{"id":287,"date":"2011-08-17T21:14:48","date_gmt":"2011-08-17T21:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nobugs.org\/lejog\/?p=287"},"modified":"2011-08-17T22:16:04","modified_gmt":"2011-08-17T22:16:04","slug":"getting-dark-out-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/?p=287","title":{"rendered":"Getting dark out there"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quick blast to Kaimes Road this evening, getting back at 9.30pm by which time it was dark, eek! The seasons are changing …<\/p>\n

This time, I climbed, descended then climbed again with no rests (apart from the time spent descending). First two climbs were seated in 2nd gear. Next climb I did entirely out of the saddle. It felt weird because it was so much easier to turn the pedals – but at the cost of increased heartrate. I finished up with one final climb in my lowest gear, sprinting up the last bit. All in all, four climbs for a total of nearly 300m ascent. It takes me about 5 minutes to go up, and 1:30 to descend.<\/p>\n

My plan was to try to find a ‘sustainable’ heart-rate that I felt I could keep up for a long time. However, my Nexus-hubbed city bike is geared such that, on Kaimes Rd, it’s hard to keep at a reasonable pedalling cadence without being over 160bpm. Hopefully the bike I’m hiring in France will have a few more low gears …<\/p>\n

To put this all into perspective, watch the Tour de France on Alpe d’Huez<\/a>. At 3:00 the peloton hits the start of the climb, a gradient of 10%. It takes them until 5:20 to reach the first corner. That’s roughly one Kaimes Rd right there – just over 700m on the road, 70m ascent. Cadel Evans, who’s been riding the Tour for weeks and has just done two huge climbs already that day, does it in 2m20s. I do the same climb in just under 5 minutes.<\/p>\n

Back of envelope calculation time. If I sustained my 4x Kaimes Rd pace all the way up Alpe d’Huez (unrealistic) then it would take me 1h 15mins. The web makes it sounds like “serious” amateurs treat an hour as the target for glory. Lance Armstrong did it in ~40 minutes during a time trial. But this is all useful info. I know that for rides over an hour, I need to take on extra liquid\/energy otherwise my energy levels collapse. Psychologically, I’d rather expect to be climbing for two hours and then be pleasantly surprised, rather than plan for shorter and get a nasty surprise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quick blast to Kaimes Road this evening, getting back at 9.30pm by which time it was dark, eek! The seasons are changing … This time, I climbed, descended then climbed again with no rests (apart from the time spent descending). First two climbs were seated in 2nd gear. Next climb I did entirely out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions\/289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}