It’s that time of year again where 198 professional cyclists ride around France over three weeks. That’s right, it’s Tour De Flu season.

Every year during the Tour De France I get some form of illness. It is a combination of two events that break down my immune system and renders me helpless for a few days (or weeks like the dreaded 06 Tour). Firstly, June has always been the busiest/most stressful month of the year for work. In the Australian corporate world, June workloads are equivalent to three normal months combined. Long hours, tight deadlines and tough negotiations all take their toll on my white blood cells. Then the Tour De France starts in the first week of July and I’m so excited that watch every stage. Unfortunately TV coverage starts at 10pm and ends at 2am so I’m mindless zombie every morning. These two events lead me to get sick in July every year.

It has become such a regular occasion that in June this year, just before the start of the Tour, I went to the chemist in preparation and stocked up on multi-coloured pills, lozenges, chewable tablets, immodium, kleenex, hydralyte, toilet paper and vapo-rub. Annoyingly on schedule, after the first mountain stage in the Pyrenees, I woke up at 4:30am with explosive diarrhoea. By the time I was emailing work at 6:30am, I was laying on the bathmat having just retched my guts out while showering. Since this was my first Tour De Flu season with a new company, I had to be polite in my email otherwise I would have just text “TDF”. That reminds me – probably a good idea to disinfect my phones. Calm down…we’ve all sent a text from the bathroom.

Happily, it appears that the worst is over and I managed to only have two horrible days, which is a new low (one in the bathroom and one with the pounding headache and muscle aches from dehydration). I don’t want to get too cocky because I am currently sipping Hydralyte as I type this but I think it will be all systems go tonight’s for mountainous stage 14.

Go Cadel.