April 6: Week 9 wrapup
The training schedule says I should be doing three sessions a week plus strength training and the weekend ride. This is quite a lot of gym. and it’s making me stronger but slowly destroying me too. I should also be doing runs afterwards “on tired legs”, but frankly tired legs are all I have these days. I get out of bed in the morning, and my legs are still tired.
The gym sessions have switched modes too. One particularly unpleasant class is climb training. This features “grinding” - and this is the actual name, given by the actual instructor - wherein you keep RPM under 60 and crank up the resistance mightily. With that much resistance each turn of the pedals is like some sort of leg lift with weights. And my knees are not entirely happy with all this force. It’s do-able, but if knee+heel+toeclip are slightly out of alignment then there’s some warning twinges. So while trying to lift up some very heavy pedals, ignore the muscle pain but be extra-attentive to knee complaints.
I’m not intending to mistreat my knees like this on the actual ride so I’m not overachieving on these classes…and also because getting an injury now would probably mean I’d need to reschedule everything for autumn.
On another topic: I’m getting my route notes prepared. I’d like the flexibility to choose shorter days if it’s raining. Also, until I’ve done a couple of days on the ride I don’t know if I’ll be able to do 6 or 8 or 10 hours a day. Komoot gives time estimates, I’m generally about 10% quicker than they estimate … but I don’t know if that’ll hold on rough roads and steep climbs and with a full bike.
So the route notes give info about the distance and estimated time to each village/town along the way, and also for hostels and B&Bs that looked good.
This is based on the route data from Komoot, which includes time estimates for every waypoint, and it adjusts for rougher roads and steeper slopes. A helpful website had a list of coordinates and populations for every European city with more than a thousand people. (Population is useful to know if there’s going to be a supermarket, or if it’s just a place to refill water.) I’ve been trawling along the route in Google Maps looking for places to stay. In addition, I’ve got noteworthy things along the route, like memorable peaks, hell climbs, offroad sections, directions for the places where the path just plain disappears, or other spots where a navigation hint might be handy when I’m trying follow the route after having lost my sense of humour. I’ve got a script that digests all this data and prepares a nicely formatted page suitable for printing and a second electronic version with clickable links; it’s a lumpen misshapen thing lashed together from some ugly XML parse code and a depth-first distance search, but it works well enough.
This probably sounds mundane, but it’s really useful. It makes it easy to see long unsupported stretches, it shows where the last chance town is, and how far to the next one. It makes it possible to schedule the days through areas with sparse accommodation, avoiding painfully long or wastefully short days. And since it’s been built with a script so I can easily change the route or add more notes.
And it will be updated, because there’s a lot of traps for the unwary. Searching for accommodation in Google Maps can give a generous scattering of icons - but when you check them, none of them actually have phone number or websites or contact details. Or that they’re all vacation apartments, minimum rental one week. Or that this is a ski village and it’s quite possible that nothing is actually open, since it’s summer. In one town the only option was rated 2/5 stars and the reviews were so descriptively awful they could form the setup for a bad horror movie. There was a campsite where you couldn’t stay unless you had permission from the local district - there were some pretty unhappy reviews for that one too... And there was one 50km section where every place to stay cost over 100 euro per night.
Despite my best efforts, I’m fully expecting that there will be some nasty surprises along the way and I’ll end up wild-camping in a bus stop. Well, I’m prepared for that at least…
