Try Tour de France (L)etape stage

A few words on this road cycling torture! 

A chamber meeting on Strahov hill

I came to it by accident. I got the starting number just yesterday, a good friend advised me to go, so I said to myself, if you're just coming from Král Šumavy (iconic Czech MTB race) and are in "racing" mode, then go!

Early in the morning in the stage village, a pleasant cozy atmosphere, if you can actually say that about Strahov beton stadium, the biggest concrete monument in the world for 250k people, a French chanson playing... it looked like it will be a piece of cake at that morning! I tuck into a French-style defrosted "croissant" and coffee, meanwhile Zdeněk Štybar is already warming up and riding around on his beautiful S-Works, "familiar" faces of a road patients everywhere, yes, I'm among my own. Starting number 1201 did not bode well for the position in the corridor on the other side of stadium, so I begged the organizers if they would let me near the start. They rejected me at first (probably based on the guideline), but I didn't give up and finally, after they wanted to see my shaved legs and prove the last road race I ride and with what result🤦‍♂️. The first one I managed to deliver somehow, for the second one I just blurted out something about mountain bikes and it worked out.

It started quite with a pace, even though the 8km race wasn't yet to be raced, it was racing right from the start, the first falls soon followed, which scared me a bit, immediately after the start I lost my bottle on a pothole, so it's nice to ride lightly, but it bit me a bit and I just dry swallowed. I thought it would be nice to stick with Mr. Staněk (such a 2m tall beacon of the Goofy team, a national basketball player whom I adored in my youth), I lasted about 15 minutes, and then he probably shifted the gear and was away quite quickly, a good team he is part of I told to myself! The following race roads are actually beautiful, well-known "roubaix" sections, that I knew from the long past.

Very soon, however, I stop thinking about the love and beauty of nature and who and where I should stick to, or in my case I shouldn't be, a "quality" roads around the castle Křivoklát kept me fully busy, I probably shouldn't have pushed it so hard. At about the same moment, it became clear that the chosen pace with an average of 37 km/h, although it would work out well for my Garmin screen, probably will not work out for me at all.

At the 80th km, the race really starts, but I'm already completely wasted and the race doesn't excite so much already. I found a completely different distraction and focused on the many women who started to overtake me, and no, not one of them was Martina Sáblíková (olympic medailist in speed skating and super cycling woman). My attempts to hook some of them already look comical, it's clear that the boy here has, of course, burned out and picked not the correct pace here, as is his typical habit. Nižbor hill already on the biggest cog, passing by Motol hospital on the small hill - I never thought that it would be such a difficult hill to climb, probably the hardest of the day, I want to vomit not only from the heat, at the finish a hug and spontaneous congratulations from a colleague on the Oltre, who thanked me for taking the lead, I didn't understand a word at all, he must have confused the Oltre riders, or we were riding a different race. The atmosphere and spectators were great, just like at the Tour, my friend Martin Chmelík was completely on different level, he rode his league next to Zdeněk Štybar.

I'm just visualising on the way back home along the Vltava river that if I should be doing this for three weeks in a row now, my apetite goes really quickly down for a roadie cycling again!