Stage 9- Hardest day in the Tour yet for Daniel

July 13, Stage 9: Morzine-Avoriaz - Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne 204.5km


1 Sandy Casar (Fra) Francaise des Jeux 5:38:10

2 Luis Leon Sanchez Gil (Spa) Caisse d'Epargne

3 Damiano Cunego (Ita) Lampre-Farnese Vini

4 Christophe Moreau (Fra) Caisse d'Epargne 0:00:02

164 Daniel Lloyd (GBr) Cervelo Test Team 0:34:57
 
Daniel's Comments; "Pretty tough day in the saddle today, we started on a small climb. For this reason I decided it would be best to do half an hour or so warm up, as I often feel blocked after the rest day. Thor got in the early break and banked the frist sprint, which was a great move. Next we started the Col du Colombiere, initially a nice pace was set by BMC, but then some attacks started and it started to feel much harder! I got dropped in a group, and a few groups came together on the decent to make quite a large groupetto. We went at our own pace from there to the finish and came in comfortably inside the time limit. I have to say that the Col de Madelaine was a bloody long climb - 1.5hours for us!! Another hot day too, so I'm feeling quite tired this evening.




Hunter's Comments: " Daniel is hanging tough right now and saving his energy for later stages. Unfortunately he has a bad muscle strain in his inner thigh which is not helping matters and he can't really accelerate hard. Even though he didn't make the front group over the Columbiere, he still averaged 335 Normalized Power for the climb, which isn't earth shattering, but a solid effort. The rest of the climbs he was able to ride at his endurance and tempo pace, which was great for him and best to save energy at this point.

An hour and half on the Madeleine. That's a long climb and considering that the leaders did it in about 1:10 at full gas, 1:30 is darn respectable. Even the gruppetto is hard in the TDF!



He rode 7 hours today, so a full hour longer than the winner. This is something that most people don't consider when watching the Tour on TV. The riders near the back most times end up out there longer. However, in overall scheme of things, they are riding a bit slower and conserving more energy. So you would think that Daniel used more energy than other riders, but if you compare to Chris Anker Sorenson's file of the same workout, on www.trainingpeaks.com, you'll see that he scored 358 Training Stess Score points. This is equivalent to 3.5 hours at threshold or 3 and 1/2 back to back 1 hour long time trials!



Daniel scored 328 Training Stress Score points and so he had less training stress than Chris Anker.

Chris Anker is a light guy at 64 kilos, so he didn't burn as many calories as Daniel, and this is one reason why looking at just the kilojoule expenditure in your ride can be misleading. Daniel burned 5466 kilo joules which is about 6000 kilo calories so I hope he had plenty of food in the evening.



Another day in the books for Daniel.
 
Download Daniel's Stage 9 file here