Phil Gallant's Blog

Today was another big day on the bike – 71km from Bendigo to Benalla. In total that makes just under 1,000km in 6 days … the legs feel surprisingly good and less surprisingly the delicate areas feel a little numb. Whilst we’re well into the distance from Adelaide to Canberra, the hardest 2 days of the tour, in the Snowies, now lie ahead of us. We’re about to enter a world of pain!

Today we all wore our ’10 million reasons to ride’ fluro pink jerseys. It takes a lot to get me into anything coloured bright pink, however I think celebrating raising $10m for cancer research, support and prevention is worth making an exception for. The team looked great on the road and you certainly wouldn’t miss us in the dark!

The highlight of today’s stage was the team time trial. On tour the riders are allocated to one of eight teams, and tradition has it that each year there’s a time trial to establish the strongest team of the tour. As you can imagine riding to the line there’s a lot of banter and sledging around how things will play out … I was apprehensive as my team is the one everyone wants to beat (it’s a long story) and the team was loaded with strong riders … plus me! The idea of the time trial is that the team go flat out over an 18km course and the timing stops when the last person crosses the line. It’s not a pleasant experience to be at your limit for that distance – however we went pretty well and I was just about able to hang on. Results are announced after stage 9 … so there’s now much discussion about how things went!

Tomorrow we have a shorter day – only around 130km … as we transition from the flatlands to the mountains.