Day 4: Pretty easy day today as I spent a part of it lying on the ground! Perhaps it is the fatigue of the past few days catching up to me but I wiped out three times today, thankfully nothing seriously damaged except the ego.
The stage itself was pretty tame my partner 'Gazman' and I thought but only after we had it under the belt. The efforts over the last few days meant that the legs felt pretty sore and tired this morning lining up for the start and neither of us were confident about the day.

We soon found our legs though perhaps because of the spectacular opening decent into the valley with helicopter overhead and police sirens blarring, it really is an amazing race to be part of.
We got off to a good start after fighting through the usual earlier eager-beavers up the first of many climbs that took us away from our campsite of three days towards our new two-night base at Worcester.
The stage passed through some unique scenary which helped the motivation and the cooler conditions of the day were especially welcomed by my UK partner. But the falls took there toll on my moral a little and I was battling to get any real enjoyment out of the day but thankfully the Gazman had a good quip or two at hand to keep the laughs and smiles flowing.
As we had spent the day waiting for me to pick myself up of the ground, we found ourselves with 5k to go, feeling rather fresh and with a couple of teams in site ahead, we decided to put the hammer down and have a bit of fun. We past three teams in the last few kilometres and we really raced down the single track to the finish. We could at least take that away from today's stage.
Tomorrow, it is a Time Trail stage which is again, like this whole mountain-biking thing, going to be a unique experience for me and the Gazman.