Wales Easter Weekend

I was fortunate enough to have my own personal Wales cycle training tour over the Easter weekend. Although the weekend started with something of a disaster, we had magnificent weather (and probably Wales entire annual quota of sunny days), beautiful countryside, and hills. Lots of hills.

So first, the disaster. I am still getting around to purchasing a car, and in the meantime had a VW Golf on hire. They have this electronic handbrake thing, which lacks the reassurance of a nice manual handbrake. If you forget to turn it on there is no way to see once the cars turned off. I left Norfolk early Friday, and got to London to pick Andrew up by about 8am and popped inside for a coffee. Upon coming outside I thought the car had been stolen.

Luckily, I had just forgotten to turn the handbrake on, and the car had rolled, very very slowly along the nearly flat street into someone's parked car. Both cars had panel damage but were perfectly drivable. We located the owner of the other car, and a call to the rental company to report it was relatively painless.

My partners in crime for the weekend were Welsh tour guide Andrew, crazy-Irish Tania, crazy-Spanish Eva, and Eva's not-really-crazy boyfriend. Andrew spent the days thrashing me on the bike, and we spent the afternoons and evening eating, and falling into a deep coma of exhaustion.

All four days rides were pretty tough, but Saturday was by far the hardest. We took in two pretty decent mountains, both ways, giving 4 x 500m ascents, in a 110km ride. These ascents are 15-25 minutes of straight climbing. The gradient is fairly gradual, and it's a matter and settling in and putting one foot in front of the other until you get to the top.

The hardest climb though was a treat left for Monday. Lulled into a false sense of security by what I thought was a easy loop to check out the castle, SURPRISE lets give the climb that featured I last years Tour of Britain a go. The 120m had a steep incline (a good portion being at 12-15% instead of the manageable 3-4% of the long climbs), and  I really thought that I would have to get off and walk, and that I would spew at the top.

Not content with being a great tour guide Andrew also gave me some good pep talks, and a couple of hour session explaining glute strengthening.

Sorry, no photos of beautiful Wales, I was too busy holding onto my handlebars going up and down those hills...