The longest day of the tour 128 miles, 8,700 feet. I got 130 miles and 8,425 feet. Garmin failed only once today. My Garmin anyway. You should hear everyone else's woes about their Garmins--from failing to battery life to navigation errors.
Tough, tough day. Second successive day of HR woes. Didn't feel as badly as the HR and the times I rode show. Max HR was 136. It was supposed to be a hit-or-miss thing with rain. It ended up raining for the first 2 hours, or so, and the last 3. A lot.
I had a flat about 20 miles from home. Changed it pretty quickly. In the rain. Allan stayed behind and dragged me in. We caught the rest of the group with just a couple of miles to go. I've been doing a lot of that, i.e. catching up with the group. I did that Day 1, and every day since, I think. It had been raining steadily for a long time by this point. We had been at the top of Col Fourtou for 15-20 mins and it was getting cold (mostly because I was so wet), and the descent back to sea level was a bit sketchy. Very foggy at the tip, twisty, and very very wet. It was really pretty miserable. My left eye started burning noticeably with about 10 miles to go and looked terrible this morning. Allan said that his eyes were burning, too. Road crap thrown up? Just the rain? Not sure. It's not quite so sensitive now, 15 hours later. I couldn't ride in Allan's slipstream because the rooster tail he was throwing up was more than I could handle. He stayed with me, though. One of the perks of being the organizer I guess.
The rain didn't let up on us, despite the fact we could see that it had dissipated where we'd just come from. Just our luck I guess.
I felt terrible Wednesday night, not sure if I was going to be able to keep food down. I never did throw up, but felt I could have at any time if I just thought about it. So I didn't. My thighs were KILLING me. It hurt to just touch them with my fingertip. The pedaling out of the saddle thing I mentioned in the Day 3 ride were worse Day 4. Excruciating.
Jeff Dux--a super cool guy from SFO and a friend of Allan's, shot this video. I'd taken a head start from the rest of the bunch, that's why I was alone. I don't know how to run it non-slo-mo. The climb was relatively benign, long but just 2.6% average gradient. It should have been a breeze--a lot like the road from Sutter Creek to Volcano. It wasn't fun, and the rain returned about 3/4 of the way up.
After the first climb, after the rain. We thought that we had seen all the rain for the day. Not quite.
Headed towards the intersection of D613 and D14--blurry, sorry about that.
You can just catch sight of Paul Randall (San Ramon) in the distance about to make the left turn.
No, you don't want to fall.
A religious site, l'Ermitage de Saint Antoine de Galamus, with a cave and a Virgin Mary. You can hike down to it, but we we didn't have equipment or time to go check it out.
I did NOT get the room with the huge sauna in the middle. Fine hotel, good restaurant though the smoking patrons outside on the patio managed to get their smoke from outside to inside thanks to some strategically opened/closed windows and doors.
No comments:
Post a Comment