3/18/15

Paris Roubaix

RVV

Weekend in Flanders


My cycling friends in Barcelona dream about the Classics of the North.
They wanted to taste the cobbles in Flanders. It's not mountain biking, but within road racing it is probably the closest you can get to mountain biking.

My friends at cyclingpave.cc organised us a great weekend to ride the cobbles.

They provided the bikes, the guiding, the expertise, the food, the beers and somewhere to rest at night.
It doesn't get any better, even the weather was there to give us a real glimpse of the "hell of the North". It was cold, damp and windy, just like it should be!
The bikes are french made Cyfac, steel frame, geometry adapted to the cobbles and a Shimano Ultegra groupset.

For a road racer they are comfortable. For a mountain biker they aren't. As I don't ride Carbon or Aluminum road bikes I cannot tell whether there is a difference or not.
What I can say is that after many hours in the saddle and more than 50k of terrible cobbles, what hurt the most was the legs, and I cannot blame it on the bike!

3/9/15

Road Riding 1

I don't like to ride on the road, never have, and I think I never will.
I've been living for almost ten years near the border between Belgium and France in a Road Bike paradise. I've tried "pavés", "muurs", everything, but I don't like it.

So in a week I'm heading back to where I used to live to ride Paris-Roubaix and the RVV (Tour des Flanders).

The friends I ride with in Barcelona ride Road Bikes and love the Classics. I have friends in the North of France who organize "Discovery Rides": cyclingpave.cc so there we go.

To do so I have taken the dust out of my old road bike and I have been doing some short rides to get used to the position.

My old Titanium bike dates back to 2007, it has a full Dura Ace group 3x10.

I've been told it is pretty comfortable with the Titanium frame and the Carbon seatstays but so far I have not seen that "comfort".

And right, it has a triple, 30x40x52 and 11x23 at the rear. So, how come as soon as the road heads up a little I find myself stuck in the 30x23?

Climbs that you don't remember as difficult in MTB seem to last forever in Road.

I keep saying to myself that there are no climbs in Roubaix, but I cannot forget that we are doing the RVV as well and there we are going to find things like this: