Don’t panic, I will not be providing a comprehensive rehash of last night’s stage. You are entirely capable of clicking here to Cycling Central, here to Cycling Tips, or here to Cycling News or anywhere the hell else that Googling Tour de France takes you.
Potentially, however, this is the best coverage for you.
Suffice to say, our fellow Cadel came second and this is good and interesting to you and I because once we shared a similar geographic location, although I am sure that Cadel is living somewhere else now. However, BMC is one of my teams, and the use of the possessive pronoun keeps me interested.
Get interested folks. Cos it was interesting.
Not all the way, some of the way it was quietly sustained, though I always like to see the peleton slowly erasing the time distance, just the inevitable pacing of it, Dave Zabriskie from my other team, Garmin Cervelo just moving it along kwiktime tasol. But in the end it got nice and interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=n4SL8YqFGQg
In the mean time, I just wanted to reassure you that it is entirely possible to enjoy a sport that you do not really understand. Take AFL for example. I have greatly enjoyed the two games that I have seen and that is tiding me over until the Grand Final. With the Tour, however, I would recommend that it is better – for the ill-informed and not very interested, to watch an entire stage start to finish, rather than bothering with the short little updates in the morning with Mike Tomalaris saying useless things and only small amounts of Phil Liggett to compensate.
Some hints: The Tour de France is very long. Don’t get over excited too early. It is not actually possible to hold down a job and watch the whole thing in the wrong time zone. So just relax. If you go to bed early, I will not be judging you, not really, even if I pay you out on Twitter. Because really, most everyone has had too many teddy bear biscuits and a hot chocolate too early and they ARE ALREADY ASLEEP AT LIKE 11.30pm, so who are they kidding.
This is a case of not realising that the Tour is a precise juggling act of nutrition and training. I am entering the Tour with an abysmal lead up. I am sick. I was meant to be jogging a marathon today somewhere else and I have strange sleep deprivation which is a combination over sleeping and undersleeping.
But this does not mean I can’t take my nutrition seriously. Sadly, because no one will be at the side of the road to hand me cans of “unnamed carbonated drink” and liquid gels, I have had to take care of nutrition myself.
Today I started the Tour off right. Wearing Red White and Blue and eating the same.
I suggest that novelty themed eating may assist the novice Tour spectator.
See you at the Team Time Trial. Or at least the first hour of it. After that, I’m going to try and hold down a job.
Oh, and this is a picture from Cycling Tips of the section of the race that I missed because I was at a fundraiser beauty pageant. No kidding.
eleanor j jackson 
“fundraiser beauty pageant”, what????
you know there’s going to be questions about this.
Like, “how can I get invited to the next one?”
That’s a good question.
totally forgot to ask the hard questions about this today :-(
There are no hard questions Andrew, I went to a beauty pageant. It was totes radilicious.
I’d go to another if you asked me to.