Two days since the monster St Carlos ride and I unexpectedly felt like a blast up to La Plagne – 4,600ft climbing. Normally this would still be a recovery situation so that was unusual to start with. The climb straight up to La Plagne is pretty soulless and it can feel like mental torture grinding your way up there and that’s what I expected. Instead, the feeling was good both physically and mentally. The only thing that appears to have changed all of this is the food supplements. There was no tiredness following the St Carlos ride and recovery seemed to just happen quickly. Today I started consuming the potion every 20 minutes from the start. 90 grams this time – a bit higher consumption rate than the last time. Salt was slightly reduced due to there being less heat and much more lemon juice was added. It tasted delicious and was easy to swallow. Amazingly the climb pace was close to a personal best despite being overweight. All very odd that only changing feeding during workouts can make such a dramatic difference – but so far this does appear to be the case. Once again there has been no sleepiness to follow the workout. I read that EPO is supposed to give an improvement of 5% to elite athletes. Just mixing maltodextrin and fructose and making it easy to use seems to have given me about 50% improvement. I also read that amphetamines give about 5.5% improvements. That means that all the athletes before the Lance Armstrong era were getting an even bigger advantage from doping! The hypocrisy in using him as a sole scapegoat is just unbelievable. Every French cycling hero that existed should be dumped or they should back off and reinstate all the rest including Armstrong.