I awoke on the morning of what had been billed as one of the toughest stages, feeling like death warmed up. Any thoughts of the previous day's shorter TT providing some recovery were quickly eradicated. My legs were stiff & extremely sore, my eyes were so puffy at 5am that i struggled to move them, my fingers were swollen and more importantly, my stomach had tied itself in a knot! At some point in the last week, pretty much everyone has had stomach trouble of some kind and even if you don't catch anything, 8 days of racing and energy food will do it... I sat at breakfast, unable to eat, with my head on the table.
In the end, 123km and 2100m of climbing passed uneventfully -relatively speaking. As we churned through the last 6km my right calf muscle was siezed solid, my left knee was hurting from an earlier 'prat-fall' and i thought i was going to need new shorts due to my squiffy-belly. Then i looked over and Dave was gushing blood out of his nose!
Luckily it was just the amount of dust and it cleared up later that night. Not that i would know, i tried to force some food down and caved at 7:30pm, while most decent people in the UK were still at their desks!
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