Hey all,

Last time I wrote was during the Tour of the Mediterranean…it was a hard race in the end and my good legs at the beginning of the race faded a bit. I ended up okay, covering moves and so on. The last day with the finish up Mont Faron was very hard, especially when you try to go with the kilometre zero move! I blew myself pretty badly and I was digging deep just to cross the line up at Mont Faron, a long way away from the podium.

After the Tour of the Med we on the Endura Racing team stayed outside Cannes in South France for a week to reload our batteries and get going again for Tour of Haut Var. We did some good training and had a nice time together. It’s important to have a good laugh with your team-mates, even if you’re not sitting in the saddle of your Look.

We did the final fifty kilometres from the first stage and then we knew that the finale was hard - very steep and narrow…

The race came closer and we changed hotel to the one for the race, a nice apartment hotel outside Saint Tropez. I shared room with Iker Camaño, our Spanish climber. With seven Grand Tours in his career, he is very experienced and a great source to have on the team. He has a load of stories to share as well.

We got through the first stage and I finished in the middle of the bunch, nine seconds behind Samuel Dumoulin (Cofidis - La Crédit en Ligne). The second stage - the big one - was coming up. It was 207 kilometres on a very hilly course. There were seven categorised climbs including two category one climbs and one HC category. That made the field split a few times. We managed to bring the Endura colors up the road in every break and fought throughout the whole stage, with riders represented in every group up the road.

I got smashed by my break with Alexander Blain but we had a few sprint points each after the stage. I got myself in the front group up until the last climb with 15km to go but there was my race done, I got dropped and rode in and crossed the line four minutes behind the winner. Thomas Vouckler (Europcar) won overall.

Now I´m in Spain, staying at the sports-hotel Mas Pelegri just outside Girona. It’s a great area for training and now that the weather back home has turned cold, with minus fourteen degrees, it´s a good plan to stay here in Spain. My next race will be Vuelta a Murcia in early March, a big one again…

Thanks for reading,

Alex