The Millar Diaries: Dispatches from the edge of hell

I made it through the night… On going to bed last night I was sure I was going to be waking up in cold sweats from a nightmare that would find me once again in the last 25km of the team time trial of yesterday. If hell exists then I think Zab and I paid a brief yet horrific visit in the last 2km before the finish line yesterday. The previous 25km had been purgatory, but those last 2km were definitely hell.

Crossing the finish line didn’t offer immediate relief either. I’ll try and explain: if you can imagine hanging precariously on the edge of a cliff, not being able to pull yourself back up to safety, but knowing that help is coming in 30mins, that is a bit how it felt. When the help does finally come you’ve already lost every single bit of your strength and your grip has been slipping for ten minutes, by the 28th minute you’re pretty much sure you can’t hold on anymore. Those last two minutes you’re basically hanging on for dear life with no consciousness beyond the tiny details surrounding you that are no longer in perspective or any recognizable time and space.

So crossing the finish line is like finally being pulled to safety, you just want to lay down, that’s all, there are no longer thoughts of relief or pleasure, just the knowledge that it’s over. That’s actually how one is supposed to feel after a TTT if it has been ridden correctly.

This morning is now different, it took me the entire evening to really recover; I couldn’t eat anything till about 21:30 as my body was in a bad way, but then I started to be better and was able to refuel and start to feel human again. Then I slept very well, nightmare free… The TTT itself was extremely difficult — the roads were technical, comprising of constantly changing bad surfaces, lefts, rights, up, downs and widths that varied from boulevard to country path. Add to this the near gale force winds and we were tackling one of the hardest TTTs any of us had ever done. From what we’ve counted, seven of the twenty teams experienced crashes, quite a shocking number when it is considered these are essentially the best road cyclists in the world. I think that says it all really.

As for us, we are pleased with our performance. We started at the pace required in order to win the race. Unfortunately this put our sprinter/rouleurs in the red before we hit the first serious obstacle, a 2km hill after 9km. We lost four of our nine here. Ryder dug deep and held on, but this left us with four riders and 28km to go, and we couldn’t afford to lose Ryder as he was on the limit and our fifth man so we had him stay on the back and guarantee his finishing with us.

The situation was, as the French would say, imprevu… What we did over the next 28km is something I’ll not forget: ever. Wiggo, VDV, Zab and I did one of the rides of our lives, not once during those 28km did we think we couldn’t still win it, and as team bonding goes that was probably one of the most amazing experiences of my life. Each one of us gave every little bit of ourselves and didn’t once doubt or slip up. Technically we didn’t even come close to making one mistake in what was, like I said, the most technical extreme TTT course we’ve ever done. Each one of the four us lifted ourselves to a level that we would not be able to reach individually, hence the near out of body experiences in those last 2km.

Kiwi Guy, Ty, MM, and Pate did everything they could, and I feel bad for them because I know how horrible it is to feel like you let your teammates (and friends) down. They didn’t though, they gave 100%, and I myself have had to endure times when I couldn’t help my team mates and have felt as beat up and down emotionally as I felt physically yesterday. Not once have we felt they let us down, the bottom line is, Wiggo, VDV, Zab and me are four of the fastest men on bikes in the world, and the four of us were racing for the win, and they understand that as we understand them.

Sometimes slowing down isn’t an option.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 10:17 am and is filed under Events, Garmin Web Site, Home Page, Pearl Izumi Web site, Rider Diaries and tagged with David Millar, The Millar Diaries, Tour de France. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.