Finally, the return.........

So after a long 12 week wait I was on the start line of my first race back. The race it self was a 2 hour semi nocture crit. now normally I wouldn’t be so nervous about a 2 hour crit but as I’ve only been on the road for 5days and the longest ride I’ve done is 1.30hrs the crit would be my longest ride since getting back on the bike! All I was hoping for was the crit to be a nice, smooth, fast race with out too much heavy breaking! In the end all I got was a fast race and a shock to the system, and certainly not smooth race as there were speed bumps, drains and mini roundabouts to shake and knock my wrist about and to rub it in a nice fast downhill straight into a very sharp 120 degree corner! So as the race got underway I didn’t know if I would be able to finish, I didn’t know if my wrist could take it, or if I had the fitness, but as there were 1500euros of primes up for grabs I really wanted a piece of that. I managed to get into a couple of moves early on, but nothing stuck and as one of my moves was coming back the main move went! I wasn’t concerned tho as Alastair and team mate Serge got into the move of 10. The peleton decided that was that and the move quickly had a 30sec. I did managed to get in a couple of moves after that and one got away with about 12 of us.. We also quickly opened up a gap on the peleton but didn’t really make any impact on the lead group. We worked well in are group and although we didn’t catch the leaders we did manage to lap the peleton what I enjoyed considering it was my first race back. After 2hours racing I was starting to feel it and was getting a little tired, so as I came to the sprint for 10th all I could manage was 15th, but I was pretty happy with my return to get 15th and a prime but the team got another good result thanks to Alastair again getting a very good 3rd place!The next day we just went out for a nice easy ride on tt bikes as we had a stage race on the weekend with a 11.5km tt in.The stage race then. Its was called Tour du pays de la Roche aux fées and consists of 2 road stages of 135km, 130km and 1 tt stage of 11.5km. The race itself was a good race with some very good riders and teams, including the u23 French champ. The first stage was a typical parcur with it being rolling and fairly twisty roads. Nothing went for the first hour but then the pace started to go up and the splits and move started to go. I was well positioned for the splits and went with a couple of moves but as the main move went I just didn’t have it in the legs to go and I had to watch them go away. So as I fell back into the peleton I quickly realised that would be the end of my stage as the peleton slowed up due 2 every team had a guy up the road (us having 3 up there). As it came to the finish are group did sprint but I didn’t get involved and just rolled in. The next day went much much better! It started of with a alarm call at 5am at the place where all the teams were staying due to the alarm going off to everyone’s joy! It did eventually go off and we had another hour sleep before with did actually have to get up. After enjoying a typical French breakfast of baguette, baguette and more baguettes, we headed towards the morning tt, everything went well for me that morning, I felt pretty good, the warm up went well, the weather was good and the course was my cup of tea, hard, on small rolling roads and windy, but nevertheless it was still fairly quick. I was off about 20 in and came across the line setting the fasted time, but this got even better as I went back to the team car I was told that Alastair was second, so we were sitting 1st and 2nd. And as we got to the last 15riders I was still 1st but unfortunately I was eventually pushed to 4th and Alastair to 12th with me just being 2seconds from 2nd place. The final stage was very similar to the first stage. A group went off very early on during the stage and managed to stay away all day, I got into the second group on the road with team mate Nathan and the group worked well together trying to catch the lead riders but we just ran out of time and we were riding for 19th place on a uphill finish with me coming 19th and Nathan 20th.