Captain Havoc and Coronals summer trip.

Captain Havoc

Still no time for reports but we've made it. Coronal should arrive in Zürich today and I arrived safe and sound in Montreux yesterday. I got locked on three pints pints last night at a concert and fell asleep with 2km to go during todays stage, I'm tired, very tired.

Coronal

...aaaand we're done here Reports from the rest of the days to follow.

Coronal

Now, it's normally Friday the 13th that's supposed to be bad luck, but it seemed like it was coming a little early for us today. We got up a little late, owing to being totally wrecked from TTTing the day before. Of course, it was raining. In France. In the Summer. wtf? So we set off, assuming it would clear up a little bit as we went along. I mean, it can't rain all day, right?

Wrong. Totally wrong. We rolled along into Modane, already pretty soaked, but with the rain starting to hold off. Things were actually starting to look up. We climbed up out of Modane and made towards the Col d'Iseran. Once we started seeing signs for the Col at 60 km, we were feeling a bit on the confident side. However, once we got within about 40 km, we pretty much hit a storm. Ducking in for a quick sandwich for lunch, we worked out the game plan. The hell with it, we decided, it's only a bit of rain, and it might be fine on the other side. We'll press on.

On we go, climbing up to Lanslebourg, where I waited for the Captain. On this climb, I'm pretty certain a few flashes of lightning hit not very far away from the road. This, coupled with the torrential rain and the piles of water flowing back down the hill, persuaded us to ask a very good question: what would Blorg do? We decided that even Blorg would sit out a storm like this, and that we should find a cheap hotel in Lanslebourg. Apologies to Blorg if we have under-estimated you.

Fortunately (at last), the first place we came across in Lanslebourg was fairly cheap and had rooms. Les Marmottes was one of the nicest places we stayed the whole trip; they even washed and dried our soaking clothes (OK, the wash cost 4 euro, but that's pretty damn cheap) for which we were immensely grateful. With free wifi and a TV in the room, we sat in to watch the last 20 km of the Tour. Not a bad end to a really crap day.

Distance: 70 km
Highlights: awesome hotel, finishing at a reasonable hour for once
Lowlights: cycling in a f**king storm.

Coronal

It seems we're not the only ones who duck out of bad weather: http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/tour-de-france-to-just-avoid-snow-on-galibier

In the same area, Tour de France organisers in 1996 were been forced to cancel the main part of stage 9 from Le Monêtier-les-Bains to Sestriere, because of the iced rain in the Col d'Iseran

Coronal

This was it. The day we had been waiting for. Now with added epicness; not only did we have to go over the Col de la Madeline and the Col de l'Iseran, we also had to hit a total distance of 220 km to make up for the previous day's storm. It was a tough ask. We felt ready.

We set off just after 9 in the morning, according to our plan. 220 km in 13 hours of daylight, which shouldn't be too much of a problem to us. Once we left Lanslebourg, we were more or less right into the Madeline. Spinning up this one was grand, no major efforts required, though I did have to stop to take off my second base layer (climbing makes you a lot warmer than I had anticipated). Rendevousing at the top of this, we descended into Bonneval sur Arc for batteries before mounting the beast. We also met up with a pair of English cyclists we'd met the night before in our hotel, who were planning on doing an ascent and descent on the same side of the Col that day also. The four of us set off.

The Col is 12.5 km long and reaches a maximum peak of 2770 m. Now, I can't actually remember a lot of what happened after we started, it's mostly one long drawn out painful blur. I do remember a really nice 3% gradient that we sped along after 3 km of going up. However, respite from there was hard to find. Most of the 1 km averages were at something like 7-9%, apart from, I think, the second last kilometer, which was at 10% with ramps up to 13%.

Strangely, at no point did I feel that my legs or lungs were going to explode. I did stop three times (picture, toilet break and helmet taking off break), but none of them were really needed as such, and I would probably have gotten on better without them. I was pipped at the top by one of the English guys (he sat on my wheel for the last few hundred meters and then rounded the last corner ahead, grr. I need to work on my uphill sprinting...), but made the whole thing in about one hour and 20 mins, which was fine by me!

Once we were both at the top, we didn't really hang around. We were still on schedule, which was good, so we set off down the other side, aiming to get down as fast as possible. Descending through the cloud layer was pretty cool, and I probably took it a lot easier than I really needed to the whole way down the hairpins. We stopped off for lunch in, I think, Val d"Isere, at around 1pm, feeling like we had lost time somewhere. Quick plate of pasta and back on the road.

I'm not sure if it was around now that we first noticed, or later, but there was one hell of a headwind that day. This would come to haunt us later. We pressed on with a slight climb here, before a loooong descent towards Seez/Bourg-Saint-Maurice. This was possibly some of the most fun I had all day. Long sweeping roads, a nice gradient, even if there was a strong headwind. Unfortunately, the road began to flatten out here, so we had to push on ourselves, which proved to be rather difficult. I estimated that we needed about a 3% gradient just to cancel out the wind, which meant a fair bit of work, especially as there were now some uphill parts where we were very exposed.

Our game plan for the day was to follow one of the main roads, since it was Bastille day and we figured traffic would be rather light. This worked out well, but by the time we got to our first major town/city of Albertville, still with 100 km to travel, we were almost two hours behind schedule. Despite not faffing about at any point, the headwind had cost us a lot of time. Since there was nothing in Albertville, we pushed on, hoping to hit Annecy before nightfall. This is where our luck finally turned.

Once we got outside of Albertville, we decided to stick to our plan but stop in all the towns to see if they had anywhere to stay. However, in the very next town, we found a sign for a dedicated bike route all the way to Annecy. We took this, seeing signs which looked like distance counters painted on the path; 30 km to Annecy from here, rather than the 70 we had been quoted in Albertville! Things were starting to look up as we ate up the distance along this perfect flat straight stretch of tarmac. We managed to pick ourselves up a passenger in AG2R kit along the way, who very kindly pulled us along for a few km before turning off and heading back the way we had come...

At this point, we had just made up our time, and were sitting in Annecy at our cut off time there of 8pm! Geneva was looking good. We were on a roll, and it should be a simple straight line from here. This was not the case. After a lot of twists and turns, we were still a good distance from Geneva and decided to finally call it in and try to find somewhere to stay on the way there. We got very lucky in the last town before open road that there was a cheap hotel there. I may at this point have been slightly giddy, since we had hit 196 km, including two Cols, that day. This was my longest ever distance, seconded by the 153 we had completed on Tuesday...

For those of you that made it this far, I present you with pictures:



More here

Hermy

Epic it is!