Sunday 19 July 2015

Penticton Riding Camp day 1 - Apex

This weekend I'm doing a riding camp in Penticton with a handful of our Haute Route group - Trev, Scott and Dennis. For me it's also a sleep camp, which I've been craving. 

We were on the road at about noon on Friday for a climb up to Apex ski resort, x2. We're focusing on these x2's to simulate multiple climbs on our event. Nice roads up to there, then Trev showed us the bottle drop corner and where people time their ascents from.  

The first 6k was pretty steep, and I haven't adjusted my gears yet to be suitable for a lot of climbing. I could just barely keep it ticking over and was putting out a lot of energy. Dennis and I rode the steeper sections together - lets just say physics dictates he'll spend less energy combatting gravity than I will.  Right where it starts to "flatten" we could hear Trev approaching, so I jumped to try to stay on his wheel for a bit. That worked for about 10s but as we finished I could still see him, he put most of his time in on the steeps and about a minute on the flatter portion, total of 5 mins ahead of me. He's 4th overall on it at 39min and I'm 17th at 44. For me that was a 301W sustained effort, which in heat I thought was good. Trev averaged 6W more, but the other key is he weighs 149lb. 

Second repeat was a lot harder. I watched everyone with spinny gears use them, and just grinded out the climb. My power to weight to grade to gears ration was out of whack. 

Nice descent down to a gravel road section that was lovely. Little more twitchy on the Cervelo vs one of my ti bikes but beauty. 

Stopped at a gas station to refuel, came down the hill by a Canada observation station in the name of science locals call Area 51, then home. 

We were bagged - and I was proud to have survived the heat (mostly). Had some adductor cramping on the way home, but that was less hear related and more overgeared double climb related. 

136k, 2930m and about 5:45. Warmup day!

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