{"id":831,"date":"2018-07-15T14:38:57","date_gmt":"2018-07-15T18:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/?p=831"},"modified":"2018-07-30T14:43:26","modified_gmt":"2018-07-30T18:43:26","slug":"ronde-alienor-daquitaine-1200","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/?p=831","title":{"rendered":"Ronde Alienor d’Aquitaine 1200"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ride report from Dave Thompson:<\/p>\n

Such variety!\u00a0 Scenery, organization, sustenance — I was asked whether mentally I wanted to saddle up again after Bulgaria and Spain — the variety alone does it.<\/div>\n
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This time I had enough sleep between rides. Albeit just another four days break, I stayed put the day after Spain, snoozed and generally doing nothing, drove to France, a 6-or-so hour drive (beautiful through the Pyrenees) and then did nothing for another couple of days.<\/div>\n
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The Aquitaine ride started at 8pm.\u00a0 That was my choice.\u00a0 5am was the other choice.\u00a0 It made the Col de Soulor a day climb (1300 metres \/ 2.5 hours) but kind of locked those of us doing the night start (160 vs 80 day starters), riding a lot at night.\u00a0 Or perhaps that’s because of my choice of hotels … hmmm.<\/div>\n
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Being very conservative and taking the advice of others, I only planned 430 km that first day.\u00a0 We could have gone further but we had a hotel and I was ready to stop.\u00a0 400 km is always longer than my sweet spot.<\/div>\n
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Days 2 & 3 were around 300 km; day 4 around 185.\u00a0 We finished Day 1 around 6pm – Hamid a little ahead of me and me a little after that – and planned a start around 2am.\u00a0 The next two nights were later finishes and we headed out at 12:30 am for the last day – with a 2pm cutoff, we needed to leave some margin for what would likely be a 12 hour ride.<\/div>\n
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It’s worth mentioning that Hamid, riding ahead of me, had the company of a Spanish rider until said rider didn’t stop at a stop sign and was hit by a car.\u00a0 Eventually carried away by air ambulance, the last word that we had was that he was in a coma.\u00a0 We don’t know if he will recover.\u00a0 Hamid, initially thinking that he was dead at the scene, was pretty broken up by that occurrence.\u00a0 I came on the scene just afterward and a while later, checked Spotwalla to ensure that Hamid was still ahead of me — yes — as I couldn’t tell who the rider was.<\/div>\n
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The rolling French countryside is always interesting.\u00a0 Various Bordeaux Chateaux and into other wine regions sure made me wish that I was on a tasting, rather than a cycling, mission.\u00a0 With all the night riding … but of course full day riding too … we did get to see a lot of grape vines, endless grape vines!<\/div>\n
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The ride started out on a bike trail into Bordeaux and then crossed back across the river on a signature bridge, one of the main sights planned into the ride.\u00a0 From there through St. Emilion, it was starting to get dark and I was riding alone, as usual.\u00a0 The staged start, a few dozen at a time, meant that those groups passed me and I was, as always, the Lanterne Rouge at that part of the ride.\u00a0 The first Control wasn’t until km 167, still dark at that point, time for a quick coffee and coke and roll on. Many others were still at that Control.<\/div>\n
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All through this ride you purchased food.\u00a0 A few controls had some gratuitous items – mainly fruit – but most everything else had a price.\u00a0 There was always Coca Cola (Coka), coffee, sparkling water, beer and wine.\u00a0 Those items all cost the same price at each control although how much you were poured and how much it cost, varied from control to control – there was no standardization.\u00a0 Food, likewise, varied hugely.\u00a0 There was pasta available at most, sometimes tomato sauce, sometimes chicken, once duck, usually bread, water was always free.\u00a0 At an early control they were cooking up a full English Breakfast.\u00a0 I didn’t realize that until I’d already purchased some other items.<\/div>\n
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Between Controls there were options as well although some were far apart.\u00a0 Through one night we had carried some pizza from the night before and stopped at a bench in a town and ate that.\u00a0 I moved to another bench and took a 15 minute power nap.\u00a0 Three other riders sat down for a time and then rolled on.<\/div>\n
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Rolling, rolling, rolling – the countryside goes on.\u00a0 We dropped down to sea level at one point and were treated to a couple of hours of Atlantic Ocean views.\u00a0 I guess that if you tried to cover the signature items, those would be the chateaux, the aforementioned bridge, all the rolling farm countryside and towns, the ocean views and the Col de Soulor.\u00a0 About a 1300 metre climb, the Tour de France will be on that climb on July 27 while we’re doing the Stelvio in the Italian ride … but let’s not get ahead of ourselves!\u00a0 We were lucky that it was cloudy for the Col.\u00a0 It could have been brutal.\u00a0 As it was, that climb took us 2.5 hours.<\/div>\n
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Shab, Hamid’s wife, supported us from overnight to overnight.\u00a0 She would check in, move drop bags into the pre-arranged hotels, pick up some food and beer and then we would drink our beer, eat some food and crash for a couple\/few hours.\u00a0\u00a0 When we left, we would carry our bags downstairs so that she could get them into the car, then she’d go back to sleep (well, maybe, as she’s been known to pay attention to our trackers!).<\/div>\n
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We stretched it out, using up most of our time.\u00a0 With that 2pm drop-dead finish time, we left the last overnight at 12:30 am and finished up at noon.\u00a0 We could have pushed harder but didn’t need to.\u00a0 We set a cushion time of two hours and kept that cushion time.<\/div>\n
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Mostly the roads were ok other than 50-60 km late afternoon on the third day when we had rough chip seal that was enough to drive you crazy and uses up a whole lot of energy.\u00a0 That area cost us at least an hour, perhaps more, which subtracted from our sleep time that last night.<\/div>\n
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The final day spent at least half our time on bike paths and through some national park closed to cars.\u00a0 It ended up back among the grape vines of the Bordeaux Chateaux and into St. Medard.\u00a0 Shab and Sandy were there to greet us!\u00a0 It’s always great to have cheering fans :).<\/div>\n
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As an aside, I was looking at the amount of climbing on the rides.\u00a0 Brazil was about 21,000 metres; DCR BRB 13,000 metres; Sofia 15,000; Leida 8,300 metres; Aquitaine 11,000.\u00a0 These numbers all come from RideWithGps, so they’re comparable if not totally accurate. BRB probably had the most high grade hills; the Virginia countryside.\u00a0 Sofia climbs were gentle for the most part, long climbs at 4%, plus or minus.\u00a0 Aquitaine had the consistently steep Col, ranging mostly from 7-9% with the occasional spike to 12%.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ride report from Dave Thompson: Such variety!\u00a0 Scenery, organization, sustenance — I was asked whether mentally I wanted to saddle up again after Bulgaria and Spain — the variety alone does it. This time I had enough sleep between rides. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ride-reports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":832,"href":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions\/832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.randonneursontario.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}