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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!

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.)

Visualizing cycling workouts (a.k.a. I love plots!)

Fasten your seat belts, you are about to read one of my best posts ever. (Honestly, it is true.)

I am a bit of a nerd, there is no need to try to deny this fact. I love gadgets, I love technology, and especially, I love plots. I love if they have more than two dimensions, if there is also color or even symbol shapes or sizes used to represent a third or fourth dimension. Moreover, I love GPS devices. At the moment I have a hiking GPS (Garmin GPSMap 60 CSx), a smartphone with built in GPS, and a cycling GPS (Garmin Edge 500), and I had three other ones (two hiking GPS devices, and a bluetooth GPS receiver with my previous Nokia phone) before these… But I am not the nerd who just sits in front of the computer, because I also love sports. I mean, I love doing sports, and not just watching them on TV (which I also like, but this is not the point). If you are not completely new to my blog, then you know that these days I am especially into cycling – this is also the reason why I own a special cycling GPS (which I bought basically on the morning of my first ride with my – back then new – racing bike). With Garmin (and even with other brands), you have the option to upload your workouts to the Garmin Connect website, which gives you some nice overview plots, a calendar, reports, some statistics, and maybe most importantly the ability to share what you have done with the on-line community. The plots and statistics are nice and detailed enough if you are an average – or so called hobby – user. In that case, there is no problem. But if you are such a plot-fetishist as I am, or you need professional analysis, and you have a desire for more, than you will like what I am just about to show after the break. (If you have no food and drinks with you, go and grab something before clicking on continue…) Continue reading →

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New personal best to Mechelen and back

My standard training route is a perfectly flat, ~48 km long section of quite good quality asphalt along the channel (the Dijlekanaal) which connects the city of Leuven with Mechelen. I have ridden it 37 times since I bought my racing bike in February, 2010. It can be very windy, but riding this route is the best (as it is always consistent) and easiest (no cars, very few crossroads, good infrastructure, and starts very close to my place) way to see how trained I am. If I push as hard as I can, and there is not too much wind, then my average speed will reflect the level of my fitness. Basically this is my individual time trial course. My seasonal best (SB) for 2010 was set on the 7th of June, with an average speed of 33.95 km/h (this value differs a bit from what can be seen on Garmin Connect, but it is more precise, believe me – and you will see in the next post, how did I get it). Now this year I had a quite different training strategy, with additional low intensity rides and interval workouts, instead of the mostly strictly high intensity rides of last year, when I almost always tried to break my previous record. The reason for this is that 1) it is better to train like this, and 2) it got really stressing after some time that I never managed to break my record from June, so I realised that I should not try to always break my record if I do not want to demotivate myself. There is also no point of going for a record, if I do not feel perfectly fit, if the wind is stronger than 10 km/h, or if the temperature is too high/low, because now I have reached the point when it is not that easy to break a record, so I need perfect or near optimal conditions to try – if I also want to have chance for succeeding. So far this year I only tried once, but too early in the season, so I have failed miserably (I thought the aerodynamic wheels would do the job just by themselves, but this is not true at all – of course). But now after all the training I had on La Palma, I really felt strong, and as the weather forecast was perfect (temperature in the low twenties, and a wind of maximum 5-10 km/h), and I had a feeling that I had already recovered after the hard rides of the Canaries, I had to try it. So on Wednesday after work I left with the goal of setting a new personal best on the Leuven – Mechelen – Leuven course. On the way towards Mechelen I had a slight tailwind, and I felt really good; my cadence was high, I had no ‘difficult’ breathing at a constant high heart rate of 180-183 BPM, and I could relatively easily concentrate on keeping the pace high without getting distracted by any doubtful thoughts (because sometimes that’s the worst, when you don’t feel perfect, and you start thinking about it, doubting that you will be able to hold this speed for long). This way I was riding with typically 37-39 km/h, and I have arrived to Mechelen with a personal best split time. My average speed was 36.5 km/h (because at crossroads I have to slow down to basically 0, and this have a huge impact on the average) when I turned back (after my usual short stop) towards Leuven. I knew that I had a very good first leg, but I was not sure if it was because of the slight help from the wind, or because my training on La Palma was really this useful. So I was very curious how will I perform against the wind (and a bit afraid what if it was just the wind – as it would have not been the first time in history). But it was relatively easy, I really do not remember if I have ever felt this comfortable (relatively speaking, as you never feel comfortable after keeping your heart rate above 180 BPM for an hour) while riding against the headwind. After the first kilometers it became clear that if I do not make a big mistake, then this will be a new record. As my speed was typically 35-37 km/h during this stage, I knew that the final average would be lower than what I saw at the turn-around point, but still much better, than my best time from 2010. And knowing that I can make it, and that the end result can be really good helped me a lot psychologically. Because there are moments when there is a stronger gust, and then you need to push against the wind with a much higher power to keep a steady speed, and it is very easy to loose the rhythm when this happens if your mind is not devoted or concentrated enough. In the last 15 km I just tried to keep my cadence at or near 100 RPM, and go without thinking about anything else (except for drinking frequently enough, because that’s very important). So at the end, I crossed the imaginary finish line completely exhausted, knowing that I really gave the maximum I could. Then I looked down to the screen of my Garmin Edge 500, and it displayed an average speed more than 1.5 km/h better, than what I had on the 7th of June in 2010. After a very easy (and extremely happy) ride home (from the end of the channel, where the imaginary finish line lies), I got to know my final, ‘official’ average speed, setting my new personal best (PB) at 35.70 km/h (individual TT on 48.06 km, not closed roads, no TT bike). An improvement of 1.75 km/h! For me this was a success as big as riding up twice to the Roque de los Muchachos on one day. In the second half of last year I tried so much to break the record without succeeding, that I really started to think that I had set it in such perfect conditions (it is true that the weather was even better than now), that I would never be able to break it again. And now, such an improvement, it is still almost unbelievable. I really am very happy about it! :)

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