Relativity of Time. I have a great mate who has a theory on the relative speed of time passing. He believes that time should be measured experientially, rather than chronologically (similar to Dunbar in Catch-22, who believes if he does nothing for long enough, time will drag out to the point that he will effectively live forever).
I think there’s something to this from the point of view of the brain. It feels like a couple of months ago that we had the prologue up in Rotterdam, and weeks ago that the Roubaix cobbles stage took place, and yet today is only Stage 6.
Yesterday’s stage showed that even with various broken bones and wounds, our boys are still good enough to be rocking and rolling with the best in the world, forming a very nice lead-out train deep in the final couple of km. With a bit of luck going our way, and less injury, I am sure things would have been even better than they were!
If human bodies subscribed to my mate’s (and Dunbar’s) theory of the relativity of time, rather than to the boring old time passes chronologically adage, we also would have scored a better result even without the luck running our way. If you are on the start line you are -in theory — ready to race — but suffice to say that as a physio, watching what our boys did yesterday was above and beyond what I had hoped that they could squeeze out of their bodies.
They’re very good athletes (by definition if you have a number on your back in this race you’re a good athlete), and this week has shown they’re also extremely hard men (which is a completely different question).
We the med team (Serge Niamke our doc, Matt Rabin our chiro and myself) continue to work our butts off so that bodies and minds are once again in synch as to what is possible.