Awake at about 08:30 and off down for breakfast, more food! Today is a big day as I plan to ride the Coll de Femenia at a good effort but this time I'm going to have empty water bottles which will give me a three pound advantage, it will be interesting to see if it makes any difference, probably not after last night's dinner :-)

Breakfast done and I've established the opening times of the small branch of ProCycleHire at the hotel. The shop does NO mechanical work but is open for sales on Monday, Wednesday and Friday between the hours of 08:30 and 10:30. Filled bottles with just a small quantity of water and my energy powders, this will be topped up at The Garage :-)

15:10 Have realised that the time stamp that gets put on these diary entries when they appear in Evernote is the time that they are uploaded to Evernote and not the time that the entry is actually written which is a great shame. This means that the time of the entry needs to be physically typed in if you want to record it if the entry is typed offline because if entries are batch uploaded they will all show the upload time rather than the time typed when the entry appears in Evernote.

It has certainly been interesting to see quite a change in the appearance of a lot of cyclists this year compared to previous trips. I don't know whether it is just that there are more triathletes out here at the moment but there are a lot more people on bikes taking great note to improve their aerodynamic situation. Today I even saw people riding with disc wheels! I guess they may as well get more use out of them but there have been a lot of people with clip-on tribars and also many people with the more aerodynamic style of helmet and some full aero helmets being used. All that said it was nice to ride past a young guy with all the aero bling on the old blue Giant bike on the climb today, if looks could kill!

17:45 Spent a relaxing afternoon with Lorena and had some interesting contact with Austin Willcock about the possibilities on the property front out here, it will be interesting to see how that one develops.

17:46 Enjoyed the ice creams we had today, always nice to have a little treat after my exertions!

18:11 Surprised to read in the book "From Lance to Landis" that in Autumn 1995 Lance Armstrong spoke with Eddy Merckx and they agreed that Merckx would speak with Dr Michele Ferrari and set up an introductory meeting between the Italian doctor and Armstrong. I didn't know that Merckx was apparently involved in setting up what was to become one of the most infamous patient-doctor relationships in sport, according to this book at any rate.

20:46 Amusing incident/senior moment earlier on when I went down into the underground bike store at The Duva which was rather dark. Went to switch the lights on but nothing seemed to happen so walked a little further in and tried another switch and again no joy, far gloomier than normal. Looked up at the ceiling and oddly the fluorescent tubes appeared to be working Ok. Finally I sorted out the problem, I was wearing my sunglasses. Bit worrying really if this is the shape of things to come.

21:02 I was amused to read this, also in "From Lance to Landis" about Lance Armstrong's "development" as a rider :-)

His Motorola teammates did not notice any loss of weight in their leader when he showed up for spring training at the beginning of the 1996 season. On the contrary, they saw a bigger and more muscular Armstrong. "God knows what happened during that winter," says Frankie Andreu, "but Lance came back the spring of '96 and he was frickin' huge. He looked like a linebacker. It was Holy shit, man, he is big." Obviously we all noticed it and he knew we did. He said something about Ferrari not realising the effect the weight room was going to have.