Final Fantasy

You must excuse me for touting Romney’s Spain blog as the last of our trip. I’d forgotten there was another chapter; one that included castles, manors, and amazing food. How boy-ish of me! Enjoy the final installment of our holiday. Lisa is a great writer and this last report is my personal favorite.

Assault on Western Europe: Part VII. Final Fantasy

As this is a fitness blog, I’ll add that it’s been fun watching Romney turn into a climber. Until this trip, she just went climbing to tag along with me. Since returning, she’s flashed a bunch of 5.11s. She still doesn’t think she can climb because most of my friends are quite good (and have been climbing forever), but she’s stronger than most of the people who call themselves climbers ever will be. She seemed surprised when, yesterday, a woman saw her back and said “you must be a climber.” Her reply that she just gets dragged around by her husband is looking more like a rouse all the time. A couple more trips to Europe and she’s going to turn into my rope gun.

Climbing in four countries on one trip can do a lot for the psyche:

England

on the sea cliffs of swanage

Belgium
like all the climbing areas in belgium, next to a castle and over a river.

France
climbing at Amiel in southern France...
with majestic views of penne's amazing castle.

Spain
approach via an old roman road, climb perfect rock, finish the day with excellent local food and wine. so easy to be inspired!
there's even climbing ON the castles

Viva la France!

Back to now-not-so-recent trip, here is Romney's account of France. Tres magnifique!

Assault of Western Europe, Part IV: The French Revolution

It's a long report, with heaps of pics. Enjoy!

In spite of their reputation for rudeness, I've always enjoyed the French people and their county. Very much so. This trip was being hosted by Americans. Namely, my friends Bruce and Alisa, whom I knew from my climbing days and, also, from hangin' out at the art studio they opened just down the street from where I lived in LA. Like me, they were climbers turned cyclists. Like me, the loved the French lifestyle.

Bruce and Alisa were on taking a year off work and living in France. Actually, they still are. They have a blog that's worth checking out, if just to make you jealous:

Our Juicy Life

After a few years of riding and racing I began climbing again. This hadn't yet happened with Bruce or Alisa and it just seemed wrong given there were living amongst some of the most beautiful limestone walls in the world. One of the coolest things we did was to get Bruce back on a rope. He was a super strong climber, as well as a climbing instructor, back in the day. It was fun watching him, not only get psyched himself, but how his instructor-ness came back also. I think he taught Lisa more in a couple of days out than I have in a year.
bruce, attempting a F7b on his second climbing day in a decade. rad.
Actually, everything we did was super cool. The trip was amazing. It's always hard to leave Europe and this time was no different. It was probably harder than ever. On our last days we were looking at bed and breakfasts. I hope they buy one because I can't wait to go back.
our hosts and les artists at the incredible museum of the absurd.

Hell Of The North

For part III of our European adventure, as well as a much higher quality version of this video, head over to Romney's Blog:

Assault on Western Europe: Part III: The Hell of the North

If you like cycling, you've probably read many accounts of Paris-Roubaix. But you probably haven't read a tourist's account of the race, which Lisa has summed up with her usual style.

Back in the states, I'm still exploring roads, bike paths, steep streets, and other more eccentric places to ride your bike for my upcoming Ronde van Salt Lake City. Took Trent our for some exploration yesterday where we got a couple of "I've never seen a road bike out here" comments. Trent says the ride is going to be stellar. I concur.

Riding Cobbles

Cobbles

(click on photo for a slideshow)

Travels with Romney, Part II, is recorded here:

The Battle of Belgium

When I heard my friends Bruce and Alisa were spending a year in southern France and had a house with plenty of room for visitors, the only choice became which bike race to visit during. Like me, they’re both climbers turned cyclists, and there was no question that our holiday had to be during a race. Having been to Le Tour, the next choices were the spring classics or the Giro. Given Bruce was a cobble crazy as I was, we set our dates to include Paris-Roubaix, better known as the Hell of the North.

The trip had originally been set up to include loads of training as my final prep for the National Championships at the end of April. Post injury, the schedule changed to include loads of eating and a recreational climbing & riding schedule to build up our appetite. But back injury or no, if I was in Belgium, I was going to have a go at some cobbles.

Riding in Belgium, well, specifically Flanders, is amazing. Everything is set up around bikes. There are cafes, museums, bike shops (that are a lot like museums), and bike routes everywhere you go. All of them include stretches of famous bike races that take place on tiny rural roads. And almost all of them include cobbles. We had our choice of a stack of different classic routes, each marked by an artistic colored plaque. We began on the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders) but once we’d had a taste of cobbles, we amended it to include the steepest and most famous sectors we could get to the quickest.

On the longest sector of the day, we were passed by a guy hammering in his big ring. Bruce and I were quickly on him, my own curiosity being how it would feel to ride these things at race pace (the girls were having none of such nonsense). I was worried about my back, but after a kilometer of rattling along my vision was blurred, my head numb, and my hands, arms, and shoulders felt like I’d been going full bore with a jackhammer, so much so that I couldn’t be bothered to think about the back at all. Paris-Roubaix includes over 100k of cobbles. We’d just raced one. The horror of that race is so acute that I absolutely must come back and try the amateur version of it sometime.

The Koppenberg was, by far, the hardest climb we did. It’s not even 500 meters but the cobbles are uneven, wet (I’m sure they never dry in Belgium), and hit an angle of 20%. I quickly realized why there were so many pics of pro racers walking up these inclines. It wasn’t that they couldn’t ride them. It’s just that they’re so steep and rutted that anything causing you to lose you line or change cadence might force you off your bike. And in a pack these things are constant. And once off your bike you can’t remount, so you’re best off to just run to the top and get back on. You’re not riding that fast anyway.

Well, at least not on the Koppenberg. For our next ride we scanning the distances and grades of the cobbled climbs and choose the Muur de Geraldsberg as one that looked the fiercest. Cobbles for 1.3K that hit 19% promised to be horrible, so we tooled around at a pedestrian pace for most of our ride so we wouldn’t burn out all those fast twitch fibers we’d need to ride all the way to the Muur’s famous summit church.

Turns out that cobbles aren’t created equal. Those on the Muur are smaller and closer together. Not only could we ride it but we could hard. On a subsequent ascent, in my big ring, I could hardly imagine how fast Divolder must have been going on these narrow roads to drop everyone, as he had done a week prior en route to winning the Ronde van Vlaanderen.

Food and beer are at least as important in Belgium as riding. And, of course, there’s a pub at the top of the Muur. We recovered with Frittes and “the world’s best beer” (according to our waiter), and contemplated if Heaven was just a bit like Belgium.

I Have A Pot

The rest of you is normal. Normal face, normal legs, normal hips, normal ass, but with a big, perfectly round pot belly.

Fabienne, Pulp Fiction

On return from a moveable feast across Europe I’ve grown a pot. My climbing and, hence, my goal for this program will stand a much better chance at realization if I lose it.

My fitness is okay. I was climbing grade 7s quickly in Europe, with pot. Sans pot, things should drastically improve.

The plan for the first two weeks will be as thus:

4 days a week of riding and/or running at aerobic pace (mainly) on an empty stomach, C workouts.

2 days per week of synergistic whole body exercising, B workouts.

3 days per week of climbing/climbing training, one A, two B workouts.

Week one will only avoid junk foods. Week two will be severely caloric restricted. Week three will be the start of another virtual Giro. Its plan will be determined later.

I’d also like to make a few improvements to this blog, with more added photo streams and video, as well as adding a lot of info targeted towards anyone doing a three month program.

For an analysis of A,B,& C workouts click here.

above: day one photo, with bruce, sportin’ the pot and looking the part of a craggin’ french baker.