The first thing I can say about my first gravel race is - I need to learn everything again. But that's actually really nice. In road cycling, I couldn't really do anything for the first time anymore, as I'd done all the important races multiple times. So while it was always exciting to start a Grand Tour, it was less so when I had to start Paris-Nice for the 14th time.
Here, though, everything is new - even the riders. You've never seen most of them before as they were never in road cycling.
How you work with the bike itself is different, too. You have to take care of it yourself and think about things like tyre pressure and tyre choice. Plus, when I had a flat like in the second race, there was no car behind me giving me a new wheel. I had to figure out how to fix the tyre myself and pump it up, too.
So that's completely different, but it's a big fun factor as well. Another great thing is that nobody cares if you are 20th or 120th, as long as you go all out the whole day, you'll get the result you deserve. So that's very refreshing, at least.
Overall, I was expecting a difficult start to my gravel racing and actually, it was a bit more difficult than I was expecting. It was like the start of a road Classic, with everybody testing each other even before the first climb, then on it was a fight for position. All this was on roads that are sometimes single track and the guys that live and train here in Girona knew the course very well, too and knew where to be in front, so that was a big disadvantage for me.
I was always pushing ahead the whole time, I was sitting in the first ten of the first bunch, and it wasn't easy to stay there. The power levels are the same as in the WorldTour, so the level is quite high. But then after 50 kilometres, there was a part with single track and everybody had to get off the bike apart from the first six or seven leaders. That was where it split into three groups and I was on the wrong side.
So I had good legs, but the difference between a good result and an average result comes down to those sorts of things and finally, I got 29th.
Sunday was a lot harder, with a long climb before the halfway point. I was 19th in the second group but then there was a one-kilometre steep uphill, single track. So everybody had to stay in the position they had and the first five were already 40 seconds away when we got off it.
I was still fighting for a good position, 17th or 18th, pushing good numbers, trying to catch as many guys as I could. But then I got a flat tyre, so I had to wait for the group behind. So again, not a big result - but a lot of experience learned, all the same.
For the first hour and a half on Saturday I was pushing 350, 360 watts on average so it's not just like being in a bunch, cruising around. It's a really hard tempo. A lot of the guys who are racing here would do well in the WorldTour as well and it surprised me a little bit that the level was really so high.
If you are in a team you can ride together, where there are attacks before the climbs and if you have a teammate they can close the gap. But unfortunately one of our teammates was sick last week, so he didn't start, another's just coming off a cyclocross season so he's not in great shape anymore, a third one was just getting sick and didn't start Sunday, and I was mostly alone.
Other teams that were there with three or four guys could really help each other to close gaps, get into position, and let each other pass. If you are alone you have to fight for every spot, they don't just let you in because you've won some races in the past. You really need to fight for position.
I learned a lot of small things today, but the biggest one is you always have to fight for your position. On Saturday, I had a really good feeling through the whole race, and I was always in the top ten, but then in the feed zone, I went back into the group a little bit, and then suddenly there was a lot of single track and I found myself in position 25. And that was really hard, I really had to fight for a front position again.
It's a bit like in the Classics, but you have to try and stay in the top 10 the whole time so you can jump in the moves that are happening and that way you don't have to sprint after every corner, either, as you do further back.
So that's the biggest lesson for next time, at least for races where there's a lot of uphill and downhill: always stay on the front.
