After a rest day staying in a mining camp chic style hotel (with 600,000 people flooding Carcassonne for its famous Bastille Day fireworks, it was all that was available) we hauled ourselves back into the bike.
Things have gotten to the point now where I have done so much that I don't question whether or not I will finish a stage. The anxiety about making it to Paris is gone, replaced with a sometimes weary resolution to just keep pedalling.
To continue the theme the first 50-100kms of the day are all about warming up, and really what better way to do this than with a couple of Cat 4 climbs. They are but mere bumps on the horizon to me now.
It was hard to believe that only a few days before we had a bunch of cyclists with borderline hypothermia, now in the Pyranees we had temperatures of above 30C, which in the sun, on tarmac, climbing a hill is pretty warm. Thankfully the heat is treating me okay, and thankfully our mostly British cohort has not melted away.
This was a long stage, and to counter the sleepiness that my nurofen + codeine + not sufficient sleep cocktail provides I found 4x cans of coke, 2x ice creams and goodness knows how much other food kept me moving.
The crowning glory of the day was Port de Bals, a relentless HC climb that came at the end of the day, as just kept going and going and going. But what a place to spend a few hours, surrounded by the amazing snow capped Pyrenees mountains, passing some of the happiest cows on earth (no wonder French cheese is so good!).
Then, the summit, and descent. After days of descending in the wet with extreme trepidation it was time to let fly, with the sun setting into the beautiful village of Luchon.
We rolled in at about 9:30pm, and luckily had the foresight to send Caroline ahead of us. She managed to get the room and bags sorted, so that it was only a matter of hauling myself from the bike to the massage table to the shower and bed.
It was a long and hard day, but one of the best I've had on the bike.
No comments:
Post a Comment