Final Day Of TOS stages 7 and 8

First up was the individual Time Trail, As we woke the hail was hitting town and it was freezing, on the way out to the start in Winton it was snowing pretty hard. Once we started our warm ups The weather was doing the 4 seasons in 10 minutes at one stage it was snowing then sleat then some hail and the the sun come out. I was lucky when I started it was sunny but with 4 mins to go in my TT it hailed so hard I just about stopped.  It was quite hard after loosing my Magellan earlier in the week, with nothing telling me the distance or heart rates I was just riding as hard as I could. I got bloody smoked in this, I was 80th 3 mins down.

Photo: Peter Burggeman 

Stage 8, 87km from Winton back to Invercargill.

Right from the get go I was dropping wheels in the strong cross winds, I was close to the front but soon very close to the back of the splitting pelaton. As I looked up after 10 mins I could see 7 bunches infront of me each with only a few people in it and it was hard. In the end I ended up with a few guys I was way to strong for and they were crying every time I lapped so I let them sit on me for 20kms in the cross winds and we rolled to the finish not without 1 more hail storm dealing to us. We ended up been 20mins down on this stage no one really cared, my GC slipped but I wasn't winning or doing any good.

I ended up 74th on GC out of 130 starters on the final day I lost 12 spots though so it could have been much better. I wanted to be top 40 when I come down but this tour was by far harder than I thought it was going to be and I learnt so much about been in the right place at the right time, bunch position is everything when you are here with the spring time winds, not one day had no wind.

Loved it though and hopefully I can work something out next year to be able to do it again. Thanks for following my Southland Experience .

Cheers
Carl