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| A guest ride by Cadel Evans - what an absolute highlight!! |
WOW! Day 2 was a massive honour to ride with cycling royalty - Australia's only Tour de France winner, Cadel Evans. It was an absolute highlight of my cycling career and an opportunity to get the smallest of insights into the pro-world and their training regime. Cadel is just about to finish his off-season and start the training proper for his last 15 weeks as a professional. His next race is the Australian National title, which despite his palmares and a World Championship under his belt, the National title has eluded him. As he said, it's a pretty tough ask when you are up against 15 GreenEdge riders!
Team Bravien's, Andrew Zietara (AZ), sent an email to Cadel Evans’ manager about 2 months ago to see if there was any chance of him joining us for part of the ride. Cadel lives near Geelong and he is almost always back from Europe at this time of the year. His availability was confirmed only 2 nights ago and the excitement was palpable amongst the group as word spread. It gave me the chance to throw the book above into my bag before leaving home. It's the same book I took to the Tour de France last year, and to Tour Down Under this year with not even a remote look in to have Cadel sign it. So after carrying this book around the planet his response was, "I don't know why you didn't just come down to Geelong"! Well - here we are!!
He was an absolute gentleman and very generous with his time, handling the minor mobbing with aplomb, showing true patience as things were brought forward for his signing, and the obligatory selfies were shot.
We left Geelong around 8.30am, heading out as one group with Cadel on the front so everybody could meet him as they rolled through. He rode with us for about 30km, chatting to everyone as if it was the most normal thing to do. The smiles on people’s faces as they rolled back was one of the highlights of the day.
And then, when he'd had enough, he said his goodbyes, wished us all the best and headed home with the wind at his back to clean the house!
And for us, it was time to break into groups and face the full block headwind all day for our remaining 130k. After yesterday's warm and sunny day, it was cool, cloudy and looking threatening. Our group fairly quickly moved into a rolling pace line to get things moving and we managed a reasonable pace for the next 2 hours.
It was when we rolled into Colac that we heard about the crash in group 2. Buffeting winds, inexperience in bunch riding and some fatigue were all big contributors...but luckily no one was seriously hurt and only one wheel was destroyed. (It got fixed the following morning).
By pure fluke we managed to pick the best bakery in town, run by some lovely Afghan people who had some spectacular pastries and great coffee. I can highly recommend the apple turn overs and the smartie cookies (a Friday morning family favourite from Fyshwick markets!).
It's really important to eat quite a bit when you're doing the distances we are - 165k today. We refuel on the go eating muesli bars, bananas, jam and cheese sandwiches and plenty of water. Most of this is carried in your jersey pockets and it's pretty easy (with a bit of practice) to reach into your back pocket and grab a bite to eat. As a reminder, I have an alarm (single beep) set on my Garmin GPS bike computer every 20 minutes. If you don't eat something at least every 20-30 mins in a 4-5 hour ride, you will run out of energy and hit the wall - or in cycling terms "bonk".
Basically, even with all the will power in the world, once your body has run out of available energy stores, you're stuffed and the pedals turn no more. You can generally feel something like this coming on and that's when you smash an emergency energy gel, which is pretty much a massive sugar hit and sometimes contains caffeine too. It will get you through a rough patch, but it won't save you if there's still 50km+ to go.
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| The boys feeding on the go. |
It was only in the last 15k before Port Campbell that we got to see glimpses of the coastline...and tomorrow we shall ride the Great Ocean road. See the ride here!
Once we got in, it was quick showers, relax, EAT to refuel for tomorrow, clean the bikes, wash the riding kit, swap photos and tell stories about how well you rode and how much it didn't hurt and how hard the wind blew. Then SLEEP!
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