Stage 3 and 4 and SALT

Stage 3- 112km with a big hill and the same hills as the day before. The KOM was on a 500m 15% climb which comes up suddenly. It is flat and fast all the way to the bottom and it doesn't change once you hit it except not flat.
I was tasked with keeping Tim with the Yellow jersey. So I paced for him, chased for him and drove the bunch at as high a speed as I could before Tim gave me some time to recover. Problem is no-one else in the team was in a position to take over so I sat in just behind for 1km and was back into it. We hit the climb at 45km/h and that was me, rapidly heading backwards as I suffered u the KOM. I got over the top just off the back of the main group(lots more behind me though) and motored at over 75km/h down a sketchy descent through light an dark, wet and dry, and off camber corners to catch the main group. After nearly over cooking a couple of corners I resigned myself to not catching the main group solo so waited or some other chasers and pickup some up and formed a nice working Gruppetto. We worked hard to limit the losses and ended up only losing 14min on the leaders.
A nasty crash in the lead group saw another rider going to hospital. The crash the day before saw the worst rider get a rod in his leg. All up agood day and I survived for another day.

Stage 4- 1.1km Criterium around the SALT Village.
This was always going to be a very fast and hard race, so I made sure I was near the front at the start. Sure enough the U/19 started off at a blistering pace with speeds in excess of 55km/h for the first 10mins. As a reult I over cooked myself and was going out the back at a rapid rate. At the 20min mark there was a bad crash with a rider hitting a parked car, which stopped the race. Just as the Coms were stopping the race they pulled me and the 2 other riders up and stopped us first. By the time the rest of the race had stopped they had decided that my group was going to get caught and we were pulled out of the race as lapped riders. When the race was restarted they had 4mins plus 2 laps. Why couldn't my group ride the last 4 minutes and finish the race properly. At least they gave us a finishing time not a DNF.

End result was 30th on GC @ 36min plus some change.

Time to recover and rebuild for the next event.
CIAO