Slow Death on the Cobbles

At the end of the Sector 16 video, you saw that I did a double-take when the National Champ of Belarus rolled by me. The little dude and a couple other FDJ guys sucked my wheel all the way across those cobbles but I was suffering so bad, I never heard them or even thought to look back and see if anyone was there. I recovered on the on the asphalt roads, absolutely giddy, trying to soak in as much of this experience as I could, and telling myself...."What every you do, do not crash and take any of these guys out". I have no doubt those guys liked the hole in the wind I make.... but I am also sure that they had not idea of my ability to wad it up on short notice. Being on my wheel in rough terrain is not necessarily the safest place to be. It appears that somehow they all knew this as the rest of the FDJ team

So, the next section (Sector 15) we hit at 18 mph. George Hincapie was on the front as none of the FDJ guys wanted to go around him. I settled in on the wheel of good ol' Yauheni and prepared to do another high output interval. Little did I know that I was about to discover that my Maximum Heart Rate seems to have dropped 3 beats per minute over the last 7 years.

Let go to the film, shall we?






I probably could have caught back on before the next section of cobbles... but it would have only resulted in another video of me getting shelled again. Still, this one of the funnest and yet painful experiences I have had. A whole lot like racing CX.