My poor poor heart

We are off! Finally. Although we’ve only been here since Wednesday, the run-in to the actual race has felt like ages. Probably because it actually started on Tuesday morning already with all the travelling. But still, the days beforehand with travelling, the team presentation and all the logistics felt surprisingly long. At some point you just want to pin on a number and get started. Today we did.

The first stage is an individual time trial. On the menu was an 11.9 km rolling course. The first part was mostly uphill, the second part a bit more downhill. A TT for the powerhouses if you ask me, and for riders who can deal well never really settling into a rhythm.
I was looking forward to this one. Since putting together AliApex in May, I’ve done a couple of pretty decent TTs. I also made what I hope are some position improvements the week before flying out, so I was happy to test everything today. We left the hotel at 11:15. Same story as every day: all the bikes into the truck, all the riders into the bus, and off to the start.

The roads here are incredibly busy, so it took us about one and a half hours to reach the race. I had asked to start first of the team because my plan was to use the course recon as my warm-up and roll straight into the TT. I did not fancy a long day waiting in the heat before my start. Halfway through the bus ride I was already getting a bit nervous because I knew time was going to be tight. In the end I quickly got changed between a few trees, jumped on the TT bike and managed to squeeze in the recon before my start.

The course itself was actually pretty good. The asphalt over the first three or four kilometres was, to put it politely, terrible. After that it improved a lot. And once again there were crowds everywhere. The Tour de Guadeloupe really is a big thing here. Result-wise I finished 14th. And that’s okay.
Not spectacular, but certainly not bad either. I think I rode to the level I currently have. Looking at my heart rate afterwards was actually more interesting than the result itself. I averaged 191 bpm and peaked at 200 bpm. I’ve only ever seen 197 once before, after a week of illness during the Dutch Indoor Championships. Let alone holding 191 for fifteen minutes. The combination of heat, humidity and fresh legs from the taper seems to be the perfect recipe for heart rate PRs. It’s also something to keep in mind for the coming days. You can blow up very quickly here. Even during the TT, those little moments below threshold barely felt like recovery.

The data nerd in me immediately started looking at how the bike and position held up. That part was slightly more disappointing. I was P8 at the intermediate checkpoint, about 8:30 into the TT at the highest point of the course, but then lost around 15-20 seconds to most of my competitors on the high-speed second half. It hints that there is still quite a bit of room for improvement aerodynamically.

But, P14 is a solid point of departure for the GC going into the hillier stages, so I’m happy with that. Big kudos to both of my teammates as well, who finished 4th and 10th. Absolute TT monsters. In fact, we also took the team classification: by one second.

Not quite sure what tomorrow will bring. It’s a relatively flat stage, so it could easily end in a bunch sprint. On the other hand, it also looks like the kind of stage where a strong breakaway might survive.
Let’s see.