After two consecutive days of hard racing, I’m now sitting in my bed at a Best Western just outside of Pau, excited for what will be our final TT of this race.

I’ve stayed in this Best Western before, during the 2021 Tour. Often, your memory of hotel rooms on the Tour becomes a homogenous blob. There have been numerous times when I’ve entered a hotel during the Tour, thinking I had never stayed there before, only for my phone to connect automatically to the wifi.

I remember this one, though, as I abandoned the Tour after stage 18 that year to be at my best for the Olympics. Disco (my soigneur) and I took what was the most expensive taxi ride I’ve ever had, from here to the Toulouse airport, excitedly bound for Japan.

The first 10 stages of this Tour felt like I was doing them in slow motion. However, since we reached the rest day, it feels like someone has just hit the fast-forward button, and now I find myself with just over a week remaining.

We had a great rest day in Toulouse on Tuesday. My family came down to visit, and my daughter gave me her own stuffed animal kitty for “good luck.” I’ve been away from my wife and two kids for most of the last two months. Relative to their ages, two months is a significant portion of their lives, and when you’re away for that length of time, you notice changes. It did my soul some good to see them, but it also made me excited to be getting closer to the end of this race.

Stages 11 and 12 were a rude transition from the tranquility of the rest day, as we raced full throttle for the majority of both days. Jonas Abrahamsen won in stunning fashion on stage 11. He attacked from km 0, and despite having broken his collarbone just four weeks earlier, managed to hold off a peloton racing at breakneck speed.

Having broken my collarbone this season I was blown away by the performance. Four weeks after my surgery I was struggling to wrap my head around racing again, let alone trying to win a stage at the tour.

Stage 12 saw me trying—and succeeding—in getting into the breakaway. However, from its outset, I knew we were destined to fail.

With the help of the IPT boys, I managed to infiltrate the break, which, in the end, wasn’t too difficult a task. Almost a third of the peloton ended up in the move, and unfortunately, Carlos Rodriguez, who was sitting at only five minutes down on the GC, was also there.

So, despite the front group riding at a pace that a 50cc scooter would struggle to maintain, Uno X and EF also rode at a similar pace in the chasing peloton, and for the second day in a row, we averaged 50 km/h for the first two hours of racing.

Before the stage, our performance group estimated that, in order for the break to win, it would need a minimum of four minutes over Pogacar at the base of the final climb—such is the state of racing now, that in your pre-race meeting, your director tells you that you need the same amount of time it takes to cook a good rare rib-eye to beat the best rider in the world.

Despite my best efforts to push the gap out on the first categorized climb, I crested it with just over two minutes, and was ultimately caught just before the base of Hautacam.

It felt great to be on the front of the race, though. My stomach troubles seem to have been resolved (I dosed my carbs more evenly throughout the day), and despite feeling like I was on a fool’s errand, yesterday gave me confidence for the days to come.

Today, we take on a 10.9 km TT starting in Loudenvielle. Unlike Stage 5’s TT, this one is going to hurt a bit more. With 3 km on the flat, straight into 7 km at 8%, there will be no hiding behind advancements in aerodynamics. Our setups are so fast now that it’s hard to really go slow on a flat TT, but with how well Tadej Pogačar is climbing, many riders in the peloton will have to push a lot harder to make the time cut.

Even I, a seasoned climber, will have to push a bit more, just to get through. Fortunately, I will be doing it all on my road bike.

I hate time trials. There is no way around it. I think everything about the current iteration of the “race of truth” is, in the words of my younger teammates, “dog.”

My hatred for the TT stems from many reasons. The main one being that I am terrible at them. I have always struggled in this discipline, and even during my days of focusing on the General Classification, the TT was my Achilles’ heel. However, there are other reasons for my disdain for the discipline.

I think the TT bike and the equipment around it are a detriment to the sport. Most manufacturers find them to be an inconvenience. Consumers don’t buy them, as triathletes now prefer triathlon-specific bikes—which do not meet UCI requirements—and people who used to buy TT bikes now buy gravel bikes. The bikes and equipment create a massive disparity among teams and strain lower-budget World Tour squads that already struggle to remain competitive.

In my mind, to now call it the “race of truth” is disingenuous. Yes, you could probably put Remco Evenepoel on a mountain bike, and he would still be competitive with me in a TT. However, the difference between the best TT setup in the World Tour and the worst is enormous, and the power required to overcome this gap is insurmountable.

TT bikes are also wildly dangerous. It isn’t a coincidence that two men who have won the Tour in the last decade have almost died on TT bikes. To me, it’s crazy that nobody in the cycling community thinks it’s crazy that a TT bike is meant to be ridden without immediate access to brakes. I understand that this setup makes sense on a track; however, on open roads, it is incredibly dangerous.

Everyone knows that the fastest position in a TT is with your head down. To maintain this head-down position, you have to train it, and you can’t just do that on a home trainer.

Under the current UCI regulations, hundreds of pro riders are incentivized to ride on open roads at 50+ km/h with their heads down. That is crazy. Now, one could argue that you can stay on the home trainer (which is not a realistic environment) and only ride the position outside in a race, but just because the road is closed doesn’t mean that not being able to see ahead is “safe.”

I once heard a story of a top-tier time trialist in the World Tour telling his teammates that his plan was to start a TT with his head down, and he knew that after he saw the fifth sewer grate on the road, he would look up to prepare for the course’s first corner. When he started, he counted down the sewer grates, and after seeing four, he waited for five, but it never came. He must have missed one, and he went straight into a gate.

Lastly, it’s hard for me to imagine any kid seeing this picture and thinking, “Man, cycling looks cool.”

I still think that the TT has the potential to be a cool discipline, but for that to happen, it would have to be done on a road bike. If the TT were ridden on the same bike and helmet that you have to race with in the peloton, it would be way safer, much less of a hassle for teams and manufacturers, and it could start living up to its moniker of “the race of truth.”