The weather however is much more to my liking, nice and cool. The laggards group is now 6 strong - myself, Dave, Jenny, Scot, Kelvin & Bob, out of the door at 7.15am, 30 minutes ahead of the fast group and straight onto at 14km climb up Peyersourde, quickly into the cloud base. I made it my personal mission to get up that damn hill before any of the fast group came through and managed it with relative ease, although I was still at that stage the last of the laggards. It seems I take longer to warm up each day, the laggards seem to always drift away ahead of me at the beginning of the day and end up behind me towards the end.
Down the other side and up the Aspin, a stunningly pretty 12km climb at 6% which I did on the Raid, this time enhanced by a bit of cloud for effect:
After the Aspin it got "a bit rural", a 3km climb up a mountain logging track, hitting 13% in many places, much of the road unmade. This was, to put it politely "a bit of a bitch" and a tough tough few KM's.
Jenny is still suffering badly, struggling to eat properly which leads to a lack of stamina and "bonking", a real nasty viscous circle. Today she only made it to lunchtime before jumping into the sag wagon. By comparison though I was finally feeling pretty good for the first time in 2.5 days, feeling happy to be on a bike. At one stage I saw Kelvin slowly catching me up a hill and felt a surge of energy, stepping on the peddles and blatting it up the rest of the hill. I didn't mean to do it to drop him, it all just seemed to happen at the same time. He told me later "I saw you there one minute, then you just vanished!".
The final climb of the day was Hautacam which I went up on the Etape. Unlike yesterday when I knew I didn't have it in me to do the final climb today I knew I did have it in me, indeed I felt great - however time was somewhat against me and I knew if I started it then I wouldn't be getting into the hotel until gone dark and gone dinner. Kelvin had managed to miss the final feedstop and was 15 minutes ahead of me, he went up Hautacam and arrived home to a heroes welcome, great job, I chose not to, much to my hindsighted regret.
Saw this sign on a cycle path on the way home, a warning sign for a 3% slope, thought that was quite cute (for the record it was actually 4% for a few metres...).
Summary stats: Distance 160km, climb 3,800m, max speed cols bagged 8 (out of 9).
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