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!

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:

 

Night Riding

We ride at night twice a week.

Tuesdays and Thursdays at 19:00 pm we go out in the woods for a couple of hours of fun, usually a group four or five riders.


As lights have become cheaper and more powerful we dare to ride even the trickiest and most treacherous singletracks.



These look easier at night as you focus only in what is in front of you and don't get distracted as much as in daylight. Often, you're looking for a certain section you know is challenging only to find out you've already passed it.

It also always surprises me that the uphills seem shorter at night (Strava is there to tell us that they might seem shorter but they aren't).

Just another fall

It happens every now and then.

You don't look for it but it is part of why we ride. We like to ride fast, we like to ride sketchy trails and we like to ride no matter the weather.
So it was not a surprise that I found myself on the ground in a slippery trail.

Winter is at its most this week in Barcelona. It rained on monday and the temperatures are way below 10º (I know, but for us, this is winter and this is cold). So the trails are really slippery. It is steep and rocky around here, so there is not a lot of mud, it doesn't hold on.

I hope everytime I fall down is like this one, just something to remember.

Testing GoPro around home

Got a new Go Pro for Xmas!!

I could't wait to go to Castellbisbal to test it in one of my favorite trails.
Enjoy it!