We have now moved into our accommodation for WOC. The Hotel  Dauphinois just down the road from the event centre…which also means that we will need to leave the hotel at 7am the morning of the Sprint Qualification! It’s a fairly old-looking hotel and smells a bit like pensioners, which seems to make up the majority of the rest of the clientele of the hotel.

Sunset over Annecy on the way back from training

We have spent the last 4 days training on relevant maps for both qualifications and finals of the middle and long distance races. During our move from Annecy to Aix les bains we spent what was left of the morning in the centre of Annecy sprint training. It was near lunch time by the time we got out amongst it and the main market street was crazy full of people! This made sprinting very difficult and often you just had to move with the crowd… It almost felt like being in an action movie running away from the bad guys. Eventually once you got out of the masses there was some cool route choices through some pretty crazy little tunnels.  Lunch was found in the market place afterwards and we got to test out our relatively poor french paying for food that in the end tasted pretty crap to be honest. I think that it was one of the coolest sprint races I have ever done. Very fun!

This evening was spent in Chambéry, checking out the cool underpasses and tunnels on the soon to be embargoed sprint final map.  It looks like it will be a very cool and very exciting spectator race, something that I would be very excited to be a part of. We shall see though as it will take Chris to Qualify for the Long on Saturday which will allow me to run in the sprint qual next Tuesday, and to run on the map I will need to qualify also!

I have been feeling pretty crap the last week or so and have come down with a nasty cold that I just can’t seem to kick. Hopefully it is in its final stages and I will be all raring to go by Sunday for the Middle Qualification.