Stage 2 was kind of a mental win. Which was good since the physical fatigue was starting to pick up. Stage 3 can be telling in a stage race, it’s when things start to get real on the physical side of things. Honestly, I was tired but my legs were still feeling strong and ready to go.

Stage 3 here seemed to play into our hands a little bit more as well. The climbs weren’t exceptionally long, some got steep, but they didn’t go on for miles and miles. There was also a lot of single-track descending and things that Wes and I just tend to fair well at. The stage started and finished in Davos and dropped down into Klosters twice. It’s really a lot of fun to get to see some of these other villages and towns along the way.

The day still had a lot of climbing in it and there was a lot of uphill late in the day. So, we stuck to a relatively conservative start while paying some attention to positioning heading into the woods, trying to make sure we could take advantage of any sort of “advantage” we might have. After a bit we were rolling 4 strong with Brian and Josh, making sketchy passes and having fun like we were just on a group ride together in a magical place. In one of the smaller towns, we shared some pedal strokes with the Michael Bolton duo team from the US (strong duo team who we’d see a bunch of throughout the week) and had some good laughs before splitting up.

The stage got us on a lot of super cool singletrack and we were letting it rip. Keeping it steady and having fun a lot of the miles just flew by. The challenge on the day was the last bit of the day had us climbing back up from Klosters to Davos. The meat of the last bit was in gravel and we did our best to keep the pace strong.

Near the top we got into some forestry where it kept pitching up, then flattened, then repeated…I was losing steam and patience. Luckily, we were rolling with a group at this point that included two of the grandmaster legends (grandmaster is 60+) these guys were so strong, that helped me stay motivated to keep on pushing.

It wasn’t long before we were staring the last stinger of a climb down and we both put in some effort to get over the top before a little singletrack section and hammered it to the line. Ending up in 5th in master’s men for the day and really our best day of the week.

We were hitting our stride (or I was, wes never really left his) and two more stages to go. It was pretty amazing to feel strong almost all day. I mean we weren’t setting any land speed records but it felt pretty good.