So we’re in the beautiful land of Ireland for the Junior Tour of Ireland.  After Nationals (and Fitchburg for the other guys), we packed up the bikes and hopped on a plane.  Arrived a few hours before the start of the prologue, built the bikes, and we were away!  At least there was no time to get cabin fever waiting for stages!

So the prologue was a 4km uphill TT under crazy rain, wind and cold.  I take it that’s typical for Ireland though, because everyone was running around like it was a summer’s day in shorts and T-shirts!  Anyway, I got going and felt pretty strong, didn’t push nearly as hard as I probably should have though.  I finished without too much pain and the results showed that, with a 20th spot 30 seconds back.    Not great for sure, but no big deal either – 5 more days of racing to gain some time.

The first road stage started this morning, under somewhat nicer, but also rainy and very windy conditions.  We got going into a headwind that had us hammering away just to go down the hills in our little chain rings!  It was insane how windy it was, but soon enough that wind would play to our advantage.  As we made our way around the loop we had to do the crazy wind turned into a cross wind, and Anders and Robin just started drilling it.  I was not positioned great, but saw them get up the road with about 6 others, which was certainly good for us.  After that Yannick, Austin, and me just kind of covered moves looking for a free ride up to the guys.  As we went over the first KOM (actually they call them king of the hill here!), some guy from England just started hammering for all he was worth.  I was on his wheel, and just kept trying to tell myself that surely he couldn’t keep that up!  Finally, he brought it down to a more sustainable pace, and we found ourselves with in a group of 4 with a good gap.  Although this sounds horribly lazy, I pretty much let them bring me up to the break.  Since I already had 2 team mates in the move, it wasn’t my job to bring anybody else, and if they wanted to make it they would just have to give me a free ticket across.  We made up the minute and a half of real estate pretty quickly, and joined them with about 50km left to race.  Now the numbers were really good for us, 3 guys in a group of about 10, since some of the original escapees had been dropped.

It was difficult to get everyone to work well together, but we managed to keep it rolling fairly well, and were sitting at about a minute and a half for the most part.  It was pretty clear that we were doing the bulk of the work though, and towing the others around isn’t exactly what we usually try to do.  So, with about 25km to go I jumped away.  They brought me back pretty much instantly, but that’s when Anders swung his punch and got everyone really good.  Nobody had an answer and Anders rode off into the distance.  At this point, Robin and I were more than happy if the break slowed down, so we no longer had to do a thing.  The others chased fairly well, but the gap was slowly growing, and the other teams were getting tired and frustrated.  I saw a small moment where the others were sitting up, trying to get someone else to work, and that’s when I jumped to help Anders.  I charged away as hard as I could, and got a gap quickly.  I made the junction to Anders with about 12 or 13 km to go.  After his very tough effort he was pretty tapped out, so I tried to do as much of the work as I could, but unfortunately his earlier efforts made that too much.  I had to ride away to gain as much time as I could for the general classification.  At this point is was just a 10km TT with the stage win and overall lead on the line.  I buried myself to gain every second possible, and my gap just kept growing and growing.  The kms seemed to click by slower than ever, and the headwind felt like it would push me backwards, but finally I saw the finish line approaching.  It was so windy I couldn’t even put my hands up, but I came across the line with a good punch of the air, followed by a mighty collapse into the grass on the side of the road.  I was so happy to have taken the win, and pumped about the yellow jersey even more!  In the end I took the win by 1:39 over Anders, who held on for 2^nd, and 1:51 over the original break.  That puts me in the lead by 1:20 for GC.  Now we’ve got 4 stages of taking control of the race, and keeping all the other contenders well in our sights.  It’s going to be a tough few days, but I know the guys are up to the task.  Stay tuned for all the excitement the next few days has in store!

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