unfortunately there was a major crash in the 2nd to last lap that meant we had a 10km neutral to the finish because there was an air ambulance on the course. This was very unfortunate but nothing comes above the health of riders so this was definitely the right decision. It was not the result I was looking to get in Saarland. By any stretch but it was a great race that I will look back on with great fondness.