(You know, it is very encouraging receiving texts and emails from people following my ride. I also get a graph update each day showing how many "views" of the blog I've had.)
Today felt a bit frustrating, because I didn't feel exhausted and in need of the rest day. I felt like I wanted to get going. However, it was 30 degrees C and difficult walking round, never mind cycling.
I have a little kitchen in my room, so I went to the supermarket to buy breakfast. Did you know it's possible to spell out your home town with items on the shelf?
Later, I checked over the bike and the new tube and went into the town, but it was so uncomfortably hot, I retreated to my room, where I decided to try and "fix" the up/down route that lay ahead. As I said on an earlier post, it is quite disheartening to have worked hard to gain height to then lose it all on a big downhill freewheel.
My sat nav is made up of about eight 100 mile routes to get me from Alsager to Wengen. Where route 1 finishes, route 2 starts etc. I did it like this because when doing all the planning, I found occasionally a very long route might crash the computer before being saved. So I ended up doing it in chunks. Tomorrow, I have about 30 miles to go on my current route to get me to Belfort. At that point, I will load up my next section from Belfort to Bozingen.
It is this next section that was giving me concern. Here is what the elevation profile looked like:
As you can see, there is a pretty big range of hills/mountains between Belfort and Bozingen, and these can't really be avoided (maybe with a 300 mile detour!), so I have to accept that I need to climb from 300m to over 1000m (see the scale on the left) - this is from 1000 feet to 3300 feet, about the height of Snowdon. But, what I really don't want are the two massive dips on the way up.
I had planned the route at my desk at home a few months ago, and spent quite a bit of time trying to get it right, but there is nothing like being here - with a few aches and pains - to really focus you on trying again to improve it.
So here it is, the benefit of having a rest day, has created, after several trial and errors, a new route for my toughest bit. This is the new elevation profile:
The scale on the left is exactly the same, so it's still going from 1000 to 3300 feet, but almost in a straight climb. The distance on the bottom is actually a few kilometres shorter, down from 123km to 117km. So I have taken out the two big dips and shaved off 6km (about 4 miles)!
If all goes well tomorrow, I should finish my current section before lunch, then get started on the one above in the afternoon probably getting to the bit where it gets really steep by the end of the day. Coincidentally, the steep bit starts somewhere near the Swiss border.
My alarm is set for 6.45 as an early start should be nice and cool.
And finally, good news for those of you who thought 3 pairs of socks and 3 pairs of undies were not enough - they have all been washed, rinsed and dried whilst on my day off!
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