More Riding in France - Grand Prix de Plouay

The UCI Pro Tour rolls into the tiny town of Plouay every August for the Grand Prix de Bretagne. It's a 248km 13 laps of a course that has its start/finish line near the town's velodrome. The preceding day sees the junior and ladies races and the major teams usually field strong B teams for the main event. So the likes of BMC, HTC Highroad (with Renshaw), Sky (with Swift, Thomas & Bosenhagen), Europcar (with Voekeler), FDJ, Leopard Trek, Cofidis, Astana, Saxo Bank and more fielding teams gives a mini TdF flavour.

Via Nirone 7 posing next to sponsor's banners

On the Friday, the amateurs get a turn with sportive, randonee, VTT and walking events available, all using the same start line as the main event. I was entered into the randonee event as there's some kind of licence / medical cert requirement for the sportive. Even these amateur events attracted a full page preview and 3 page report in the Ouest France newspaper.

I opted for the 90km ride but managed to miss the big start (1900 in the randonee) by 30 minutes because I'd got mixed up with when the campsite allowed car movements in the early morning, but the organisers still allowed me to run. Nice. This route was constantly undulating, no real big climbs, but no rest sections either. There was one refreshment point where I filled up with water and enjoyed bananas and madelines. I probably picked off 100 or so riders over the route which made me feel better, given their 30 min head start. Nice weather too, wet roads to start with but no rain nor wind and temps around the 20 mark. Had my first puncture after 4000 miles of puncture free riding on Conti Gatorskins, but it was just over 1km from the finish so I walked it over the line. Good job my French is poor so I didn't have to understand the commentators' sarky remarks.

56 miles in 3 hrs 33 mins including the walking, so pretty pleased with that. Post ride refreshments included the option of a beer!  Shame I had to drive home.

So that's all my riding done now, next time on the bike will be on the way from Euston to the hotel in London on the night before the first day of L2P. Gulp!

More Riding in France 3

Today's ride felt like great practice for Kent. I didn't want to spend much time looking at maps so I just decided to head out through Carnac and stick to the major single carriageway D roads to the West with the city of Lorient at my halfway point before completing the ride by just retracing my tracks.

Despite holding back on setting off until later in the morning (allowing breakfast with the family) to wait for some showers to pass over, about 2 hours of this ride was spent in fairly significant rain. By French standards these were pretty busy roads and Lorient turned out not to be worth the effort. So good practice for Kent and Dover!

A very robust 61 miles this time, and a For Goodness Shakes vanilla flavour consumed ready for the big event out of Plouay tomorrow.

Bianchisti Cymraeg En Francais

Stuart, Conrad and I are off to France a couple of months early - and that's only 2.5 weeks away now.  Really looking forward to a lads week away to watch the Tour de France.

The plan is a ferry with cabin then there's 3 days of tour stages within riding distance of our accomodation base.  Looks like a couple of 80 mile days and one of about 30 miles, so that'll be excellent training for L2P - it'll be the first time I've done some distance on my bike 3 days in succession.

We'll be seeing the stages that start in Lorient, Carhaix and Dinan which are in the North West.  See them on the route map here.

None of these look like they're favourable for Mark Cavendish (with the finish at the seaside in Cap Frehel being the least worst), but we can still hope!  It will all depend on the strength and quality of any breakaways that are created by the rolling nature of the climbs in the earlier parts of all three of these stages.   If there's a decent and sustained breakaway group and Cav's not in it, then its game over.  Brad Wiggins might be in for a shout though.  No doubt Stuart will be giving his Union Jack cycling jersey its annual provocative outing.

On a more general point, great to see the team time trial back on the agenda - that's one of the more interesting parts of the event for me.

No doubt the weather is going to be superb!