Day 1 – Camino Interior
Well, that was the hardest bike ride of my life so far. What a fun day!
I left Viseu around 9.15 am and I arrived a little after 3 pm to wherever I am. So about 5 hours and 45 minutes (which matches my bike GPS for total time). I stopped for a total of ~30 minutes to eat snacks and drink water (went through 4200 ml and pee was way too dark). And, then I had a fair bit of mini stops to talk to God about the mountains and the swarms of bugs around my face.
Why was this ride so hard?
#1 – Crazy intense altitude gains while pushing a bike. The map says ~1,450m of gain (~5000 feet) which isn’t too bad until you see how intense they are. I had to walk up most of these while pushing a heavy bike/bag setup… which leads me to reason number 2…
And, here is what it looks like just when I was riding. The huge sharp leaps are because I walked up those parts while pushing the bike and then the bike gps came back on when I started moving fast enough.
#2 – Insane trails that were harder than anything I did in Colorado on my mountain bike. Many of them just looked like stream beds with 18in drops in the middle of the path, loose rubble, huge rocks, some sandy, etc… And, some were fairly overgrown. Many times I had to walk down the steep parts to ensure no tragedy (pictures below).
Stats?
Note, my bike GPS auto stops when I am not going fast enough, aka biking very slowly or walking (something I will turn off shortly).
So it says I biked for 3 hours and 14 minutes. During which I covered 39.25km and ~700m of altitude gain. The map says I biked ~51km and did ~1450m altitude gain. So that means I walked or I was riding very slowly for ~10km, 750m, and 2 hours on top of that. That seems likely. It might have been a little less distance as at the end I jumped on a road instead of more of the insane path.
Pictures in order of my day…
Tomorrow?
I scaled back the distance as a lot of altitude tomorrow too. But, I am going to keep trying this path :)
We shall see how it goes…
Fuck you Strava :)
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