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if she will continue, fingers crossed.

                  Devastated! My race is over, and I am currently an emotional
mess about it, as failure does not sit well with me. Mentally I long to continue
but physically I just can't. After only managing to eat a few mouthfuls of
food last night I have just got weaker. Set alarm for 3.30 but when I went
to stand I just fell straight back down again. So we set the alarms for 6 but
I felt no better, everything just shakes and has zero strength, and on trying
to eat I just get sick, so was unfair to hold Jayne back anymore. She had
gone on alone and will be there in a flash as she is a truly brilliant cyclist and
deserves to be the only female finisher of this race. The organisers made the
race much harder this year to last, and in truth I am not a good enough
cyclist to have even got me is far as I did in the cut off time frames, that
was only managed through willpower, but never did I think food would be my
downfall. So next year when I will have to come back and do it all over again,
as I couldn't leave it un conquered, I will definitely need to be a faster and
stronger cyclist, as the times are quite tight, ideally you need to average
24km/25km an hour not the 21km I had trained for. Right I'm now off to find
a way to get to the capital so I can get to a doctors to see if my stomach
can be sorted so that I can feel a bit more human. Thank you for all your
support and sorry to have let you down.

Ed. No report from Jayne today but I can tell you that she crossed the border
from Albania into Macedonia and spent the night in the town of Struga.

                  Conclusion and support for Jayne -
I have now made my way from Albania to Istanbul so that I can support Jayne
at the finish. We were actually on track for the finishers party when we went
through last checkpoint, which means now Jayne can spread her wings and
ride at her supersonic pace, she has a great shot at making the finishers
party despite the delay when I was ill smile emoticon well that's if her
navigation holds out, both our Garmins broke a few days ago so we have been
using paper maps and Jaynes not a huge fan of map reading!!

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