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June 10, 2013

Bike- Four Peaks STAGE 3

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Go do a marathon race in the Cape, and you are almost guaranteed to come back with scratches all over your legs from a section of jeep track overgrown with Fynbos or grass. I thought I’d escaped that problem by coming to race in Europe, but evidently not!

After climbing 1200 meters in 20km from the gun today, I found myself sitting quite comfortably in the lead group along with all the Craft Rocky Mountain riders, as well as Saffa Darren Lill. What happened next was truly something “special”.

With the spout of bad weather most of Europe experienced last week the top of the mountain was covered in snow. For the next half an hour we found ourselves wading in knee to waist deep snow while dragging our bikes alongside us. A really funny experience for the 1st 100m, but then came the snow burn! And now my legs are covered in scratches!

I made the rookie error of getting stuck behind a bad technical rider on the singletrack descent, and found myself a couple 100m behind the lead group as we hit the valley floor, and then they were gone. Coming back was impossible, and remembering the pace they set on the flats yesterday I stood no chance. We had 25km of flat valley bike paths which took us to our final climb for the day in Kaprun another 1000m in 9km!

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The organisers here must have learnt a thing or two from the Cape Epic organisers, as at the finish line I saw that the start of the last climb was not more than 200m from the finish line. Lucky I didn’t see this earlier otherwise I would have been completely over it. I completely lost motivation over the last climb anyways, as the pain of these climbs is completely mind numbing, and requires you to just switch off and suffer. I completed the day quite far down in 36th place, quite a few minutes behind winner Jochen Kass of the Vuade Centurion team who made a solo breakaway at the base of the first climb and never came back, incredible!

Tomorrow we get another 20km climb, but at the end of the stage, yeeha!

Until then, keep doing the ride thing…