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Riding up to the Mont Ventoux (and more)

There are iconic climbs in road cycling, and probably the most known ones are the Col de Tourmalet, the curvy road of Alpe d’Huez, and the vindy ascent of the Mont Ventoux. These are not the most difficult climbs (like the north side of the Roque on La Palma is way more difficult – steeper and longer -, and you can find the almost exact copy – in terms of steepness and length – of Alpe d’Huez also on the island) of the World, but these are usually decisive places on the Tour de France. The yellow jersey is won on these slopes. They have a long and exciting history.

As I already mentioned in the last post, I got invited by Valery (who is now a PhD student in Gent, but who finished her Master in Astronomy during the first year of my PhD in Leuven) to join them (her boyfriend and some family members) for five days in France, where one of the days would be a climb to the Mont Ventoux. How on Earth could someone say no to such a thing? :D

We left from Limburg around six on Monday morning, and I spent most of the ride sleeping, so the almost 1000 km to our residence near Grospierres went by relatively quickly. The apartment was a bit smaller than we expected, but we had no plans to spend a lot of time inside, so we did not make a big fuzz about it. On two of the evenings, we had the buffet dinner of the resort, which was really delicious, and usually made me almost unable to move ;) There were also several pools, so the children and the non-cyclist adults also had fun on the spot.

As the weather was not the best on the first days, but the weather forecast was really promising for Thursday and Friday, we scheduled the ascent of the Mont Ventoux for the second part of our stay. (Side note to myself: make a lot of money – or love, as a sub side note -, and forget this economy class flying, because it starts to be a bit annoying… We are somewhere between Madrid and La Palma while I am writing these, and there is absolutely no leg-space on this plane… But back to the story…) So after the first night, I decided that it was time to try out my knee, to see what I might still free from the accident I had on Saturday. I had a 47 km ride alone into the nearby gorge (which was really amazing, as at one point, the river flows below a magnificent arch of rock which connects the two sides of the valley), with an average speed of 33.4 km/h and basically no pain in my knee, so I was quite convinced that I won’t have any problems with it later that week (as such average would have been really good even on my flat Leuven – Mechelen – Leuven training route). Almost immediately after arriving back to the apartment, I went for another ride with Jurgen. It was a much more calm ride of 74 km to a relatively nearby bike store, where he could get the specific bike parts he needed, and I could buy a new rain (and wind) jacket, as my old one was torn in the accident (and that was not even windproof). Speaking of the jacket I made a very good purchase, because it was not only relatively cheep, but I made use of it immediately, as on the return leg we got quite some rain starting at the exact moment when we left the store ;) 10 km from home we caught Jurgen’s father, who was riding all the way from Belgium! On Wednesday Jurgen wanted to rest, so I went on a ride with his father. It was 68 km with an elevation gain of a bit more than 1000 meters (through a beautiful pine forest, with rocks and flowers on the ground level), but with low intensity climbing, as neither of us wanted to use too much energy before the big day. The roads (even the smalles ones) in this part of France are generally very good quality and quiet (especially the small mountain roads have very low amounts of traffic), so we enjoyed the ride very much despite the rain we got here and there. I hope I will be in the same shape as Jurgen’s father when I turn 67… On the descent I had the feeling that he took too much risk, as at a very curvy section I got dropped, but I preferred to take it slower especially because of the wet road (and because one accident per week is already more than enough). From the point where the road got straighter, I went back in front to lead the group (of the two of us). For the next day, we set the alarm clocks to 6:30 AM, as we wanted to do the climb before it gets too windy and hot on the afternoon.

As the holiday resort is situated a bit more than a 100 km from Bédoin (the village where the most difficult of the three ascents of the Mont Ventoux starts), we still had to spend two hours in the car before we could start the ride. After one hour the Mont Ventoux started to became visible, as a huge pyramid standing high above the vast plains between the Alps and the Massif Central. It was a majestic sight. We hopped on the bikes 20 km from Bédoin to have a proper warm-up before the hardcore part of the day. One hour later (and already ~250 meters higher) we arrived to the start line, which is literally an old line made out of stones across the road – the 0 km mark of this legendary climb (some people start 400 meters further out at the Bédoin road sign, that’s why the official distance from the Tour de France in 2009 is ‘only’ 21.1 km). We had enough time to think about the climb (at least that’s what I did) during this warm-up section, as the rocky, deserted peak stood high in front of us all the time, getting higher and higher as we approached the start… Here we discussed the strategy for the support car (as Valery and Jurgen’s mother was our support car staff for the climb, which was pretty nice), filled our bottles, prepared our replacement bottles, energy bars, and everything we might have needed later on. Then around noon, we started the climb (see photo of me crossing the start line, while starting the recording of the climb on my Garmin cycling computer – precision is very important). The data of the ascent is here, while the descent is here.

My plan was 1 hour and 40 minutes, as this was the time Tijl had when he did the climb before his PhD defense. Of course I wanted to be faster ;) He was not in his best shape back then, but now I was less then one week from a quite serious accident. I did not want to look at the time (that’s frustrating), so I had not have it displayed on the GPS, but I just wanted to give the maximum effort I could, and see the resulting time only on the top. So the only thing I had to concentrate on was to keep my heart rate around 180 BPM. That’s the maximum I can keep for such a long time, above that I start producing too much lactic acid in my muscles, which makes you tired and slow pretty quickly. As you can see it on the elevation profile (click for larger version) the ascent consists of 4 main sections.

The first 5.5-6 km is very easy, so the plan here was to go as fast as possible (ok, basically this was the plan on all sections, but still, people tend to not pedal really hard before the climb gets really serious). Then from the first switchback (and the first checkpoint with the support car – where they did not expect me that early, so they were not yet standing on the side of the road when I arrived there…) to Chalet Reynard, kilometer 7-15 through the forest is really difficult with an average gradient of 9.2% for 9 kilometers, and with kilometer 9 being 10.5%, this stretch of the route is really something to survive.

You can see it on the plot below that on such steep climbs I can not keep up my cadence in the optimal ~90 RPM zone, so on the easiest gear I have much lower cadences too. In the first section I could just keep my optimal cadence and shift gears according to the gradient, that’s why you see the nice compact distributions along the different gears other than the easiest, where the distribution is elongated towards the lower values. (My earlier posts about these plots can be found here.)

We had the second checkpoint in the middle of this section, and the last at the Chalet Reynard, where I also put my jacket in my pocket, as I knew that because the support car has to wait for the last one of use, they will not be on the peak when I arrive there (and you don’t want to stand there in the cold wind without a jacket). The good thing was that I kept passing others and no cyclist passed me, though there was a guy with whom I went together for quite a while, and we really played the game of he dropping me and me catching him for kilometers (then on the last section he bonked, and I flew past him).

The third section comes after Chalet Reynard and lasts till the last 1.5 km, with gradients below 8%, and with a kilometer of only 5.8% around 1500 meters above sea level. Here it started to be a bit colder and the wind got stronger because at this point the road leaves the forests and continues through the rocky deserted yellowish grey landscape of the Ventoux. Also, the tower on the top stays visible till the end of the climb from this point. These kilometers – especially after the steep road of the forest – seemed to be really easy, so I had the feeling of going pretty well. Then the last 1.5 kilometer is again 9.6% and the steepest 100 meter section comes also here with a shocking 14.0%…

There were three points where photographers took pictures of basically every cyclists, and then gave you their business cards (with the time and date, or even a specific ID number printed on), so later it was possible to find the pictures, and purchase them online for a lot of money. Really, a lot. But they made really cool pictures, so I had to buy the ones above and below. (And thanks to Valery for the other pictures and the support!)

The last curve is very steep again, but then after 21.5 kilometers of climbing at an average of 7.3% (HC climb beyond any question), you arrive at the top of Provance. Which is extremely crowded… It’s like Mecca but for cyclists. I arrived on the top completely exhausted, and stopped the timer on 1:38:41, which was a bit more than 1 minute faster than the plan, so I was extremely happy. And tired. This was my fastest HC category climb till now.

On the peak it was very windy and cold, so I put on my new jacket and stood next to the building where the conditions were less harsh… At a point a guy asked if I was from Leuven, as it turned out he was the one I rode along with for a very long time on the Brabantse Pijl earlier this year. The World is a tiny little place, isn’t it!?! Then at the point where I really started to be cold the support team finally arrived (the others had a time around two and a half hours), so I could put on all my warm clothes (arm and knee warmers, etc.), before we started the descent. Now that was fun! I had an average speed of 50 km/h to Bédoin, following a Dutch car (but not in its slipstream). Then we rode back to where we started that morning. None of us had problems with sleeping that night ;)

On the last day we went for a shorter and only slightly hilly ride of 48 km. There was very strong (~40 km/h base with gusts up to who knows what) headwind for the last kilometers, but with my last energy reserves, I led the three of us home with ~30 km/h, which was quite well apreciated by Jurgen’s father. Then on Saturday we drove home, and luckily all the traffic jams were in the other direction, towards Marseille and the sea. With all this biking, July became my best month with 1256 km on the racing bike (so the cruising around Antwerpen with Elise on a Dutch bike on the last Sunday is not included :D). It was almost 400 km more than the previous best, and it was third af all the road cycling I had last year. It was a very nice month :)

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July

A month without posts on the blog can be a sign that my life just became boring, or that it is just so good and my days are so filled with things to do that I simply have no time/energy/psychological need to write. I can assure you that the latter is much closer to reality. But now, having a week of holidays in France, I have some time to sum up things from July.

The main topic of this month was cycling (while I am still working on my second paper, so no big news work-vise, before anyone asks). I set a goal for myself to ride at least 1000 km before climbing the Mont Ventoux somewhen during the last week of the month (see next post soon). I managed that surprisingly easily, with 3-5 trainings per week (mostly my standard 50 km rides before or after working hours, and then one or two rides above 100 km on the weekends or national holidays). I even had company sometimes with the AstroTeam, though they all say that it is impossible to keep up with me, and that my training rides are madness :D I have to admit that hearing these things always make me feel better ;) But now I am really so used to the trainings, that if I don’t ride my road bike for two days, then I really start feeling bad about it, and I really need to hit the road and ride.

On the last weekend before going on holidays, I went on an organised ride (Herent – Landen – Herent) with Tijl, wich would have resulted in reaching the 1000 km goal already before the last week (and the Mont Ventoux) of the month. Unluckily, the ride ended much sooner than expected, as after 20 kilometers (which I later decided to not even count as training for this month), I hit a car. No, I was not hit by a car, I hit a car… It was clearly my fault, we should have given the right to the car turning out onto our road from the right hand side (willing to continue in the direction from where we were coming from), but the fact that it let two other cyclists pass before us confused us for a moment. This moment was long enough for my brain to decide that it will be all right and we will just pass in front of the car as the two other cyclists just did, so I did not start breaking (while Tijl who was more in front already came into almost a full stop). Unluckily, the car driver probably only saw Tijl stopping, so he went on with his original plan of turning out onto the road, and at this point I was too close and way to fast to stop. The rain and the wet roads did not help me either, so missing Tijl just by centimeters, I basically went straight into the side of the turning car with a speed of 33 km/h (data from my GPS log ;P)… Luckily, the car was big, so I could not fly over it, and its side had an angle of 45° relative to my ‘speed vector’ (because it was turning), so I could slide along it during the impact. This probably saved me from a ride to the hospital. I was relatively lucky, because I only hit my knee into the car, and my helmet a bit while I was sliding along the side. With a full frontal impact, it would have been probably much much worse. Unluckily, my front wheel broke (again, damping the impact quite a lot), and the damage is unrepairable – and of course I had the fancy expensive aero-wheels on… But again, no other damage to the bike besides this, which I think is quite unbelievable – given my momentum. Also, the side of the car got seriously bent in (so it was really not a tiny little impact) and scratched, but my insurance will cover that. Tijl helped a lot with filling in the accident report form, and on the afternoon he looked up lots of insurance related stuff for me. As I could not ride any further from this crossroad, I got a ride from the organisers (that’s also a reason why these cyclosportive events are really good…). By the afternoon, my right knee looked like an inflated ball, so – as already as a first thought right after getting up from the ground along with some nice Hungarian swear words – my biggest worry was ‘how am I going to ride up to the Mont Ventoux in less then a week’s time’. Yeah, I was not really shocked by the accident itself. So on the afternoon I took a shower with my bike, and inspected it for further damage (luckily there was nothing), and then spent the rest of the weekend with resting (except for Sunday evening)… But I was quite optimistic about the following week anyway… (Hey, my guardian angel up there, thanks again if you read this.)

Finally this month I made it to Mechelen without my bike, as we had a nice day there with Elise, visiting a photo exhibition, the tower of the cathedral with more than 500 stairs up to a height of almost 100 meters (and with the bells and mechanical parts of the carillon inside – did you know that Belgium has the second highest carillon density over surface area in the World after the Netherlands?), and the city park, plus we have seen the Big Jump event (people raising awareness for the water quality of Belgian rivers by jumping into them) too :)

Then a week later, I made a three course dinner at my place for her (as the main idea was to go and listen to the Daan concert that night, which turned out to be a bit too crowded unluckily), and even though I made everything for the very first time in my life, it was perfect! (I was very proud of myself, as I am not the biggest chef at all…) If I had known that it is so easy to make pancakes, I would have made them every week :D So I made them on Sunday again (ok, a bit less fancy version, but the pancakes were the same) for some of my friends, and they also liked them!

For the rest of the month, I went to the Hungarian embassy in Brussels to make a new passport (took me 5 hours…), saw the last Harry Potter movie (it was OK), and had the experience of hopping on the train after work to arrive in Gent after only one hour, then have dinner (and get invited to the Mont Ventoux) there, and still arrive back to Leuven at a reasonable hour. I could never imagine this happening in Hungary between two big cities ~100 kilometers away from each other with the trains there… Sorry, but this is true. So this was the story of July till the 24th, I will tell you about the last week in the next post!

A proper thunderstorm

After two days of 33-35°C, yesterday evening a quite massive storm-front brought this short hot period to its end in Belgium. The storms came in waves, there were at least three of them passing over Leuven (and Belgium) – the first one arrived only 10 minutes after I arrived home from work. (This was not coincidental – I was checking the weather radar almost constantly to make sure I can still ride home without getting completely wet…) After I finished my dinner I decided to take some pictures, so I set up my tripod at the open window – inside enough to not get wet, but outside enough to capture a big portion of the sky. Then the rest of the job was mostly being lucky enough (and good settings of course :D)… At the end (after midnight), I had quite a lot of pictures with lightning on, and it could have been even better if there were more ‘outside the cloud’ lightning and not that many sheet lightning (inside the cloud, with the actual discharge path being hidden) instead. But I can not complain, as I got some really nice ones. (Unluckily I do not have the one which made me jump back from the window :D)

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Keep calm and bike more!

The last three weeks with no cycling had a quite nasty effect on my condition, now I am ~2 km/h slower on average compared to the beginning of June (when – I have to admit – I was in a very good shape). This is not good. But what can I do, I will just ‘Keep calm, and bike more’ – or how was that exactly… (Matching music comes here.)

Talk in Marseille

After the long weekend two and a half weeks ago, I had to work day and night (literally, with an average ~5 hours of sleep per day, and leaving from work usually after midnight) to prepare my talk (and especially to produce some final results which are ready to be presented) for the 2nd CoRoT Symposium for the week after (so for last week). It was not easy, but these pre-deadline rushes happen, when you are a PhD student. And before that too… And they will never stop happening anyway, just to make it clear. After I presented my talk to my supervisor on Friday, and I made the minor corrections which we agreed on, I was so tired, that I just stayed in my office for two more hours, sitting in my chair and staring at random molecules of air, before I finally managed to go home… Yeah, but at the end, everything was ready for the conference, so I was happy that I can take the next days easier, and I don’t have to stress that much about my forthcoming talk. On Sunday, after packing in for Marseille, doing the laundry – which I still hate so much, and cleaning up a bit, I spent the afternoon with Elise. It was very nice, and not only because she brought my home made small cakes :) We always have great conversations.

Then on Sunday, I took the TGV to Marseille. It was a direct train from Brussels, with a journey lasting five and a half hours – and on first class! Yeah, on one of my lonely mornings at the telescope back in May I managed to find a cheaper than 2nd class option on the French TGV site, which was quite well hidden on the Belgian page ;) That’s how I got my separate (Solo), big and cosy seat! It was really comfortable, I spent the trip watching some episodes from the BBC series Wonders of the Universe, listening to music, looking over and over my slides, and measuring the speed (~310 km/h) with the GPS of my smartphone ;) It was much better than a flight, especially with no hassle about the luggage and check-in… Probably not as good as a first class flight with all the free food and beverages, but still very good. Then on Monday I walked around Marseille after lunch for a bit with Jonas, who is really in love with the city. Unluckily for me, Marseille is only a big, crowded, dirty and stinky place, so I did not enjoy it as much, but tastes are different, and that’s good, this makes us individuals. On the evening we had a welcome reception, then the symposium kicked off on Tuesday morning at 9:30. It is always good to meet other people from the field, to put faces behind the names – at the end, this is the main reason we go to such conferences. And to present ourselves to the community. That’s why PhD students give talks. That’s why I gave a talk (and of course to present my results). It is even an official requirement from the University to get a PhD… I gave my talk on Wednesday (after rehearsing in my hotel room on Tuesday afternoon, and a bit on Wednesday morning, plus listening to it on my iPod :D), between the first coffee break and lunch (the best time ever), and it went quite well, without stress. I did not receive difficult questions either, so I was very happy after I sat back to my place among the audience. And several colleagues told me that the talk was very good, so even if only half of this is true, I can be happy about it!

We had the conference dinner on the evening overlooking the port of Marseille, under the eclipsed Moon… The place was scenic, but the food was not that good, though I have to admit that after the delicious lunches we got every day (and I really mean those were pretty awesome), no one was complaining. The last two days I have been to all the talks, and I looked at all the posters, so I got quite tired by the end of the week. It is a pity that I did not like Marseille a bit more, because this way I felt it a bit useless to stay for Saturday and go home only on Sunday, but I had the tickets already, so there was no choice. So I just tried to enjoy the city as much as I can for an extra day… Luckily I was not alone; some colleagues helped to get the best out of the situation.

But then I was really happy to be back in Belgium (FYI: the TGV is also cool on 2nd class if you can sit next to the window), even if it was a bit rainy and much colder compared to the Mediterranean, but I still feel much better here. That’s how I am. This week I am mostly dealing with paperwork and travel arrangements, plus I have to supervise exams for one and a half days. So it is less research for now, but I need to do these things too once in a while… And I just managed to get another observing run in October on La Palma, when I will be the support astronomer of the master students, like last year. This way I can work at the telescope even as part of my teaching duties :) Four observing runs this year!!! Really cool.

Sports-wise I did not do anything since my last ride on the 4th on June (lot of work and then the conference…) till the day before yesterday, when I joined the others to play badminton… I played more than three hours (very intensive three hours), so yesterday I felt some pain in my legs (and saw Midnight in Paris on the big screen on the evening BTW), but today I can barely walk or sit down/stand up (cycling is almost painless though, luckily). I hope it will get better for the weekend, because I really need to get back on my racing bike…

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