Stage 8 - Sunday, July 11 2010

• 1. Andy Schleck (Lux) Team Saxo Bank 4:54:11
• 2. Samuel Sanchez Gonzalez (Spa) Euskaltel - Euskadi
• 3. Robert Gesink (Ned) Rabobank 0:00:10
• 4. Roman Kreuziger (Cze) Liquigas-Doimo
• 69. Chris Anker Sorensen (Den) Team Saxo Bank 0:11:45

Exciting day in the Tour for Chris today and his team leader Andy Schleck. He rode hard at the front of Ramaz to set the pace and be ready for anything. Chris averaged 363 watts normalized for the 40 minutes with the first 26 minutes of the climb at 374 watts. Once he made it over Ramaz, his day was largely done. He had a little tumble down the hillside right beside Lance when he got tangled up with Lance in avoiding a crash, but was o.k. In the final climb, he rode with Lance's group up the climb and it was a very casual affair at this point, with Chris only averaging 292 watts, which is just at the top of his endurance zone (75% of FTP).

Interestingly the hardest part of the stage in terms of intensity was a short hard 7 minute Petit Joux climb near the beginning of the stage, where he averaged 442 normalized watts, and that's way above his threshold power!

Overall Chris burned over 4500 kilocalories, scored 288 TSS and his normalized power for the stage was 290 watts. The normalized power is what his body felt like and takes into account the variable nature of cycling to assess his true metabolic training stress.

I am sure Chris is very happy as his hard work paid off for his team leadery Andy Schleck as Andy was able to attack at the finish for the stage win and bring himself closer to the Yellow Jersey.

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