Trentino stage 4

Giro del trentino wrapped today with a quite panoramic stage which took us from the shores of largo d garda and to the summit of passo pordoi in the heart of the dolomites. I was super motivated for today as for a nice change I knew pretty much all of the route from my days on training camp with liquigas last season at san pelligrino. My plan was to go in the break which unfortunately was the plan of a lot of other riders aswell. That meant attack after attack after attack and after 80km of racing, 50km/ph average speed and having climbed 500m of altitude since the gun had gone off, 2 riders snuck of the front and a at this point decimated peleton happily took a nature break and a breather. The main field as so often happens on a balistic start like today reformed which makes everybody body wonder why we made it so hard for ourselves in the first place and the colnago team started tapping out there very gentlemanly tempo for the next 80km before we hit the vally rd before passo pordoi. So all was quite peacefull in the field until about 10km from the base of the final climb when liquigas swarmed onto the front and drilled. Not to worry I knew what they were up to and how they would do it and started to ease my way forward through what was now becoming a tired peleton. Unfortunately when people start to struggle they make small mistakes and on a harmless uphill dragging section of rd somone near the front clipped somone else's tyre and caused a massive pile up. With riders on the ground all around me I had not choice but to career straight into the carnage and hope for the best. This resulted in me stopping very suddenly, flying over the handle bars and proceeding to do a perfect summersalt quite conveniently onto another rider, landing squarely on my tailbone and head! I feared the worse as I flew throught he air but to my apsolute amazement I got up with nothing more than a groggy head, found my bike, even picked up my bottle which somehow came to rest between my legs, put my chain back on, and re mounted my bike. Only problem was by this stage the race was long gone up the rd and so close to the finish there is not charity wait for the crashers!!! Like there can be in other circumstances. So gruppeto for me today. I would have really liked to push hard on the final climb as I knew it so well and am interested to see my condition but adequate in cycling does not really permit you to attack the gruppeto when the race is already 5minutes up the rd. So non event day in the end. At the finish I was still a little dazed and when I reached into my pockets I realised my ventoline was in 100pieces. I have crashed a lot with that in my pocked and never broken one so maby it was the slight cushion I needed to avoid any serious injury. Regardless I am just happy to have got through this beautiful race, looking forward to some rest and then of to the USA where I will be racing the tour of gila. A lot of work in the bank so to speak now so am looking forward to seeing what I can do there.

First some sleep, a couple more days in gavirate then on the plane stateside monday morning.

The adventure roles on!

Cjw
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