Nice to be the hometown hero

For those who haven’t heard, my recovery period since Portugal has been spent either in bed or with my head in a toilet. Not ideal preparations for my home race, but I had someone to keep me company. CJ (Chris Sutton) was looking after me, then he got sick to an even greater extent than me! Seems I got lucky with only projectile vomiting. Graphic I know, but CJ (and in fact Tyler, who got stuck in Portugal) really did come out worse. Poor CJ did well to get out of bed this morning, never mind ride 210 km!

Anyway, although I would have preferred to lie in my bed yesterday, duty called and I managed to summon the energy to do a press conference (above) and photo shoot. There’s also a pretty cool TV interview that you guys can look out for. Apparently it’s to be shown before the race coverage. Awesome experience and felt surreal for me to be the centre of attention. I guess I didn’t realize how much it means to be a national champion riding your home race.

It’s kind of nice getting so much attention, and it definitely got me to the start line this morning. I wanted to die for the first two hours of the race. But after a very leisurely start and a conveniently timed trip to the race doctor’s car (the only car we can legally hold onto…useful on a climb), I started coming round. The adrenaline kicked in and made me feel positively good in the final 10 km. Though I was empty having not eaten for two days, I still felt strong.

So all bodes well for the rest of the race. Good feed tonight and hopefully another easy day tomorrow, and I can start to think of getting back on a podium again.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Features, Garmin Web Site, Home Page and tagged with Dan Martin, Tour of Ireland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.