Mountains To Beach Day 3 - Buckendera

Day 3 started at 5.15am. This was the "dawn raid" requiring lights. I was looking forward to this as a kind of rest day as it was less than 30km of racing and about 40km of cruising. I was planning on taking it easy as I had a little buffer on second and third place and to save my legs for the more important longer stage on Thursday.

The race started out at a fairly sensible pace. I tried to stay away from the pace making for the first lap and made a small attack about a quarter of the way into the last lap onto some really rough terrain. My main reason for winding it up here was to purely get over this rough stuff as soon as possible. I made a fair gap but Nick Booth managed to bring the chase group across to me. I rode away from the group again up a small rise around 3km from the finish and Andrew Fellow bridged the gap to me and we rode together to the finish. I took it easy up the final climb and rode to a comfortable second place building another 30 seconds in the overall GC.

Going into the big Thursday stage I have a 7.30 buffer which I hopefully wont need!