Whatever happened in April, the weather in Scotland has firmly got back on message in May - namely wet, and extremely blowy. My average speed's taken such a hit, I'm back down at April levels (which was influenced heavily by the Cowal ride), and yesterday didn't help, consisting, as it did, of me looking fretfully out the window for most of the day as the rain moved in 2 hours too soon. Normally, I'd go for a run to get moving without wetting my cycling kit through, but with my knee still having twinges from Thursday, I resigned to watching the Giro's assault on Monte Zoncolan and doing occasional stretches. It's not like I have all that many clear weekends left...
Today, things brightened up enough to hit the road, and in honor of Contador, Nibali, Scarponi and the rest slogging their way through 6000m of climbing today, I decided to simulate some alpine riding myself - namely, repeats of the Crow road. Oh, so many repeats.
Eight times I summited, and eight times I descended again, into or out of the driving westerly, doing over 2000m of climbing - which was disappointingly low, for a 5 hour ride, but I blame the shape of the road and the wind. At any rate, climbing wasn't really the aim of the day.
What I really wanted to do was get knackered, on the point of bonking, and see if I could pull myself up again. It was an excuse to see when the bonk is setting in at the moment, how severe it is, and whether I can stomach pretend-food (gels and whatnot) enough to get me out of the hole.
Most of the day, then, was just steady grinding. I love being on the bike. I love rolling anywhere, for any reason, at any speed. Even given that, though, it got boring. With the wind and weather as it was, I didn't really want to go further afield (especially with my recent record with punctures), so this was the only way I could think to put some serious elevation in my way, but face-down into the wind, crawling along below 15mph on shallow descents into the gale, it was tough to keep going. When the bonk finally came (after catching a group on the ascent that I had passed on my last descent and leading them down the far side) I was glad to be heading off. My route home on the flat was still into the wind, and tortuously slow. While the gels had the effect of postponing the worst, the take-home lesson was that if I need to ride for more than 4 and a half hours, I'd better have a proper food waypoint, and also that lucosade energy gels (the first of the bunch I'm experimenting with) taste rubbish, but I refrain from scoring them (zero) in case any of the others taste worse and I have to rescale the whole thing.
Probably the biggest success of the day, though, was in terms of descending. I'm still a pretty cautious guy, but running, re-running, and re-running again those descents really gave me a good feel for the bike. By the end, I was skittering over the rucked-up braking zones into tight hairpins with wheels alternately losing contact, and holding her steady (though maybe running a little wide through some left-handers that I couldn't strictly see the exit of). On my penultimate run, as I caught the group I'd gone past on the way down near the bothy at the top of the pass, taking them at full speed, a young guy on what I think was a blue CAAD 9 gave chase. Given my huge head tube and poor aerodynamics (you know it's windy when you can feel your shorts slowing you down!) I wouldn't have been surprised if he could have taken me in a couple of places, as his shadow crept up into my peripheral vision, but the road's in such a state that there's only one or two lines to take even on the straight bits, so maybe for that reason, maybe because he just wanted to follow my line, he stayed back, and I ended up pulling out a slight lead through the technical final part of the slope. It was a good run that really showed off what I'd learned through the day, and tipped me over the edge in the tiredness stakes, so I'm glad the guy was there and gave me a bit of a push to get down. Hopefully, knowing the roads in Wales, I'll be able to put some of that confidence into practice on the day.
Oh, and the picture below was supposed to show my state deteriorating on each summit. Beyond more hair sticking out of the helmet vents and barely-visible salt deposits on my forehead, it doesn't really work. Maybe would have worked better with clear specs.
Good trails!
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