Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Tour de Bretagne. UCI 2.2

The next race for me is 'le tour de bretagne' starting this Saturday. It's a 7 day stage race in the brittany region of France I believe. Not an easy tour at all either.

A little bit of a preview.. it's the 43rd edition of the race and probably has been won by some big names before.

Stage 1 or as they say in french 'etape' is 159km from Nantes - Vallet
Must be hard because they have given us 5hours to complete the course!

Stage 2 is from Treffieux - Fougères and covers 153km. It is a hill top finish, so i'm guessing most of the stage is rolling to hilly.

Stage 3 is between Fougères - Saint-Cast Le Guildo. It is 161km and looks to be pretty rolling again.

Stage 4 goes from Matignon - Perros Guirec and is 156km. Some of these stages are starting to look pretty damn hard! It's a false flat up hill finish!!

Stage 5 is between Saint-Brieuc - Ploeren. 170km in length and looks to be on the coast. If it's windy this could be where the race is won. Look for fireworks on this stage.

Stage 6 will go between Douarnenez - Douarnenez and is 24km. Yes you read right, it's the day of the time trial. Rolling terrain, 50m being the biggest difference.

Stage 7, The final day between Douarnenez - Quimperlé will be interesting with a difficult last 3km. Maybe the break will stay away. Depends how close it is at the top of the classification I guess.

So i'm going to be riding the hardest race of my career next week. I have no ambition except to gain experience, get through it and help our leader Romain. He's a great guy. Lots can be learnt from him.

Anyway that's what I will be up to for the next week. Tripping it around France, probably with wind and rain if last year is anything to go by, but already we have had a better April than previous years.. tomorrow is suppose to be mid twenties. As is rest of week.

After this tour, who knows, but one thing will be for sure.. If I get through it, it's going to be a good base to run the rest of the year off.

http://www.tourdebretagne.fr/

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