Day 4 - If your legs don't hurt today they will by tomorrow.

The sun has disappeared, it seems an opportune time to throttle back and have a short steady day, let the legs recover and make sure you have enough energy for the rest of the week.

Not everyone has the same idea though. Myself, Alan, Meirion, Shelley and Mark head towards Haut Vallee, a 20 mile steady road that actually climbs to almost 2000 metres, but just never feels like that. It is the most pleasant option in the area for a ride with very little climbing.

Above is Tim demonstrating how to protect yourself from the sun at altitude...go out in the rain wearing everything you own.

Out along here we see the damage caused by a recent avalanche, and eventually turn round at 15 iles as Mark has to leave today and needs to get back, packed and moving. I grumble a bit, the rest of the road is superb...surrounded on all sides by steep wooded slopes, dotted with waterfalls, and barely a car in sight, a treat if you usally ride in the tourist packed Peak District with heavy quarry traffic all over the place. It turns out to be the right choice though, cold rain starting to fall before we are halfway back.

Everyone else heads up the Briancon side of the Izoard, staying together for the climb before splitting up to either enjoy the descent back and chill out for the rest of the afternoon (Rich and Dewi), or complete the 65 mile clockwise loop down the other side, along the gorge to Guillestre and back to town. They get wet, actually quite wet...now I think about it, cold too...just look at the pics, doesn't look so nice on the Izoard today.

Today's reward though is tea in the old town, the walled part of Briancon at the top of the hill, the bit favoured by race organisers for stage finishes of the Tour and the Giro.

The pic here is Dewi doing his best to look ferocious, this is to ward off cattle, dangerous things y'know. That merits expanding I think.

My training partner and team mate, Steve Gibson, had a very nice carbon TT frame for sale, so I mentioned it to Shelley, and Dewi appeared as a buyer almost immediately. The frame was duly posted and lovingly built by Dewi.

Several weeks later, perhaps a little concerned that he hadn't been paid yet, Steve called Dewi to check up, only to find that Dewi, on the bike's maiden voyage, had tried, and failed, to get through a gap in a herd of cows in the first mile of the Ystwyth Club 10 TT. He hit the cow, followed by a gatepost, snapped the frame in two and ended up with the bruising you see below as a pointer for where the broken bits of his body were...2 vertebrae, a few ribs and so on.

Steve would like to apologise for pissing himself laughing on the phone while trying to sound concerned, he isn't always very good at that.

There is very little, if any, truth in the scurrilous rumour that Shelly, as the first rider on the scene of the accident, hesitated and checked his stopwatch to see if he was on for a personal best before deciding to go to Dewi's aid. Just not true, really.

Simon Miles:30

What we've learned today: French brides to be, apparently, tour the town seeking signatures on a petition of some sort. I must look this tradition up and debunk the only other theory I could think of, that being that the bride presents it to the groom if reports of the stag night were too wild and proclaims it to be a list of all the men she slept with on the hen night.

Tim signed out of politeness, we all declined having no wish to be named later in an international divorce or paternity case.