Philip Deignan said after saying goodbye to Irish fans in Dublin he had a seamless Giro transfer back to Italy.
Monday May 12th, Transfer to Italy and Rest Day.
By: Philip Deignan
As it was our last day in Ireland, I had a lot of visitors to the team hotel in Dublin Airport last night.
I stayed in the lobby, chatting, signing autographs and posing for photos for a few hours after dinner but still managed to get to bed at a reasonable time of 11pm, as I knew I had an early start this morning.
Six hours and 45 minutes later, I was up and ready to go to Italy. After a quick bowl of porridge and a cup of coffee for breakfast, I headed to the terminal with the team to board the plane.
Today’s transfer went pretty smoothly really. When we got to the airport, our boarding passes were all waiting for us and we walked straight through.
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We flew on a Thomas Cook chartered plane and I spent the flight sitting next to our Spanish team carer Crespo.
We had a chat about the story in the paper about a bomb found in Dublin on Saturday night.
The newspapers and international media were trying to connect the bomb to the Giro being in Ireland but it doesn’t make sense to me, just doesn’t add up. And I told Crespo that I didn’t think it had anything to do with the race at all.
When we landed in Bari, the organisers had pulled out all the stops to make the journey as stress free as possible, with the team buses even parked on the runway waiting for us.
After a quick passport check, my Sky squad only had a five minute drive to our hotel, arriving about 1pm, just in time for lunch so it was a pretty quick and efficient transfer today and wasn’t one of those epic travel days that wear you out.
As you aren’t going to be racing and therefore aren’t going to be burning off as many calories as you would during a stage, you always have to be really careful what you eat on a rest day.
Whether I’m racing or not, I still find I have the same appetite but restricted myself to some salad, rice and a bit of parma ham before heading out with the guys at 4pm for a leisurely spin.
Although we usually have strict protocols for most things and plenty of team meetings, in general, rest days are about what the individual riders want to do. The team is pretty flexible about them so my Aussie teammate Chris Sutton, who had a dodgy tummy last night, took the day off as we saddled up.
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At Team Sky we all have three bikes on this Giro and today we rode our third bike, just to make sure everything was okay with it.
Even though we just rode easy for an hour to spin the legs, I thought that my bike just didn’t feel right.
When you ride your bike every day, you can tell immediately if somebody has altered something or even adjusted your saddle or handlebars by just a millimetre or two. Today, as I rode along, I knew there was something wrong but couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
You can imagine my surprise when we got back to the mechanics truck afterwards, and I found out that my third bike was a different sized frame to my race bike and spare bike. I can’t explain how that happened but hopefully two bikes will be enough on this Giro anyway.
This evening I had a nice call from the Oakley rep to the hotel and he gave me a couple of spanking new pairs of sunglasses, which is always good for the morale.
I went for black frames with the Transitions Photochromic lenses that change with the various light conditions, going dark in the sun and becoming clearer on the more overcast days.
While it was a bit warmer in Bari today than it has been the last few days in Ireland, I think the weather is following us.
I’ve heard rumours that the forecast is for rain tomorrow. That’d be pretty disappointing, especially with the road surfaces down here.
At least in Ireland if it rains there’s a bit of grip on the roads but here, it’s notoriously slippery, so I hope the rumours aren’t true.
If they are, well at least those new lenses will come in handy.
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