Switching off before gearing up for climb

TOUR DIARY:So what do we do on a rest day in the Tour de France? You can't take the day completely off

I’D BEEN feeling sick for a few days but I definitely felt a lot better yesterday; my sinuses aren’t blocked any more and while I’ve still got some congestion on my chest, I felt a lot better. We had a 41.5 kilometre individual time trial to do from Arc-et-Senans to Besançon, and I’m pretty happy with how things went. I didn’t push it from the start, but the sensations are definitely improving.

We were staying in the finish town, which was quite a long way from the start. While a number of riders would have checked out the course in the morning, I didn’t do that. I just did a bit of a warm up to get myself going, although I didn’t do as much as I would usually do. Because I’ve been a bit sick with a head cold and because I wasn’t planning on doing the time trial flat out, I was happy enough doing things that way.

Anyway, I went out there and just rode within myself until the first checkpoint. I saw then I was going okay and I decided to press on a bit from there, accelerating and riding harder. I actually got going pretty well in the end. In the last sector I just lost 10 seconds to the world time-trial champion Tony Martin, who ended up 12th on the stage. I was 51st out of 178 riders and was fine with that. I didn’t go all out to get my best possible time, after all.

The time trial was a nice one – it was a beautiful course out there. The climb was a lot steeper than I imagined and I didn’t have the right gear for that. What was encouraging was there were a heck of a lot of Irish tricolours out there today. I also saw a Limerick jersey as well. I did my best to wave at every Irish fan who was on the side of the road. There were quite a few.

What’s good for those fans is that the time trial goes on so long. While the bunch blurs past pretty quickly on a normal stage, the riders go off one at a time in the time trial and are two or three minutes apart. When we woke up yesterday morning, Tyler Farrar was already under way in his effort, so that shows just how long things go on for. It’s really great for the fans to watch – you have got seven hours or so of guys coming past every two or three minutes, so there’s plenty to see.

After I finished the test, I rode back to the hotel behind the team car . . . it was interesting, we were actually on the highway for six kilometres. The idea was to spin the legs out a bit and get all the lactic acid out of the muscles, which will help the recovery.

As I said, I was feeling much better yesterday and I should keep improving over the next day or two.

Today is the first rest day of the race and, first off, the plan is to sleep as long as possible in order to aid the recovery. We are actually staying in the same hotel as we did in the Critérium du Dauphiné race, which took place before the Tour de France. I’m now rooming with the American rider Christian Vande Velde, who was fourth in the race in 2008.

I was rooming with Tom Danielson earlier in the Tour but he crashed out and has gone home. When that happens you don’t end up with a room to yourself; the race organisers allocate the hotels and they take away bedrooms when you lose riders. That’s how I’ve ended up sharing with Christian.

Anyway, when you have a rest day, you can end up staying more than one night in the same hotel. It’s definitely a boost if you have a good one. This hotel is a bit quirky – every room has a different theme, a different colour, and there’s a load of wooden beams. It’s pretty unusual.

There’s also a sun terrace where you can chill out, and in the village square there’s a couple of cafes so it’s going to be pretty relaxing.

So what do we do on a rest day in the Tour de France? It’s not all about taking it easy. We’ve been racing for over a week and racked up over 1,500 kilometres but you can’t take the day completely off. The problem is that your body completely seizes up if you don’t do at least a bit of training. It makes it much harder to get going again when the race starts once more.

In order to avoid that, what you have to do is to almost trick your body into thinking that it is still racing. We will go out for an hour and a half or two hours. That’s important to do, particularly after a stage as short as yesterday’s.

The race will then restart tomorrow. It’s a mountainous stage but not super hard. I hope to be completely over my cold then and should be able to do some proper racing. My plan is to try to go in the breakaway, but it’s too soon to think about that now; before then, it’s about switching off for a bit, taking a small break mentally and physically, getting a little fresher, then putting on a race number again and get going once more. As I’m feeling better, I’m looking forward to what lies ahead.