A Paradocs Abroad

The time zone may be weird, but we had a beautiful, sunny 20°+ day today, that made the beginning of our winter training for PBP 2007 pretty easy to start.

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As far as we can tell there are no spin classes nearby, so Susan came up with an alternative plan. There's a U-shaped valley not far from here with the road marked off every hundred metres, or so, a remnant of a bike race earlier in the season, I guess. Susan's plan: hill intervals back and forth across this valley. She calls them hill intervals, I call it a puke-fest...

The valley is about 1250 m from side to side, and not quite symmetric, rising about 700 m to the south, and 550 to the north. The grade is 4% or 5% on both sides. There is a T-intersection at the bottom.

We arrived from the east, at that intersection in the bottom of the valley, and it was half an hour of climbing one side as hard as you can, trying to recover while coasting back down to the bottom (too soon!), and climbing up the other side. People in the little village on the north side (where the finish line of the race is) don't bat an eye as we climb repeatedly to the centre of their bourg and do a U-turn in the square.

Susan does one last climb of the south side while I roll back and forth across the bottom in ever decreasing U-s, like a marble in a trough, exhausted.

She's feeling virtuous and high on endorphines, and I'm just tired...