Pic Spocket

Sometimes I deserve a slap behind the head. Before the trip to France to visit my in-laws, I was worried of the effects on my training of this vacation in the middle of the season. Corinne has not been visiting her family in over 3 years, so I really did not want to act like a diva over there, bending everyone over my schedule to try to get my training done. While I did end up cancelling my plans to race the 70.3 at REV3 in part because of this trip (but mostly due to some issues in one leg since IMFL), more positive came out of it than I expected. First of all, it turns out I needed the break. My worries were unfounded since I could log in over 10 hours of decent training without pushing it. And it gave me access to some incredible cycling opportunities!

Corinne’s sister lives in Seez, in the Alps, just above Bourg Saint Maurice. Some awesome cycling routes are over there, several of which were featured in the recent editions of the famous ‘Tour de France’.

They are very kind and they had organized a road bike for me from one of their co-workers, but the shifting was not working very well it seemed, so I ended up going down to town to rent a road bike. I was lucky to find a very good deal: a Colnago Extreme built in top of the line Shimano Dura-Ace. A superb climbing machine for 19 euros a day. Cool! I took it for 3 days, which would allow me to log in 2 long rides.

On the Tuesday morning, I left early while (almost) everybody was still sleeping and tackled the ‘Little Saint Bernard pass’ based on suggestions from Corinne’s sister and her boyfriend. This route is not very busy, so it was deemed ‘safer’ than some of the other options. Weather was nice: cool and sunny.

Instructions were simple : go down the hill in front of the house, when you get to the intersection, you make a left and then you go up, up… up…. Up……..UP. Turns out they were not kidding. After a 1’ crazy descent on the brakes (they live in the middle of a 13% grade hill), I made that left turn and right there I was in a non-stop standing climb situation. So much for warm-up… within minutes, my heart rate was through the roof. I had to tone it down a notch if I wanted to last.  I was really not expecting a 26 km continuous climb at 4-7% grade with switchbacks/hairpin turns.

Before too long, the view was AMAZING. Here is Bourg Saint Maurice below in the far distance.

My ride:

And more I climbed, the better the landscape views…

What was nice is that they had these mile marker every km, showing you the distance left to the top, and the current grade of the hill.

Reaching the top of the pass was just awesome and rewarding. At the highest spot of the route, it’s the border between France and Italy. I stopped there to take a bunch of pictures.

Also asked a tourist to take a photo of me there

My ride started at an altitude of roughly 1000m above sea level, and peaked at 2188m. My Garmin Edge 500 showed an elevation gain of 1400m.

I saw a few of cyclists near the top, which was nice to have some kind of company. Unexpected for a week day.

At the top of the climb, I had only 26 km to the trip computer, so I decided to cross in Italy and go down for another 4 km at least so that the ride would finish at 60km total. The route goes down to LaThuile, a very well known ski station in Italy. The descent on the Italian side was pretty steep so I turned around as planned without extra at that restaurant:

This lake was on the italian side…

The descent in Italy seemed much steeper than the French side, so after the turn-around my work was cut out for me to climb back to the top. Good thing it was only 4 km! After reaching the top, ‘careful’ high speed descent was in order. I was more cautious than not, to be on the safe side. So I used the brakes a lot. My bike skills for going downhill and negotiating the switchbacks on an unknown route with various road hazards and car traffic is limited at this time, and it looked like going off the road on the cliff side could be quite fatal hehe!

That’s the thing I found with riding over there: either you are working hard (climbing) or not hard enough (going downhill). So the return trip felt a bit too easy to be qualified as training, but it was a LOAD of fun!!!

Here’s the elevation chart. Pretty simple graph….

I made it back to the base not too late after my declared return time. Here I am, post ride:

Click on the link below to see the ride data as recorded by my Edge 500.

Full album with 1000 pixels versions available below.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2011 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Sport and Races, Travel, Our news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.