On paper, or on the webpage, today's club ride from Amelie les Bains looked kind of short, just 60k once we started in Amelie. With the extra 60k to and from the ride, the day promised a leisurely 120k or so, a modest number for one of my big rides of the week.
The ride up the valley to Amelie would be sans Geoff; Janet answered the phone last night while doing dishes downstairs and talked to a Geoff in a lot of pain. Les calculs billaire, gallstones, had forced him into the hospital for a few hours and cancelled his weekend training. I checked anyway as I wound through the rondpoint in Le Boulou. Nope, no Geoff, the pain must have been pretty bad.
The day had come in sunny and a bit windy, but far less windy than the gales blowing the past three days. Our Lonely Planet guidebook defines le Mistral as a constant wind from the mountains that drives people crazy; after a few days of constant howling winds gusting to 70mph, this 10-15mph seemed pleasant. The sun patches on the road warmed my arms and legs and I took time to soak in the scenery. Many trips up the valley over the last two months, and I still hadn't completely absorbed the scene. The sense of size and space, the long horizontal vistas of the plain of Rousillon, the vertical presence of le Canigou; colors and sounds, mimosa yellows, almond whites, peach pinks against a canvas of desert browns and greens; and the sounds of water, birds and wind; a sensory symphony.
Around the rondpoint at St. Jean pla de Corts and the long stretch to Ceret, and, voila! a new road surface. It's been two weeks since my tires last touched this asphalt and the old bumpy tarmac has been completely replaced with a velvet smooth surface. If only they could do this to Hwy 3 in Colesburg so quickly! Alas and alack, the truly terrible section in Ceret, the one that mimics the worst sections of my highway back in Iowa, is still there, potholes and cracks and crevases uncovered and unfettered.
8:55am and I've the first one at the meeting point in Amelie's centre ville. A moment of doubt; in the states daylight savings time started two weeks earlier than usual, today, did the French follow suit? Another rider rolls up and then another, shaking hands a salutory salut and the worry fades. David, the fellow I met and rode with on Wednesday, arrives from Ceret and we're soon off, back down the valley for a climb up the Col de Llauro.
The pace down is always a bit of a frustration for me. After 30k on the false flats of the Tech valley, I'm warmed up and ready to go. Coasting back down hill, using up my brake pads and cooling off takes some patience. Not that I'm feeling too squirly today with a chest cold in full bloom (did I hurt myself at last Sunday's race?), but I miss the constant pace of my Wednesday rides. On these club runs we're either going too easy or too hard, but it's not peculiar to this club; our Dubuque club has the same issue: how to be most things to most riders. And they've come to a similar solution: easy, easy pace for the first part of the ride and then the group splits for the second part into fast and less fast. As with most compromises, it's not perfect. As a new rider in the group and a non-native speaker of French, my strategy is to wait and watch for the group split and follow wheels.
We take the split in the road right at Ceret and head towards Maureillas, another smooth, newly paved section of road. A loud bang at the rondpoint and everyone rolls to a stop. 'C'est le tourist,' one of the club riders says. Sounds like a sidewall blowout. The fellow has a cellphone and calls for a pickup; we all continue on our way. Just before Maureillas, we take the left turn to St Jean, crossing my route up, then it's the very familiar climb up past Vives and the Col de Llauro. The group is splitting on the climb and I follow the best climber's wheel, Veronique, and we're soon 7 riders spinning up to Vives, the midway point on the climb. Just before the village, the road levels and I spin lightly on the pedals, letting the legs recover and get used to the effort before we climb again on the edge of town.
Veronique, the top finisher in her age group at the Marmotte last year and one of the top women finishers overall, is putting it on today. Geoff and I normally use this climb as a warmup for our Wednesday rides, letting the cranks turn over and keeping it around 11mph. At 11 my heartrate stays just inside the aerobic zone, a perfect spot. At 13mph, my heart is pumping like crazy, 160, 165, 170 and levels out at 173, deep inside my anaerobic zone. I take a kind of detached awareness of this and wonder how long I can climb at this rate. About a kilometer from the top I get my answer and slowly lose the wheels of the five riders in front of me, led by Veronique and her husband, a rider down from Toulouse, a fellow from Le Boulou and a couple of other grimpeurs. There's no honor lost and I didn't push too hard. David is just behind me and I spin the rest of the way to the top and the group recongeals.
'This is a real pin in the neck, this,' David says as we feel our legs stiffening at the roadside of Llauro. We're soon rolling through the village, over the col and down to Ceret. Our group isn't very big now. The triathalon guy that was pushing on the col is gone, so is the little spanish guy on the yellow bike. Seven of us cruise back towards Amelie.
'Have you been up Montbolo,' David asks. I think I have, but I quickly learn I haven't. I'm sure if I had been up it on a bicycle, my legs would have remembered it. We follow a small sign for Montbolo, and Veronique's husband, a former gendarme, barks at us to follow him past a big red sign that says 'Danger'. It's just a short cut next to a slope that occasionally litters the road with chunks of granite. We 'save' maybe 50 meters or so.
Then the road lurches up. By lurch, I don't mean a paltry 8% like the Col de Llauro. Lurch means more like Potter's Hill. I'm quicly into my red zone, pumping away, trying to be smooth, letting the three in front roll off at their own pace. David soon passes me, looking good, a grimace on his face. Two riders are behind me and when I stop for a photo (and a breather) Veronique coasts back down. 'Ca va, Chris?' 'Oui, ca va. Je prende un photo. C'est tres jolie.' Gasp, gasp. My lungs are wheezing with the phlegm of my chest cold and I think either I'll get pnuemonia from this or all the gunk will get burned out of me from the inside out.
Veronique stays with me and asks about Geoff. I tell her about gallstones, very proud to be understood with this new word (les calculs billiare) but soon we're stumped when it get's to describing the treatment. The French knack for inventing new words for technical things (computer=ordinator) stumps us both. What is the word for ultrasound? (Ultrasons!) This is where the language learning hits the road. We get to the top and David is there next to the fountain. A quick refill of the bottle and we're flying down through the hairpins the back way to Amelie.
75, 4:45, 4200ft
The ride up the valley to Amelie would be sans Geoff; Janet answered the phone last night while doing dishes downstairs and talked to a Geoff in a lot of pain. Les calculs billaire, gallstones, had forced him into the hospital for a few hours and cancelled his weekend training. I checked anyway as I wound through the rondpoint in Le Boulou. Nope, no Geoff, the pain must have been pretty bad.
The day had come in sunny and a bit windy, but far less windy than the gales blowing the past three days. Our Lonely Planet guidebook defines le Mistral as a constant wind from the mountains that drives people crazy; after a few days of constant howling winds gusting to 70mph, this 10-15mph seemed pleasant. The sun patches on the road warmed my arms and legs and I took time to soak in the scenery. Many trips up the valley over the last two months, and I still hadn't completely absorbed the scene. The sense of size and space, the long horizontal vistas of the plain of Rousillon, the vertical presence of le Canigou; colors and sounds, mimosa yellows, almond whites, peach pinks against a canvas of desert browns and greens; and the sounds of water, birds and wind; a sensory symphony.
Around the rondpoint at St. Jean pla de Corts and the long stretch to Ceret, and, voila! a new road surface. It's been two weeks since my tires last touched this asphalt and the old bumpy tarmac has been completely replaced with a velvet smooth surface. If only they could do this to Hwy 3 in Colesburg so quickly! Alas and alack, the truly terrible section in Ceret, the one that mimics the worst sections of my highway back in Iowa, is still there, potholes and cracks and crevases uncovered and unfettered.
8:55am and I've the first one at the meeting point in Amelie's centre ville. A moment of doubt; in the states daylight savings time started two weeks earlier than usual, today, did the French follow suit? Another rider rolls up and then another, shaking hands a salutory salut and the worry fades. David, the fellow I met and rode with on Wednesday, arrives from Ceret and we're soon off, back down the valley for a climb up the Col de Llauro.
The pace down is always a bit of a frustration for me. After 30k on the false flats of the Tech valley, I'm warmed up and ready to go. Coasting back down hill, using up my brake pads and cooling off takes some patience. Not that I'm feeling too squirly today with a chest cold in full bloom (did I hurt myself at last Sunday's race?), but I miss the constant pace of my Wednesday rides. On these club runs we're either going too easy or too hard, but it's not peculiar to this club; our Dubuque club has the same issue: how to be most things to most riders. And they've come to a similar solution: easy, easy pace for the first part of the ride and then the group splits for the second part into fast and less fast. As with most compromises, it's not perfect. As a new rider in the group and a non-native speaker of French, my strategy is to wait and watch for the group split and follow wheels.
We take the split in the road right at Ceret and head towards Maureillas, another smooth, newly paved section of road. A loud bang at the rondpoint and everyone rolls to a stop. 'C'est le tourist,' one of the club riders says. Sounds like a sidewall blowout. The fellow has a cellphone and calls for a pickup; we all continue on our way. Just before Maureillas, we take the left turn to St Jean, crossing my route up, then it's the very familiar climb up past Vives and the Col de Llauro. The group is splitting on the climb and I follow the best climber's wheel, Veronique, and we're soon 7 riders spinning up to Vives, the midway point on the climb. Just before the village, the road levels and I spin lightly on the pedals, letting the legs recover and get used to the effort before we climb again on the edge of town.
Veronique, the top finisher in her age group at the Marmotte last year and one of the top women finishers overall, is putting it on today. Geoff and I normally use this climb as a warmup for our Wednesday rides, letting the cranks turn over and keeping it around 11mph. At 11 my heartrate stays just inside the aerobic zone, a perfect spot. At 13mph, my heart is pumping like crazy, 160, 165, 170 and levels out at 173, deep inside my anaerobic zone. I take a kind of detached awareness of this and wonder how long I can climb at this rate. About a kilometer from the top I get my answer and slowly lose the wheels of the five riders in front of me, led by Veronique and her husband, a rider down from Toulouse, a fellow from Le Boulou and a couple of other grimpeurs. There's no honor lost and I didn't push too hard. David is just behind me and I spin the rest of the way to the top and the group recongeals.
'This is a real pin in the neck, this,' David says as we feel our legs stiffening at the roadside of Llauro. We're soon rolling through the village, over the col and down to Ceret. Our group isn't very big now. The triathalon guy that was pushing on the col is gone, so is the little spanish guy on the yellow bike. Seven of us cruise back towards Amelie.
'Have you been up Montbolo,' David asks. I think I have, but I quickly learn I haven't. I'm sure if I had been up it on a bicycle, my legs would have remembered it. We follow a small sign for Montbolo, and Veronique's husband, a former gendarme, barks at us to follow him past a big red sign that says 'Danger'. It's just a short cut next to a slope that occasionally litters the road with chunks of granite. We 'save' maybe 50 meters or so.
Then the road lurches up. By lurch, I don't mean a paltry 8% like the Col de Llauro. Lurch means more like Potter's Hill. I'm quicly into my red zone, pumping away, trying to be smooth, letting the three in front roll off at their own pace. David soon passes me, looking good, a grimace on his face. Two riders are behind me and when I stop for a photo (and a breather) Veronique coasts back down. 'Ca va, Chris?' 'Oui, ca va. Je prende un photo. C'est tres jolie.' Gasp, gasp. My lungs are wheezing with the phlegm of my chest cold and I think either I'll get pnuemonia from this or all the gunk will get burned out of me from the inside out.Veronique stays with me and asks about Geoff. I tell her about gallstones, very proud to be understood with this new word (les calculs billiare) but soon we're stumped when it get's to describing the treatment. The French knack for inventing new words for technical things (computer=ordinator) stumps us both. What is the word for ultrasound? (Ultrasons!) This is where the language learning hits the road. We get to the top and David is there next to the fountain. A quick refill of the bottle and we're flying down through the hairpins the back way to Amelie.
75, 4:45, 4200ft
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