Cycle Nice to Ancona, Italy

CJudgeRun

Hi guys,

I'm a first time poster and am looking for the best advice going, so any help you can give would be much appreciated!
So, in August coming, a friend and I will hopefully be attempting to cycle from Nice, France to Ancona, Italy. According to google earth it's a distance of around 700km.
To give you a little background, we are both fit(15mile mountain runs regularly enough) but will be doing some fitness work over the summer to prepare ourselves. We are attempting to do the trip in around 1 week. Now, for the questions.....
1) Would you advise using a racer for the journey, or investing in a touring bike? Please bear in mind we are both students so the cost of having to buy a new bike is one that we wouldn't mind avoiding if possible. We will be packing light enough - just a backpack most likely.
2) Is it possible/legal to cycle in the hard shoulder or any part of France's/Italy's motorways? If not this would require a large amount of re-routing which I guess could make it unfeasible.
3) On the off-chance anyone has done this before, could you recommend both a route/schedule for the journey?

Once again any info that you might have would be great thanks!

TheBlaaMan

I've never done this - so take this as "book knowledge" and not based on experience.

1 You could probably do it on any bike, and you may not want to splash out on a road bike, but a fair bit of climbing will be involved, so make sure you have a good range of gears.

2 Don't attempt to cycle on motorway hard shoulders - its a short-cut to a tragic end. Its not for no reason that a cop pulling in a motorist on an M-way will escort them to the nearest slip road to deal with an infringement - its estimated that so many fast moving vehicles encroach onto the hard shoulder unintentionally that the average survival time on a busy M-way hard shoulder is as little as 15 minutes before you'll be hit. Don't do it !!

Some online tools are available (I used ridewithgps.com) and will assist with your routing Its certainly possible to do the route avoiding the motorway network - in fact it may be slightly shorter, but the penalty will be a slower, tougher route - though arguably a far nicer way to see the country.

I used the above to plot the route:

AVOIDING MOTORWAYS (this is an option to select on ridewithgps.com)

Distance: 693.3 km
Elevation Gain: 8676m
Maximum Elevation: 976 m
Average Elevation: 156 m
Maximum Grade: 29.2 %

Less total meters climbed, but one big pass to go over (nearly 1000m)

ALLOWING USE OF MOTORWAYS

Distance: 715.6 km
Elevation Gain: 12767m
Maximum Elevation: 554 m
Average Elevation: 104 m
Maximum Grade: 40 %

I think you could take the maximum grades with a pinch of salt (I cannot see them being 40% !) but there will be steep gradients for sure.

Dermot Illogical

CJudgeRun wrote: »

2) Is it possible/legal to cycle in the hard shoulder or any part of France's/Italy's motorways? If not this would require a large amount of re-routing which I guess could make it unfeasible.

It's completely illegal. If you're lucky you'll be arrested before you're killed.
The timescale for the latter result is shorter in Italy..

CJudgeRun

Thanks a million for the replies. Saved me more than a lot of trouble!
Could probably map out that ridewithgps.com site onto a normal gps, or else use an iphone or paper map.
I'm absolutely delighted that the non-motorway route is quicker than the other - as you can't really see much from a motorway at the best of times so this will make it far more enjoyable!
Could you suggest a training regime/target that would help us get up to being able to get the type of miles per day that we would be looking to get?

el Bastardo

Italian motorways don't have hard shoulders (At least, no motorways that I've been driving on). In any case, Italian motorists are dangerous (most of the time, in my experience).