Today was our second attempt to get an early glimpse of the Tour of Flanders course. We had a recon planned for late December but the weather was too bad so we had to cancel.

Today was not much better at minus two (Celsius) and light snow falling at daybreak. We met at the Tour of Flanders museum in Oudenaarde. Our Classics director sportif Geert Van Bondt planned well for the weather and also had the course logged in on the Garmin 800 of three of the six riders so even though there was no signs up we could follow the course using our Garmins!

Geert brought Tyler from Gent and Johan Van Summeren came with Thomas Dekker. Maaskant brought Haussler who came yesterday by train from Germany. Sep Van Marke lives 10kms from Oudenaarde where we started the ride at the museum. So six seasoned pro’s and me, the 52 year old Sporting Manager. (Luckily Geert was behind in the car!)

“I was pleased that I made it with the big guys,” Summerhill recalls.

Though 22-year old Summerhill grew up in and lives in Denver and has ridden with Slipstream’s Boulder-based development team from its earliest beginnings in 2005, he has never considered himself a climber.

At the USA Pro Cycling Challenge he believes Colorado’s nose-bleed altitude has worked in his favor by neutralizing some of the super climbers. “I think that racing here, in comparison to what it would be like racing at sea level, is so different. Everyone is on a much more even basis because of the fact that everyone is limited by altitude. The max speeds, the amount of attacks get diminished.”

Summerhill, a seven-time road and cyclocross national champion, shakes his head at the thought and says, “I mean, I beat Andy Schleck to the top of a climb yesterday. That’s obviously saying something about the conditions that we are in.”

Summerhill is too humble to admit it outright, but his performance also says something about his ability to race a bike. “There is nothing for me here that I plan on doing apart from being the most helpful stagiaire and domestique that I can.”

Stagiaire is a French term for trainee. Starting on August 1 each year, UCI rules allow pro teams to race with up to three under-23 riders like Summerhill. It’s a way for the younger riders to learn and test their mettle in the big leagues while also giving teams a chance to watch how they perform under pressure.

Summerhill also raced with the Garmin-Cervélo squad earlier this month at the Tour of Utah, and says the step up made him anxious. “I’ve been nervous for the last two weeks. Utah I had much more nerves because it was like being a stagiaire for this team was a fluke somehow and I was scared I was just going to get dropped instantly on the first day. Obviously that didn’t happen and it shook some of those nerves out.”

While Summerhill had not before ridden Independence Pass, the 12,095-foot monster on stage two, he does recall riding down it as a teenager. “I remember doing it years and years ago on a bicycle tour of Colorado with my mom.”

In fact, Summerhill’s mom got him into riding bikes, and she still races cyclocross. “She got out of doing the crits and the road races a few years ago. She didn’t want to break herself. I told her she can do a lot less damage racing on dirt.” She lives in Denver and has been following Summerhill at several of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge stages.

“I I got into racing mostly from messing around on my BMX bike and doing jumps,” Summerhill recalls of his introduction to bike racing. “From there I went into racing BMX a couple of times.” That led to racing mountain bikes, including downhill. But the highly specialized downhill mountain bikes are expensive, and crashes happen all the time. “My mom got me out of downhill pretty quickly because of how pricey it was once you broke anything.”

Back in 2003, Vaughters started out with a dream, a chunk of his personal savings and a humble objective: nurture young American riders while also fostering a 100-percent clean racing and training culture.

Fast forward eight years and the team has returned to its roots, revisiting the place of its birth to race against a lineup that includes the entire top-three podium from the 2011 Tour de France — Andy and Franck Schleck and Cadel Evans.

The seven-day race starts on August 22 in Colorado Springs and finishes August 28 in Denver. Along the way, the course takes the riders over two 12,000-foot passes—each one twice the altitude of France’s Alpe d’Huez.

Tom Danielson placed ninth at the Tour de France this year, and is motivated to ride for the win in the state where he started racing bikes and that he calls home today.

The day before the 5.2 mile prologue into Colorado Springs, Danielson said “It feels amazing to race in the home state of Colorado.”

“I started racing road bikes in my collegiate days at Fort Lewis College in Durango and travelled the state in a 15-passenger van with 30 people eating peanuts and chips and camping out before races. This will be a different way to travel the state, but I’m really looking forward to it. Instead of racing against the different colleges I’ll be racing against the different countries of the world. It’s really cool to come full circle and do it in my home state of Colorado.”

Earlier in the day, while team mechanics washed cars in front of the team hotel and team chefs Barbara and Chris Grealish prepped dinner in a mobile kitchen out back, Danielson told gathered media at the pre-race press conference that he is extremely motivated to do well in Colorado. “I’m super pumped. I’m super excited.”

Sitting on a dais in a row with Ivan Basso, the Schleck brothers, Cadel Evans and Christian Vande Velde, Danielson added “It’s really a magical moment for me to even be at this press conference with these people here in my state of Colorado.”

From the press gathering at USA Cycling’s Colorado Springs headquarters, Christian Vande Velde pointed out that while “we’ve been based out of Boulder, Colorado since day one,” the team is always extra motivated to perform for the fans whenever it is racing in the United States.

“Being here in Colorado, being on a lot of our home roads, Tom Danielson’s home roads, we are extra excited.”

Moments before the start of the the Basque one-day Clásica San Sebastián, I slip into the team car and ask Garmin-Cervélo director sportif Bingen Fernandez how many times he has done this race. He shakes his head and smiles. “Phewwww…too many!”

Fernandez knows this 234-kilometer course from the Atlantic beaches of San Sebastián, over five categorized climbs in the surrounding mountains and back to the beach. He raced it often during his 14 years as a pro. One thing that changed this year is that the organizers now have the riders attack the iconic Alto de Jaizkibel climb twice, rather than once.

Today Bingen is directing a squad that includes Andreas Kleir, David Millar, Julian Dean, Ryder Hesjedal, Matt Wilson, Gabriel Rasch, Murilo Fischer and Johan Van Summeren.

Standing in the middle of one of San Sebastián’s regal seaside boulevards, the Paris-Roubaix winner tells me he’s still hurting from a run in with a car last week while training in Belgium. When the car hit him, Van Summeren didn’t break anything, but injured ligaments in his shoulder make it tough to ride with his full force.

Shortly after 11am the race rolls past shirtless and bikini-clad fans who line San Sebastian’s glorious La Concha beach.

Almost immediately we jolt up into the hills that surround the city like a green glove. 12 kilometers in a break gets away. Brazilian national champ Murilo Fischer is in it with five others. While the peloton pulls over for a mass pee-break at 15 kilometers, the break works well together and builds a three-minute gap.

It’s been a rainy summer in San Sebastián, but today it’s hot, sunny and humid. The temperature is already 24 degrees (73 Fahrenheit). Bingen doesn’t use the radio much, but he does call the riders to remind them that it’s hotter than it seems, and to keep drinking.

Because he’s a Basque who grew up in the nearby town of Bermeo, everyone seems to know Bingen. A couple of Movistar riders say hello. “Tranquilo!” he shouts back as they sprint through the cars. The director of the Andalucia team slows along side us to talk. He also has someone in the break and he is on his way up to visit his rider. “You have a chat, then I will come up for a while” Bingen tells him in Spanish.

We pass the Pukas surf shop in Zarautz, a famous Basque surf town. The main street is packed with barefoot beachgoers. Binghen points to a building up the street and tells me it’s a good spot for the local white wine, Txakoli.

After Zarautz we turn inland onto the day’s first category two climb, the Alto de Garate. Julian Dean drops back to the car and asks if we have an extra pair of sunglasses. Victor Villalba, the mechanic in the car with us, roots through the back of the car but comes up empty. Bingen offers Julian his glasses, but because they are not Transitions sunglasses, Dean turns them down. “Matt Johnson (Slipstream’s president) will fine me if I wear those,” the New Zealander says with a smile.

Toward the top of the Garate we pass thick Txakoli vinyards growing on nearly vertical hillsides. Compared to the vines growing in the flat, dry, rocky terrain of Provence we saw earlier this month at the Tour de France, these vines look like a jungle canopy. With obvious pride in his Basque heritage, Bingen explains that the combination of steep hillside terroir, rain and ocean breezes from the Bay of Biscay give the white wine a taste unlike any other.

The break is now eight minutes ahead. The race director’s car gives us the OK to pay Murilo a visit. The Brazilian is in good spirits, smiling as usual. He takes two water bottles.

We drop back and park on a curve in the road where the approaching peloton can see us from afar. Victor grabs an armload of water bottles and heads up the road a few hundred meters while Bingen waits with more bottles by the car. The field passes, but it’s strung out and no one risks their position to take on bottles.

Back on the road, Andreas Kleir drops back to the car to load up with bottles. He fills his pockets, then front and back of his jersey with CamelBak bidons. “One more,” Binghen tells him. “The sticky one.” Klier grabs one more bottle with a long handoff then heads back up the road to distribute the fluids to his teammates.

72 kilometers into the race it’s nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Driving through the town of Zumarraga a clot of kids yells “Garmeeeeen!”

At 1pm, Matt Wilson drops back for another load of bottles. The race merges onto the N1 motorway. Police have stopped all the traffic on this major highway and people sit on the hoods of their cars and cheer as the race surges past.

After the kilometer 116 feed zone Binghen radios the riders. He directs them to start grouping near Ryder. “The race is going to start soon.”

We pass a Sky rider on the side of the road. He’s extracting a feed bag from his rear cluster. Later, the Sky team car comes up next to us and Bingen discusses the episode with their director in French. So far today Bingen has used Spanish, English, Basque, Italian and French. Language skills are a key pro cycling skill set.

But then in one day in the spring of 2008, Fowler was out riding his bike when Tom Danielson caught up with him. “He was actually lost,” Fowler remembers. “He asked me for directions.”

Danielson visited Fowler’s restaurant. Then he came back with the rest of the team, and they fell in love with Fowler’s food. The eclectic mixture of cuisines that draws influence from afar as Texas barbecue and as near as Pyrenean vegetable dishes had a special appeal to the riders.

“We had a neat bonding,” Fowler recalls. After having him cook for one of their training camps, the team asked Fowler if he would consider going on the road with them as their chef.

With three children and a restaurant to run full time, Fowler, who is originally from Colorado and trained at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, had to decline the offer. But as a dedicated cyclists who regularly puts 200 miles a week on the bike, the notion stuck with him.

“It was kind of bugging me the whole time,” he recalls while chopping garlic in his gleaming stainless steel mobile kitchen that’s parked behind a hotel in Toulouse, France. The next year he discussed the idea with his wife and fellow restauranteur, Olga. “What if we just try it this year, to see if we can do it?”

With their restaurant normally closed in July anyhow, they ended up feeding the team during the 2009 Tour de France, and it worked out. Fast forward to 2011, and the Fowlers’ kids are old enough to take care of themselves while mom and dad are at the Tour.

In 2011 they also fed the team at the Dauphine, the Tour of Switzerland and will support the team at the Vuelta a España in September. During the non-Tour races Olga stays at home and runs the restaurant with the help of their now-18-year old son.

With the help of a friend who is a sheet metal fabrication expert, Sean outfitted the rolling kitchen van himself. It has everything from heavy-duty cook stoves to an oven to auxiliary generator power.

Each night he Fowlers park in the team-hotel parking lot. When possible they plug into the hotel power and water supply. After cooking meals in the van, they carry them on serving platters into a hotel dining room for the riders.

In the morning they prepare breakfast, of which oatmeal is a staple. The Fowlers wash their cooking utensils and pots and pans in the van. The hotels take care of cleaning the riders’ plates and utensils.

When he started working with the team, Sean says he found the logistics involved with running a pro cycling team astonishing.

“The entire infrastructure was, even to this day, mind boggling,” he says while shaking his head in disbelief at how much stuff and how many people Garmin-Cervélo has moving around the world at any one time. He says that as part of those logistics himself, he strives to bring the same standards he demands at his restaurant to the cuisine he prepares on the road.

“Nothing special, just spinning the legs out” Tyler Farrar says of their two-hour ride through vineyards that spread like green blankets around the flanks of the Mount Ventoux, also known as the Giant of Provence. “If you spend all day laying in bed you’d be terrible tomorrow.”

After the ride, the team makes a short drive to something really special, a lunch of Chipotle burritos at one of Provence’s most renown vineyards, Château la Nerthe, in one of France’s most legendary wine regions, Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Here, in an area that originally crafted wines for Pope Clement V in the 14th-century, the team feasts on freshly made Chipotle burritos, chats with gathered press and team sponsors, and, of course, has a sip or two of Château la Nerthe’s exquisite vintages.

While Chipotle is major sponsor of the team’s U.S.-based development squad of under-23 riders, the purveyor of fine burritos wanted to come to the Big Show as well. Damon Biggins, 39, of Paris and Jacob Sumner, 32, of London, are both Chipotle managers who came to Provence to prepare burritos in the kitchen of the expansive chateau.

Chipotle currently has one restaurant in London’s Soho neighborhood. It is doing so well that they are opening another to relieve the pressure on the first. They are also opening a restaurant in Paris later this year.

“We want to bring awareness to France and to support the Tour de France team,” Biggins said of the company’s motives for putting on the rest day event. For the American riders, “We also want to give them a taste of home. Next year we’ll have burritos at the finish line at the Champs.”

Chipotle’s motto is “Food with Integrity.” They take that seriously, making food from sustainable sources and avoiding meat from animals that have been raised with antibiotics or hormones. Biggins says that corporate ethos “is very much in line” with the Garmin-Cervélo team’s strict anti-doping, ride-pure operating philosophy. “Everything we do is 100-percent antibiotic and hormone free.”

Along with the riders, some eighty journalists attend the event on this sunny afternoon in southern France.

Versus TV broadcasters Craig Hummer and Robbie Ventura built up a fierce appetite for burritos by climbing Mount Ventoux in the morning. Between bites of a Chipotle burrito and sips of a 2008 Châteauneuf-du-Pape red, Hummer says he expected to see a handful of riders on the climb; once he and Ventura got onto the Giant of Provence, “there were thousands” of cyclists up there.

At another table, team sports scientist Robby Ketchel chats with Tom Fowler of Cervélo and Nick Habgood of Keronite, a British company that works with Mavic to create the special Exalith braking surfaces on the wheels riders are using this season.

Habgood’s company also consults with Formula 1 motor racing teams and a lively discussion springs up between him, Ketchell and Fowler about aerodynamics. Ketchell is the team’s aerodynamics expert and has spent countless hours in wind tunnels with the riders, as has Fowler in the process of designing Cervélo’s wind-slicing frames.

The second rest day certainly comes with a touch more optimism. We are further south, the sun is shining, and Paris seems close, but yet so far.

There is far more of a buzz around the hotel but that may have something to do with sharing our accommodation with two other teams, and possibly the humming of cars from the motorway which is less than 1km away.

Week two of this years tour has been thankfully less dramatic than the first one, it couldn’t not have been really. Knock on wood nobody really touched down this week so it’s been a case of keeping things steady and on top of even the smallest of issues, discomforts or hints of injury.

As we approach week two and three of the tour small problems can become big problems quickly, as the fatigue sets in and the immune system typically starts to wane.

The great news is that pretty much across the board everyone seems to have hit the slot this week, the reason being I believe as their bodies begin to get used to the rigours of the race and the body adapts.

What we end up with is athletes bio-mechanically stronger this week than last and hopefully next week stronger still. So on the contrary to what may be expected I have had slightly less to do this week but then again not crashing definitely helps.

The high of the week was definitely Thors win into Lourdes, clinical, calculating, efficient and executed to perfection. Earlier in the stage while waiting at the finish, John the physio and I headed to Le Grotto in Lourdes an interesting if very sad place as I have never seen so many sick, unwell or disabled people in one place.

Two groups of people keep the Garmin-Cervélo riders going at the Tour de France: the mechanics who keep the bikes singing and the soigneurs who keep their bodies fueled and supple.

Soigneurs are versatile staff-members who do everything from massage therapy to food preparation to on-the-road bottle handups to clothes washing. Without them, the team would halt.

To find what goes into this job, we spend stage 10 of the Tour de France, a 158-kilometer race through the rolling, sunflower-field covered landscapes of the Aveyron and Tarn regions of France, with Sophie Roullous and Josep Colomer, both four-year veterans with the team.

After eating breakfast at 8:15 a.m. at the team hotel, the pair prepare the day’s bottles. Of the 150 CamelBak Podium bottles, 75-percent are filled with energy drink. The rest are water. Other soigneurs make lunches for the team cars, VIP vehicles and prepare the riders’ feed bags.

After bringing the riders’ suitcases to the team truck, Josep and Sophie caravan with the team bus and four other team cars to the race start in Aveyron. When the bus pulls into the team parking lot, it is mobbed with fans hungry for a photo or rider signature.

30 minutes before the 1:30 p.m. race start, Sophie and Josep hop in their car, identified by a pink, blue and black sticker across the windshield that reads “Tour de France Equipe 253.” We ease through masses of fans onto the race course.

10 minutes down the course, it starts to hail. Marble-size ice pummels the car. Outside, fans scramble under trees and the eaves of stone barns. “Today is not a good day to be a bike rider,” Sophie observes in the lilting accent that comes of her upbringing in France.

We are headed to the day’s feed zone, a Tour-appointed location 77.5 kilometers into the race. Along the way, every kilometer is populated with fans. This is rural France, and minuscule roads wind us through wooded valleys, along rushing streams and past countless stone villages and fields dotted with France’s omnipresent cylindrical hay bales.

We also thread past white flotillas of motorhomes parked on the side of the road. These rafts of moving houses come from all over Europe to follow the Tour each summer. (Note to self, that is the way to watch the Tour!) Though they have been doing this for 10 days now, the motorhome campers agitate flags and smile as we pass like they have never seen a Garmin car before. In villages, watchers spot our car and excitedly yell “Garmin!.”

We stop for gas at a Total station. It costs over 100 US dollars to fill a car in France. A techno pop song comes on the radio: “Every day I’m shufflin’” It’s followed by another that refrains, “Johnny, la gente esta muy loca, what the…” then slips into language that would never fly on American radio. “It’s the same songs every day at the same time,” Sophie says.

At the start of the feed zone, Josep stops and chats with a soigneur from the Euskaltel-Euskadi team. Josep is Catalan, and the Euskaltel staffer Basque, so they speak in Spanish. Then, in French, Josep and Sophie discuss where to park. We drive a kilometer further down the road. After parking next to a RadioShack car, Josep and Sophie pull out folding chairs, open icy bottles of water and sit down to eat wraps.

It’s hot and humid now. The staff wearies of sandwiches made of bread every day, so they mix up their road diet by making wraps. Every three days or so the soigneurs go grocery shopping for fresh food for the lunches.

Sophie and Josep discuss upcoming work schedules with the RadioShack soigneurs,: Clásica San Sebastián, Utah, Colorado, Tour of Spain, Lombardy, China, Australia; a carousel of international destinations.

Two-minutes after 3:00 p.m., Josep pulls on a Garmin-Cervélo jersey. Sophie dons a team wind vest. These are so the riders can identify their soigneurs. The pair pack up their folding chairs, Sophie holds the chair bags while Josep folds the seats; even small acts a team effort, without hesitation.

Sophie opens a cooler in the back of the car and pulls out eight cloth musette bags. Each one contains two water bottles, two Clif Bars, two Clif Shot Bloks, two Clif Shot Gels, a panini sandwich and a small can of Coke. “Baby Cokes,” Sophie calls them.

The first rest day could not have come soon enough for what seems like most of the peloton, as in the words of one of our riders there are some “buckled units” out there. Luckily we find ourselves being housed for two days in chateau, in La Garde, which is only a 20km transfer from the end of yesterdays stage but what seems like a lifetime away.

We find ourselves here it transpires as almost a thank you to JV for all his hard work he does as President of the AIGCP, well someone had to stay here and luckily it was us. The place is idyllic set in acres of wooded parkland, and four stars no less which for a Tdf hotel is as good as it typically could possibly get.

A perfect environment for our riders to rest up and reload for the stages ahead. Being the only team here and seemingly the only guests, the battering the bodies took, the terrible weather and the tdf in general feel a million miles away, for a few hours at least.

As I write this the boys have headed out for their ‘rest day’ ride to keep the body ticking over and in some cases preventing the body from
seizing up too much so they are ready to go tomorrow. The last thing we want is the body to ‘forget’ it’s at the biggest bike race on the calendar and to shut down.

The first week has been an outstanding week for the team, as a chiropractor it has definitely seemed busier than the previous two editions I have been at with treatments approaching midnight not too unheard of this week.

The Rocktape has been unleashed a little earlier than may have been expected as the numerous knocks, scrapes and near misses add up. These guys are tough with superhuman efforts taken by all riders all week to get the job done, delivering our maiden tour victory on the TTT, scenes of which shall remain burned into the memory forever, and Tylers July 4th win, celebrated in just as much vigour.

That aside from 7 days in yellow, it’s been a good, no great week. The biggest downer coming yesterday as we lost DZ our charismatic comedic talisman and huge engine of the first week, everyone is gutted.

So today for myself it shouldn’t be too late a day but will be steady for most of the afternoon as we go to work to reset their bodies biomechanically to be functioning as optimally as possible when they climb on for stage ten tomorrow.

Stage 7: Le Mans – Châteauroux

Stage 5: Carhaix – Cap Fréhel

Stage 3: Olonne-sur-Mer – Redon