Triptyque de la Vallée de l'Ance

So had my first tour for the year. It was category 1 race and had 3 stages over 2 days. Team did pretty well overall picking up 2nd on General classification and 2nd in the teams classification. As for me personally I just had an average result but it was good to help out my French team mate finish 2nd.

Stage 1 130km
first stage was really hard, the course was up and down all the time but with no big hills and there were constant attacks throughout the whole stage with no let up. This also made it really hard to read the race to make the right break away. Finally a break got away with 40km to go and I had one team mate in there who ended up finishing second in a group of 10 and then there was my bunch which had 30 or 40 guys left.

Stage 2 67km
This stage was the next day in the morning and it was freezing cold as we were at a pretty high altitude. I think about 1000m. So having a good warm up was important which I did have although it still took me awhile to get in to it. The stage had 2 hard hills in it about 3 or 4 km long. our team plan was to get our guy in 2nd to 1st so we were on the attack to force the yellow jerseys team to chase. It seemed a lot of people were tired from the day before and the stage wasnt to hard and nothing got away and all the team finished in the peloton.

Stage 3 80km
Last stage was on the same day of the 2nd stage but in the afternoon. Again we wanted to be active in all the breakaways and we controlled the race really well, we always had some one up the road and if anything dangerous got away it didn't get far as we were there to chase it down, unfortunately the leader of the race was to strong and we weren't able to move our guy into the yellow jersey. But in the end my room mate Martins got painfully close to winning the stage but ended up 2nd which was still impressive as he had been working his ass off the whole stage.

All in all good tour for the team, and I think I ended up 29th overall on the same time as 10th.

Next weekend I'm looking forward to another tour Circuit de Saône-et-Loir which is elite national and looks super hard and hilly, form is coming along so hopefully some good results coming.