Transcontinental Race No. 7 - TCR7 - #TCRN07 - 2019

Tl;dr, scratched, neck probs, train home.

I've just scratched.

Riding a few hours after tweaking my bike to raise the bars yesterday told me what I didn't want to hear, which was that, however high I got my bars, i was finding it increasingly hard to look down the road.

What finally convinced me was reading this account from Felix Wong, linked from @skinny 's blog, in my hotel last night
https://felixwong.com/2015/08/my-experience-with-shermers-neck/

I'm experiencing exactly the symptoms he describes, and doing the same things in response - getting my bars as high as I can and riding on my aerobar pads. Essentially schemers is usually seen as a sudden thing, but his was progressive over several days, as mine has been.

I could carry on and see how it goes for a couple more days. Climbing would be fine but what I really don't fancy are long, twisting descents, so makes sense to give up now, at Spittal an der Drau, before heading into the Alps. Also, tbh, I don't fancy letting it get bad, like he did, with consequent harder recovery. And reading his account made it only too clear where things are heading.

So I'm at the station, waiting for the 11:40 to Zurich, then a tgv and eurostar. Actually I might forget the eurostar and go for a ferry from dieppe.

Very disappointed. After a bad start I was going well. Had got up from around 150th place at the first checkpoint to about 60th, thanks to some good route planning and TTing across Serbia. If I hadn't messed up my di2 yesterday I'd have managed a third successive day of around 330km, which is far better than I did in either tcr 2016 or indypac. I'd expected to drop back a few places on the parcours but gain again on the sections I'd routed across Switzerland and France (my total route stats were 4040km and 38k m of climbing, so much flatter than any others I'd seen and only marginally longer, I'd put loads of time into optimising it). So I felt, given a few other people ahead of me scratching, I could realistically aim for around 30th, similar to where I came in 2016.

I'd got to the stage where pains I'd had earlier in the ride, like saddle sores and sore feet, had pretty much gone away, and I was feeling stronger as the ride went on. My plan of early starts and early finishes was working well, with 100km before breakfast setting me up for the day.

If I'd not done tcr before I'd be more disappointed and tempted to continue.

why did it happen? Two reasons

• My fall on the first day hurt my shoulder and probably gave the neck muscles a bit of hammer too.
  
• I spent a lot of time in the aerobars, far more than I have done before.