Another beautiful sunny day with 2 pretty good climbs ahead of us. The start out of Solden was pretty short and uneventful with the climb starting only a couple of kilometres out of town. The Timmelsjoch is one of those climbs that sweeps for long stretches along the side of the mountain so you can see a long way up and down as you are climbing. It’s not a particularly hard climb, but mentally numbing as you just never seem to get any closer to the top and you can see so many damn riders so far ahead of you. The top of the Timmelsjoch is our highest point in the race at 2506 meters and there was lots of snow at the top. A few of the gang regrouped here before we started the wickedly long 25 km descent into Italy. This one was particularly fun as once you pass into Italy, the police completely close the roads so we didn’t have to worry about cars on the long sweeping chicanes that made up a good part of this descent.

The second climb up the Jaufenpass was completely different from the Timmelsjoch, where the first was a long sweeping road along the mountain, the Jaufenpass was a seemingly never ending set of switchbacks that cut is’s way up the side of the mountain. This didn’t seem so bad at first until I got what I thought was about half way up and there seemed to be just as many switchbacks still ahead of me and I was starting to feel a little bit of cramping even though I was getting lots of food and fluids into me unlike yesterday. The one saving grace was that I knew Tobias was waiting at the top with our support vehicle and a much needed refill of fluids as even this high it was starting to get really hot. This by the way did not bode well for our plunge down in the valley towards Brixen. Those of you that know me, know that I have trouble in the heat, I lose water and lots of it when it is hot and I haven’t had time to acclimatize. Given the weather in Vancouver this year I think it’s safe to say I’ve not had a chance to adjust to the sun and warmer weather. I knew I was already dehydrated at the top and we were heading down into the valley with another 50 kms to go in heat that was in the mid 30′s.

The descent down off the Jaufenpass was uneventful for us and once at the bottom we settled into a good rhythm after we picked a couple other people in our group. We also had the fortunate luck of hooking up with a couple of riders from the Netherlands and man those guys like there flats. Unlike yesterday where I spent a good chunk of time pulling for the last 30 km, these two seemed more than happy to pull us along at 40-45 km/h for what seemed like forever. Our little group managed to hang on although there were many that couldn’t hold the pace and fell off over the 20 km of flattish terrain we had before we hit the final three short climbs coming into Brixen. Although the climbs were short, at that point in the race they were pretty challenging. I almost blew past one of the turns as I had my head down trying to pull the group up to the second climb.

All in all an awesome day where the climbs were not nearly as steep as the climb up the Khutai yesterday, but they were numbingly long.

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Posted in Day 2 by mike No Comments Yet