Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Le Triptyque des Monts et Châteaux

Another race report coming from the U23 National Team over here in Belgium. Well, nothing good to say about the first stage. Rabobank U23 D3 is very strong. They man handled the race. We all missed a split that put us out of the GC.

The next day was 8.5k TT in the morning with a 120k road stage in the afternoon. Crane went well in the TT with 11th place. I rode the TT conservatively because I was already three and half minutes down on 40 riders. With my tt bike and complete aero set up, my SRM still showed an average power of 400 watts for 11 minutes 18 seconds. That put me 53rd. Lars Boom from Rabobank won the time trial with a time of 10 minutes 2 seconds. Just think about that power.In the afternoon stage, I crashed on the circuits and had to ride the last 30k in the wind by myself on my spare bike. That sucked. Devine did a good job finishing 11th place.

On the last day, Rabobank put it in the gutter 60k in and shattered the race. Devine was the only guy to make it in the front. Crane, Deeny and myself were in the third group that was pulled by the 100k mark. I was exhausted. Once again, Devine had a great day at the front and salvaged the national teams weekend by finishing 15th.

More to come this weekend, when we hit up Gaverstreek 2.12 stage race.

2 comments:

Michael said...

Murph,

You're looking good. Haven't seen your pic in Bicycling yet but it's gotten a lot of notice over here. Jed and the boys have got it rolling pretty well, unfortunately David went down hard last weekend. If you haven't heard, he's out with a collarbone for awhile. See you soon. MJ

Anonymous said...

Hey John: I even showed your pix in Bicycling to the guys installing the water heater! They said, "Yeah, that's great." regards, Dad