Survival in France

Gees...what a crazy couple of weeks! From Holland to Spain, to France and now back to Holland with 970km or so of racing thrown in there. Yesterday 78 girls made it to the finish of the toughest Tour de l'Aude that I have ever had the pleasure to finish :) All 6 girls in our team finished, and I think we were possibly the only team to be able to claim this. After 10 days of not so impressive riding, I put in a particularly unimpressive effort to get dropped on the first uncategorised climb, less than 10km into the stage...it was a long day for me in which I many many times questioned why I was there and what I was doing with my life! But such a relief to finish! It is very hard to explain to someone the physical and mental feeling of tour racing - for me, after 10 days I feel a shell of myself, completely empty mentally and physically. It is amazing that even though you feel so very terrible...you put the knicks on and some days can do some terrific things. Not that this happened to me in the last week! However, many of my team-mates put in some very impressive rides. Suus to unexpectedly ride into the yellow jersey and Adrie to make sure she was in pretty much every single break that went down the road all week. For many of the girls, this is great preparation for a solid month of racing in June, culminating in everyone's respective National Championships held in the last weekend of June. But for this little Aussie....today is day 1 of my mid-season break. A week off the bike, a mental rest...regroup and then rebuild for the second half of the season where there is plenty of tough racing again. After driving 1200km through the night to arrive in Holland at 9am this morning, I feel like I have just raced day 11 and am looking forward to lying down and watching the Giro...something we've missed in the last 2 weeks. I don't know how the men do it....10 days is plenty for me.