Aleman attacked from the off, as usual, however, this time he was beaten out of the gate by
@djk and
@martin22 . With a superhuman effort, he caught and passed Dave Kings building an 11 seconds lead, but was trailing Martin by 4 seconds after the first kilometer. Determined to catch Martin, he kept the effort high and caught him another 500m up the road, as the gradient increased. By the second kilometer he had pulled out 6 seconds on Martin and 25 seconds on Dave.
@Mugshot a further minute back and
@Whorty three minutes down forming the grupetto. At the third kilometer it looked as though the elastic to Martin had broken, as the gap had gone out to 22 seconds, with Dave catching Martin strongly. The next kilometer and a half were fairly flat, and it looked as though Aleman was in trouble having difficulty keeping the power levels up, Del had pegged his gap to a minute and a half, but Dave and Martin were having a great battle between themselves pulling back Aleman to only 13 seconds by the 5th kilometer. This was where the gradient really ramped up and although the average was only going to be about 8% for the next 2 kilometers, there were kickers of 10 to 14%. Although he was desperately trying to maintain form Alemans shoulders were rocking, and he was pulling grimaces of pain as he dug deep, to little effect, Dave was coming on like a train, and the deficit was only 9 seconds at the 6 Km. If Aleman could only maintain a slight gap and crest the summit ahead of Dave it was unlikely that he could be caught on the 10% descent. Sadly for Aleman that was not going to be the case as Dave caught and passed him with only 500m to the summit, and even Martin was closing the gap. As Aleman crested the summit Dave had already pulled 25 seconds out and Martin was only 12 seconds behind, which was pretty much how they all finished.
32:21 for me
This ride is now closed