Tag Archives: cycling

First days at the Observatorio del Teide

After finishing the internal version (ready to be sent to the co-authors) of my first paper on Wednesday evening after weeks of hard work (even on weekends) and iteration with my supervisors, I had to pack in for a full moth, as I was getting ready to leave for two observing runs and for some holidays to the Canary Islands. As always, packing took ages, so I had no sleep at all before my taxi arrived at 5 on the morning. The most difficult part was packing my racing bike to its bike box, because everything had to be placed very carefully, to avoid any possible damage during the flights. (The wheels were placed on top of the whole stuff in separate wheel-bags, but still into the bike box).

At the end (after I had to reopen the box – at which point I was swearing a bit – because I forgot to put the big pump inside…), I had 60 kg of luggage (and I even had to leave my tripod at home, because it really did not fit in anywhere): 32 kg in the bike box (as the box itself weights 12 kg, plus the bike is 8 kg, plus I put in some other stuff too to save space in my normal bag), 22 kg as normal check-in luggage, and 6 kg in my hand luggage. (And I had to pay only 75 € for the bike box, and nothing else. Luckily.) I took the Iberia flight to Madrid at 8 AM, then another from the same company to Tenerife after waiting two and a half hours at the airport. (I still love airports like this one.)

Luckily, as the original plan was only one and a half hour, and I was a bit afraid, that the bike box will not make it in time from one plane to another… A managed to get some sleep during the flights, but I was still extremely tired upon arriving to the Canaries. (And then it came to my mind that I will have to do the same endless packing three times again in the coming month… But OK, I stop complaining.) After collecting my normal luggage, I had to go down one floor to pick up my bike box, but that floor was completely deserted – with only a few lights turned on, endless baggage claim areas with no people around at all, and then, at the very end of the area, my bike box rolled out on its own, alone. With no personnel or anyone around. It was a bit scary… Then as I stepped outside, I was shocked by the 28°C air temperature, so I took off some clothes (:P) and headed to the taxi area as fast as I could. There, the taxi drivers were the ones under a slight shock, as they realized, that all this luggage was mine, and there was no other person traveling with me :D But no worries, everything fit in perfectly (with the rear seats leaned forward), and we were on our long way up to the observatory in no time. It was still early afternoon when I arrived and checked in at the Residencia of the Observatorio del Teide. (I might consider learning Spanish instead of Dutch, if I want to get a job after my PhD as a support astronomer somewhere…) I even met two Hungarians, which was a nice surprise! As I was extremely tired, I had not done anything later that day, except that I assembled my bike, and unpacked all my bags. Yesterday I woke up at around midday, and after a nice lunch, I went for a relatively short acclimatization ride on the afternoon. (GPS details here.) My policy is the following: as I am on a work trip here, I only go cycling on those days, when I have no observing duties on the following night (because I might be in a good shape, but staying up all night and working with expensive equipment is not something you want to do tired).

First I went down to 2000 meter towards the NE (passing the famous colorful curves of the TF-24 road – see picture above), than I turned back, and climbed up almost to the point where I started, but as I felt still quite strong and I had still a lot of water in my bottles, I decided to ride a bit to the other direction on TF-21 towards the Teide volcano. It was really nice, with slopes between 4 % and 12 % (with 7-8 % most of the time).

I made two short videos about the roads and the scenery from the bike, which are not the best quality (as I had only my compact camera with me), but they can be seen here and here. It is worth checking them anyway, as you can see how my new cycling glasses fit me :) I think they are extremely cool ;D The road quality is not the best everywhere, but it is generally OK. There are silk-smooth parts, and there are places, where one have to be a bit more careful… After 50 km and 1000 meter of elevation gain, I arrived back well before lunch, so I had time to take a shower and check my mail before I joined the others at the table. Later that night I tried to stay up as late as possible (watching TV series on my MacBook) to shift my rhythm from day to nigh-time, but I had to go to bed already at 3 AM. Still I think it is OK, as I managed to sleep till midday today, so by the end of the forthcoming night, the shift will be complete. Now I am praying for good weather, because the last nights were a complete disaster for the previous observers, and we need data badly…

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Training in the morning

As days get shorter (because they do, goddamnit), it is not that easy to go cycling after work (especially if you have troubles starting early at your desk, so you do not finish at 4 or 5 PM). One solution to this problem might be training before the working hours, which has advantages and – of course – disadvantages as well. First of all, if it was hard to get up at 8 AM on a usual weekday, then getting up at 6:45 will be even worse (believe me), but this way you might be back from a two hour ride by 9 or 9:30, and be at work after a refreshing shower at 10 already. You will need to stay till a bit later than usual, but then it will be already dark, so there is nothing to worry about (I mean, no lost hours of sunshine or anything). And you can skip the coffee on the morning, because the training will wake you up – guaranteed :) Plus you had success (hopefully) before work already, which makes starting the day much easier!

For me, the only problem with this system is that I am a night person, so going to bed before midnight is just not my thing. And then getting up so early is just terrible. But some sacrifices must be made… Though e.g. having a nice new jersey hanging on the doorknob gives the needed motivation to leave the bed! (And not just a jersey, but a complete Omega Pharma-Lotto kit – I love it!) The most important thing is to find motivation, because everything will be much easier when you have something (a goal) to get up for. Finally, I also managed to measure my resting heart rate (RHR = 53 BPM) for the first time yesterday (because when I am sleepy, this is the last thing I want to spend time on), so now I can set my heart rate values more precisely for the training zones. But I can not deny the fact, that after a morning ride, I need to eat much more during the day (I am hungry already before lunchtime), and I usually have a bad hour in the afternoon, when I feel a bit sleepy… But chocolate helps usually ;) By the way, my last three training rides were almost completely identical, I completed the 48.37 km measured part of my usual ~51 km route in 1:26:23, 1:26:36, and 1:26:44, respectively. This means that the difference was only 0.4% between the fastest and the slowest time! Fascinating, isn’t it?

Now it is raining, and there is no hope for good weather till next week… So I guess I will just work on the weekend, as I am nowhere near finished with my article… There are days when I am extremely productive, and then there are those when I can not make progress at all… Today was such a lousy day, fighting with scripts of my own, dealing with painful mistakes during long hours of debugging. I hope for a better day tomorrow…

Update (2010.08.28.): RHR = 46 BPM this morning, and an “almost personal best” ride (1:25:20, average speed of 34.0 km/h) in the wind! Now work :S

TdF 2010 – Stage 3

Tuesday was my last day on the Tour de France. As I already had ~900 images from the previous three days, I decided to leave the heavy equipment (and my press-card) behind, and hit the road on my racing bike, to catch the peloton at the one and only climb of the stage, at the Côte de Bothey (1.4 km climb to 3.4%, Category 4 – basically this is nothing, you can not even notice such a slope if you are riding in the peloton). Of course this meant that I had only my compact camera with me, so the pictures from this day are incomparable with the ones from the previous stages – but when you are not paid by a professional agency, then you have the freedom to choose between good pictures and just pure fun. That day I went for the fun only. We (as Tijl and Kristof – a postdoc and another PhD student, both from Belgium – did also join me on that day) left the Institute of Astronomy at 10:45, so we had three hours to our destination (as the expected arrival time of the riders at the climb was between 13:44 and 13:50, assuming an average speed of 46-42 km/h). As the distance was around 48 km, this was a very safe plan. The roads were generally OK, though we ran into some trouble with one-way streets in Wavre, and we had to ride on cobblestones for 5 km between Court-Saint-Étienne and Villeroux… I have to say that really do not like (or using the word “hate” might be more appropriate in this situation) the cobbles, but I tried to look at that part as the final stage of my integration into Belgium as a cyclist, which made me feel a bit better, and struggle a bit less. Still, the pain building up in my hands during these kilometers was incomparable to anything which I have ever felt on the bike before. And these were really the worst kind of cobbles, with large spaces in between the stones, and with a road-surface which was far from flat with a small bump running along the middle, and two small depressions along the sides (created by cars passing through). But this was the day when even the Tour riders had cobblestones (13.2 km compared to our 10 km, but on a route which is twice as long as ours), so at least we got to know the pain they had to go through later on… Anyway, at the end we arrived a bit more than one hour before the scheduled pass (just after the publicity caravan had passed).

The weather was really nice, sunny but not too warm, not too windy, with no chance of precipitation during the whole day. While we were waiting for the peloton to arrive, we asked someone to take a picture of us (check out the Hungarian flag which I brought along with me):

The breakaway group arrived almost exactly on the expected time, and the peloton followed them 4’45” later. We made some interesting observations about the whole stuff around us. 1) The number of support cars and motorcycles are incomparably higher than the number of cyclists. They are just coming and coming and coming for long-long minutes before and after the riders. And knowing that e.g. the team buses move along another route to get from the start of the stage to its finish, it is really shocking to see, that there are still this many vehicles following the peloton itself. 2) The climb was not big, still both the breakaway group, both the main pack was relatively slow after the “top”, so they probably just took a short recovery break there… 3) The gap of 4’45” felt surprisingly long.

After the closing cars passed, the organizers started to clean up everything very quickly, so we had to be fast to make a picture with the gate itself on the “top”. But we made it of course. (I know it’s way too over-photoshopped, but the lighting was terrible, and our “photographer” was and old French guy who probably took his first picture with a digital camera at that very moment…)

On the way back I tried to keep up with Kristof on the climb with cobblestones, and I managed, but as soon as we left the slope behind, he dropped me immediately. Yeah, he is definitely the King of the Cobblestones among us. (Though if there are no cobbles, no one can stop me ;D) But you really have to be a native Belgian to be able to ride fast on these roads. I think it is in their genes. When I arrived home (which is a mess now, with clothes and gadgets all around the place, as I had no time to clean up anything in the last days) I was still in time to watch the end of the stage with several paved sections (it was crazy!), then I left to play badminton with my colleagues… Yes, we have a very sporty department!

Now something for the geeks among us. I lost the second part of our ride, because I had only a one-way course loaded into my Edge 500 cycling GPS, so while we were riding back to Leuven, it was complaining all the time, that I was off-course, etc. Then after a while (on the biggest climb right after Wavre) it just died… So, if you want to follow a course back and forth, have both legs planned! And some interesting sites on the net for the Tour-fanatics: 1) You can follow the HTC – Columbia riders on Google Maps live here. 2) You can check the recorded data of selected Garmin – Transitions riders here. These are both really cool projects!

This brings us to the end of the story about me and the Tour de France of 2010, it was a great experience, a lot of fun but also hard work, and I hope to repeat it somewhen in the coming years. With a bit more sleep, if that is possible. Vive le Tour!

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Belgisch Kampioenschap 2010, Leuven

Sunday was the day of the Belgian National Road Race Championship, which was held in Leuven this year (for the first time in history). As this is one of the biggest events (after the spring classics) in the Belgian cycling calendar, it is not surprising, that the preparations and the race itself turned the city upside down. Streets were closed down and endless crowds were moving along the route (17 rounds of 14.2 km) of the race from the early morning (to get the best spots) till the end of the podium ceremony – so basically all day long. The podium finishers were:

1. Stijn Devolder (Quick Step, #4) with an average speed of 41.091 km/h on 239.7 km
2. Philippe Gilbert (Omega Pharma-Lotto, #23) 0:23
3. Frederik Veuchelen (Vacansoleil Pro Cycling Team, #91) 0:24

For me, this was the best opportunity to test and practice with my equipment (new additions: Canon Speedlite 430EX II flash, a Lowepro Fastpack 250 backpack, and – for the time being – a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM lens – thanks to Dr. Stefan Uttenthaler for lending the latter to me for these races) which I will use on the first days of the Tour de France next week. I was there at the start, then from 4 PM till the end I was running around various point along the course. I have to admit I have learned a lot, and I got to know my equipment much better in a quite short time. Of course I made a lot of blurred or out-of-focus pictures (experimenting with focus modes, autofocus areas and exposure times), and images where I missed half of the cyclist (following – or tracking – someone riding with 40 km/h just a couple of meters from you with a big telephoto lens is everything but easy – the lens is heavy, the field of view is small, and the cyclists are fast…), but as time went by, I had more and more good pictures, so I am very optimistic about my future keep-rate (number of images not ending up in the trash immediately) on the Tour de France. (But please pray with me for good weather – ok, any kind of weather is fine, if it does not involve rain.) As soon as I am ready with all the images, I will let you know, but I still have unprocessed pictures from earlier events, so for now, I have only a short photo-report. I have selected images of the top 3 cyclists (look for their numbers above) plus some interesting/nice ones, so please, enjoy!

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It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish…

I use to think I am insane, and this is probably true. After completing a 203 km ride on Saturday (and it was not a “flat” one), I thought “no more cycling during the long weekend, I should just take the following days calm and easy, laying around in the botanic garden, write my diary, read a book, or work on pictures I had taken in the recent weeks (months)“. But this thought vanished quickly – like rain from the asphalt after a short shower on a hot summer day – and I decided to go on a recovery ride (keeping the heart rate low, but pedaling relatively fast, not caring about the speed) to Mechelen, on my usual 52 km route on Sunday afternoon (after sleeping till midday, I have to confess it here). I thought it would be good to just go and have a slow ride, to move the legs and get rid off the stiffness. And it worked even better than I had expected. After the ride I felt completely recharged, with no pain or tiredness left from the previous day. That was the moment when I decided to go for another long ride on Monday. All the conditions were excellent: the weather forecast was almost perfect, I felt strong, and I had nothing else to do on that day – I knew I would only waste my time at home, probably sitting in front of the screen, watching TV or surfing the internet in endless cycles, because I would be to lazy to go out and do something else.

So I got up at 8 on the next morning, and left around 9 after a good breakfast of scrambled eggs with bacon. I had written down the list of knot-points I had to follow into my mobile phone, so no risk of loosing an important piece of paper like in April… I had a terrible headwind till Mechelen (and even a bit further, so I did use some “not that nice” words to describe how I disliked the situation – I was swearing like hell in Hungarian :D), then as I turned to the NE, it changed to an almost perfect tailwind, and stayed like that for a long time. I was flying through Flanders with 35 km/h on the wings of the wind, turning my legs around without any difficulty. I really enjoyed it. Then from Duffel to Lier I rode with another guy, and with the help of each other’s slipstream we easily reached and hold a speed of 40 km/h for quite a long time (I had a maximum heart rate of 174 bpm, which is lover than the usual average heart rate during my normal workouts). Later on from Viersel to Herentals, I had a perfect tailwind (really, it was one of those rare moments when you don’t even hear the wind blowing, because it has the same speed as you have), so here I could ride with 37 km/h with my heart rate still in HR Zone 2 (around 155 bpm) – where I tried to keep it all day long. This part of Belgium is really flat, so no climbs at all (except some bridges). There were many restaurants along the channels, so I decided that I would stop somewhere for a lunch after a while (somewhen after halfway point). At Witgoor I turned to the South, hence the wind became sidewind, and it got only worse later… And then – around 120 km – came the first problem of the day: I started to run out of water (I mean Isostar), and being fed up with eating the sweet (and already melted, but useful) energy bars, but of course there were no restaurants around anymore… So typical. Finally, just after I had passed the 143 km mark, I arrived to Fietsstop 303 – which is situated right at knot-point nr. 303 :) I rode the last 10 km really thinking just about cold water and normal food (that’s something you should always avoid, because it will never make the situation better). But here I could eat a good spaghetti and have a Coke, which saved my life (ok, I start to be a bit too poetic, but anyway, I really enjoyed the food and the rest here). I was a bit surprised, that they had no special sports drinks (like Isostar, Powerade or Gatorade), but at least I could refill my bottles with cold tap-water. From Halen to Tienen, I rode on a cycle path which was built on the trajectory of an old railway. Then the last part of the ride (from Tienen) was the same as 48 hours earlier, but the hills were much more painful with the headwind and with another 250 km in my legs since then… But cycling is all about pain-handling (at least when you go far or fast – or both…), so I stood out of the saddle, and pushed the pedals till the peak (thinking that I am Lance on the Ventoux), then tried to recover on the other side. Then from Lovenjoel I switched on my last power sources and rode with 30-35 km/h till I arrived to Leuven. At the end (after 212 km), I looked really extremely dirty professional, with all the sweat mixed with the sunscreen, the dirt and dust of the road (plus the dead insects :D), anyone could tell I am coming from far far away. And I felt completely satisfied with the rides of the weekend, so I arrived home with a big smile on my face. A really BIG one! So the sum of the long weekend is 467.53 km (203.46 + 51.93 + 212.13), which is awesome. I spent almost 18 hours in the saddle… Being a cyclist (I mean a PhD student who likes cycling) in Belgium is great (though we could use some imported Alps over here, but hey, I am not going to complain).

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