The fifth day of TransWales kicked off with the third special stage, a team relay around the Climachx trail near Machynlleth. One rider rode the first half, the other the second. With the loop being mainly up then mainly down, the main tactical decision was which rider should do what. The solo competitors, of course, just had to do the whole thing.
While the Team Men and Women result held no surprises (Mojo Suspension's Ryan Bevis and Jonathan Pugh and SheCycles's Kim Hurst and Heather Dawe respectively), there were some new names in the other categories. The Pembroke Pedallers (Maggie Bichard and Max Jeffries) were the fastest mixed team, while Velo 95 (Ian Muir and Bob Moor) were top Vets. Joanne Carritt and Phil Spencer were the fastest soloists.
With the day's competition over with, all (ha!) that remained was the 65km ride to Llanafan. Despite being relatively short and promising a mere 1,800m of climbing, it was still a tough stage, not helped by a couple of wayward course arrows that had large chunks of the field going the wrong way. That all sorted itself out, though. The weather was a stouter obstacle, inevitably coinciding with the time at which the bulk of the field was right out in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately the route passed through Nant yr Arian, giving us not only a dose of purpose-built singletrack but also a welcome tea-and-cake opportunity. From there it was just a splendid descent, evilly steep climb and a few km of tracks to the campsite.
Going in to Day 6, all the overall leaders remain the same except that the Pembroke Pedallers have knocked MTB-Marathon off the top of the Mixed podium - that one looks like going right to the wire.
SheCycles team update
Kim Hurst and Heather Dawe finished as the 2nd team back to base on Thursday...that's pretty fast considering they've been racing flat out the whole way round. Seems like they can't get out of 5th gear even for the linking stages! They are still in the Women's leaders Buff jersey and would currently place 27th in the men's team category - only 24 seconds off a top 25 placing (were they blokes).....bet that's put the wind up the BikeMagic team!
Kim texted us from deepest Wales to say "We had a scare with a mechanical on day 4, we had a tyre blow out and realised all the others were quite damaged too with hundreds of small lacerations. Thankfully we took another spare tyre that day which held us up a bit at the start but it paid off later. We rode well today but it was long and we're getting really quite tired now." (Why are we not surprised by that!)
Her text message goes on to say "We are not really looking forward to the 7km TT on Friday evening. Last TT we both went for it, neither of us would let the other get ahead so I expect it'll be the same this time too. I don't think I'd ever pushed myself that hard before! After 90km linking stage and a lot of climbing the TT is going to really hurt!"
Day six features an 80km/2,800m climbing linking stage followed by another special stage - it's going to be a long day...
A happy start line!
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