So its been a while since my last blog so I am going to do a few. This one is about the race I did in Autun in France. This race was going to be my first international race ever. And boy did it live up to its expectation. This was a D2 race for those people who know what that means. So I had done not a heap of training being my first week in Europe and my diet had mostly consisted of pastries, Nuttela, Strawberries and Pasta. I jumped on the train and headed towards Autun. we got of the train about an hour from Autun and traveled by bus through some of the most amazing vineyards, the photos really don't explain how nice it was.

Race morning and it was a nice sensible race start time of 9am so you didn't have to be up at sparrow fart to get to transition, rocked up 30 minutes before the start of the race, did a little swim warm up, ran bare foot (shoes where already in transition) over the off road run corse and made our way to the holding area.

I still wasn't 100% sure which way the swim was going because of the lack of French I know. We got called down to the start line, which is pretty cool running down and they call "Carla Doyle, Cesson". Made our way to the pontoon and waited for the start. I turned to one of the girls on my team and asked which way to swim she pointed and spoke in French, so I just had to guess what she had said. A few minutes later we where off... It was a funny feeling not training all week and trying to get the heart rate up was quite hard. I had a pretty good swim, came out at the back of the front pack. When I hit T1 I saw the the leaders had just left. I thought b***** but also pretty good. I had not done a course reco so I was told there was a hill that was quite hard. And they where not wrong it was about 400-600m long and a good 8% gradient and I had 4 laps of this.... I made it up with out falling off the team bike that I was on and made it back down town through the technical course of hard rights and tight lefts and a few long straights. I got off the bike probably in the position that I got out of the swim as I had a few people pass me and I passed a few of them I had a pretty solid run, I didn't get passed but anyone and passed a good amount of people, but was really hurting by the end. I thought I wasn't to far from the finish line but I remembered one of the girls saying that you do a 400m loop before you go down the finish shoot. This was killing me because I could see the finish line but had to go around this track to get it. I ended up 31st out of about 70 or so, so I was pretty happy. The best part of the race would have been the drafting on the bike, oh man I love that kind of racing. And the second part would have been the recovery area, if I drank coke I would have been in my element, but I kid you not it was a full buffet after the race it was wicked.

So we packed up after the race and headed back to Paris, back through the vineyards, I would have loved to have stopped and had a look but time was not on our side.

So for my next blog I will tell you about my trip in Rome and my first week in the best place in the world by far Morzine.... I don't ever want to come home.