The Tour According to G by Geraint Thomas

Author:Geraint Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2018-10-23T14:42:54+00:00

Chapter Ten

The Alpe

You can feel form on the bike and you can feel form when you get up in the morning too. You don’t dance out of bed but you definitely notice that you’re not completely screwed. After a night’s sleep, you think, I’m refreshed again now. When you start the day, your legs work. The soreness is there but it’s not overwhelming.

That Thursday morning, I didn’t think about the fact that I would be swapping my white and black Sky jersey for a pristine yellow one. I just walked from the bed in my small hotel room to the bathroom and thought, I feel good here. There’s more to come.

When the form isn’t there, then neither is your mood. When you’re tired from training, the grumpiness arrives as you get off your bike and gets worse when you realise you can’t eat what you’d actually like to eat. You get home and crash out on the sofa and want to turn the telly on and not talk to anyone for a couple of hours. When you finally do have food, the sleepiness takes hold, and I turn into my dad after the family Sunday lunch and start snoring in my chair. When I’m doing well in training, I’m more talkative. I’m a nicer person to be around. I’m happy that I’m doing well and the workload isn’t making me so exhausted.

You look too at how your teammates feel. Breakfast was never going to be all laughs and backslapping, not after two tough days in the mountains and with a tougher one to come. Stage 12 was both an Alpine classic and a new twist on an old form of torture: 175.5km from Bourg-Saint-Maurice to Alpe d’Huez, 72 of those kilometres uphill, spiking its way south-west across the most beautifully horrible climbs the organisers could find. Three hors catégorie ascents, first the Col de la Madeleine, 25km long at an average gradient of more than 6%, then the Croix de Fer via its nastiest option, 29km at 5% with a summit at 2,000m, and finally the big daddy of them all – Alpe d’Huez, 13.8km at an average of 8%, each of its 21 hairpins named after a previous Tour stage winner there, every one rammed with fans who had arrived days in advance and barely stopped drinking since. In case we felt in some way bored, there was also the Lacets de Montvernier, a comparative tiddler at 3.4km but still an assault on the legs and lungs at 8%, a ridiculous road that did indeed resemble a pair of shoelaces draped up a mountain and looked as delightful on television as it was painful to ride.

5,000m of height for us to gain. That sort of menu brings a smile to no one’s face over their morning espresso and omelette. It was secretly quite uplifting when Michał Kwiatkowski quietly mentioned that he was tired, that yesterday had been a big day, and equally as important that I didn’t vocalise the thought going through my own head: I didn’t think it was too bad.

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