STAGE 4
Ostensibly the easiest of La Ruta, it is still 75 miles long with 5,000 feet of climbing. Picture riding from Richmond to Charlottesville on a MTB starting out with 30% more climbing than Wintergreen and all of it much steeper. My hind quarters were still barking and very concerned about the 20k of railroad to cross. Scott crashed 3 times in the first 20k but managed to maneuver himself into innocuous landings. I came around one corner and he was 20 meters downhill of his bike. He claimed to be fine having jumped over the bars instead of flipping over them. We rode a littler harder and limited break time at the checkpoint/food stations, not because we cared about our place (I was still about 150th), but we just wanted to get done and go chill on the Caribbean.

At the second of the long railroad bridges, a train was actually coming and we had to wait. We had been moving up already so we were in a good position, but now we had a group of 20 riders queuing up on the bridge. I was thinking a group might be able to paceline and end this thing even quicker because the last couple hours were flat. Apparently a few people, one was an American pro woman, thought somebody was walking too slowly across the bridge, so they walked on the outside of the rails, with nothing between them and their bikes but a 55 foot drop to a raging river. I had seen so much crazy stuff already but that was truly startling. They were not even going to save time.
As I thought, this group was hammering on what they call sand roads, basically just hard dirt with rocks everywhere. It was sort of like cobbles. We did this for an hour or so but it all broke up over the last section of railroad, which was fine by me because now all we had left was a Costa Rican 12k on the beach to the finish, which was 20k and had some rocky roads, a hill, and heavy open traffic.

Some random stuff from Stage 4:
1. A few dudes were attacked by bees on the bridge and had to jump in the river to avoid getting stung to death.
2. Another dude got mugged/highjacked. They stole his bike and disappeared into a Pineapple plantation.
3. They serve beer on ice.
4. http://www.cyclingnews.com/races/la-ruta-de-los-conquistadores-sr-1/stage-4/phot