Don’t be scared
Don’t be scared
Confidence is king when it comes to tackling the cobbles according to Hammond, who believes relaxing is the best way to comfortably conquer the pavé.
“The worst thing you can be is frightened, so the advice I’d always give to people is try to relax as much as possible,” he says, “not doing the usual or the things you want to do automatically.
“The worst thing you can do is grab hold of the bars tighter or tense your whole upper body. The advice I give is to start off riding the cobbles at a speed you’re comfortable with so you don’t frighten yourself from the start, and then as you build your confidence, go faster and faster and you will find they get easier and easier.
“Your confidence will grow and hopefully you will be able to keep relaxed and calm while riding on the cobbles.”
From experience, he believes very few of the secteurs are actually as decisive as many think, with the acceleration to get to them just as hair-raising.
“The funny thing, for me, about Roubaix is that out of the 27 secteurs, you can only pinpoint two or three where you really rode flat out on them,” Hammond adds.
“It’s a little bit like a climber in a climber’s race – you don’t ride every single climb trying to drop everybody else. You ride some of them at just a good tempo, so the people who can’t climb are dropped but you can use that part of the race to recover.
“That’s exactly the same as Roubaix. I spent more time on the cobbles recovering from the acceleration immediately before them.
“There’s always massive acceleration to get to the cobbles first and then once I got into them it was then more about recovering, relaxing and letting my heart rate get back down for the next bit of tarmac in between the cobbles.
“It’s not necessarily about hitting them hard and fast, certainly not. The more relaxed you are, the more energy you can conserve on the cobbles.”
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