More Cycling Action

The Tour of Britain started this past weekend, kicking off the first stage with a great course along the River Thames. But don't worry, this race was only an hour long, so I can probably only stretch this topic out into a two or three part series, not the full five. (Only kidding.)

I had managed to convince one of my coworkers to go with me on Saturday to watch and take pictures (since I knew Laura wasn't too keen on the idea). However, I failed to recognise that the race was on Sunday, not Saturday, so that ended up being a major failure in planning. A few pints of beer made up for my error in judgement, so we're friends again.

On the actual race day, I wandered from my flat down to the river and walked back and forth on the course to get some pictures. The race was 10 laps of a fairly quick circuit between the Tower of London to Westminster, so it provided plenty of opportunity to see the riders again and again.


Typically, the problem with watching a race like this is that you only get to see the cyclists for about 10 seconds as they fly past your spot on the course. It gets a little better on mountain stages, since they're going slower and usually the group breaks apart. The time trial stages are the best for seeing lots of cyclists over a long period of time, but you don't get the dynamism of watching the bunch race together that you do on "normal" stages.


For those reasons, the 10-lap format of this stage was perfect. Lots of chances to see riders combined and lots of chances to see them interacting with each other (breakaways, chases, etc).

Chris Sutton leading in the break.

Team Chipotle was out in force, with Chris Sutton in a breakaway for about 6-7 laps of the race. British champ David Millar didn't see much action, just tucked back in the pack staying safe and upright. After the breakaway was caught and the race came together around lap 8, Magnus Backstedt managed to squeeze through the bunch sprint and claim 3rd on the day.

The rain only came down for a few minutes, so it was a very enjoyable day of spectating. Here's a full showing of my pictures.

Tour De France - Part 3

(In what's turning into a much longer series than expected, we continue with Alpe D'Huez.)

The day had arrived, it was our first time seeing cyclists, and we jumped right into the deep end. People don't just casually check out Alpe D'Huez, it's more of a life experience. And somehow we decided that it would be a great spot to get our first taste of Tour de France spirit (not to mentions spirits!).

So, the plan was formed: wake up early and drive to Bourg d'Oisans (town at the base of the climb), pick up some beer and food in the town, pick out a low-key spot near the bottom, get drunk, cheer on Team Chipotle. Sounds simple enough.

We got to the town, followed the line of cars as we looked for parking, and then accidentally started driving right up the mountain. There was a lot of "oh crap, what do we do now?", "can we turn around?" and "this is CRAZY" going on in our car as we continued up and up the mountain.


It's not like we could just pull over and turn around to go back to Plan A. There were cyclists everywhere, cars everywhere, and drunk spectators everywhere (keep in mind, it's now 9:30 am). There's no going back to Plan A, definitely Plan B time. Our real worry was that Plan B (find somewhere to park NOW!) would turn into Plan C (can't find parking because people have been camping on this mountain for a week, driving over the top, end up somewhere back in Italy again), and we definitely wanted to avoid that.

Through some divine intervention, we managed to find a spot on the side of the road that wasn't taken up by a tent, car, motorhome, or group of drunk Germans, and pulled over. A very helpful cop informed us (in both French and through frantic hand gestures), that we had to turn the car around so that it was facing down the mountain (turned out to be a great idea when we were trying to get off the mountain later).

So, we were parked. Halfway up the mountain. With no beer.

We were in quite a dilemma, time for a big decision. We could walk back down the way we came, find a shop, and resume Plan A. Or we could walk up this mountain, find a shop, and resume the last half of Plan A (the drinking and cheering part). We decided it would be a waste to come all this way and let a silly thing like climbing a mountain get in our way. So we started up.

About 8 kilometers and 3 really long hours later, we made the summit. We picked up provisions at the top (baguettes, beer, wine... I knew bike jerseys were good for something). We then found our spot, just above the 3 km mark and began to enjoy the fantastic scenery of Alpe D'Huez.

A new plan to sew pockets like this into all of our shirts was hatched shortly after we realised how easy it is to carry bottles of alcohol in them.

The beer went a lot faster than we thought (stupid 250 ml bottles), but luckily the tour started to roll through just in time (for us to crack open the wine). The caravan came through about an hour before the first riders, and handed out loads of free schwag.

Luckily for us, our neighbors along the barrier had updates coming to their mobile and were giving us the heads up on what was happening down the mountain. Then the riders came through.

Carlos Sastre basically won the Tour at this exact moment

It was a fairly slow trickle of riders, all coming up alone or in groups of 2 or 3. The mountain had destroyed the main bunch and shattered them across all 23 switchbacks.

A slightly larger group makes it up the crazy, crazy mountain

At last, the peloton came rolling through (and probably still faster than I could ride on flat ground)

It was time to head back down the slopes. Along with a few tens of thousands of other fans. We met up with some fellow Chipotle supporters (Americans, but living in Switzerland now), who had been camping on Alpe D'Huez for a few days and they brought us down some shortcuts through all the switchbacks. We repaid the favor by giving them a (very slow) lift down the rest of the mountain.

All in all, it was a blast. Jacob got his picture on the Chipotle team website. We got to cheer on our team, and watch some fantastic cycling. Only a few hours later, and we made it out of the crowd and back to the hotel.

Check out the full Alpe D'Huez pictures.

Up next, the final part - Lyon and the Time Trial.

Saturday: Cycling and Visitors

This Saturday is going to be quite eventful.

First (well, second really), Mike is coming to visit London. He's coming in Saturday afternoon and staying with us for a bit before heading off to the rest of Europe.

Before that, I'm going to be cycling in a race Saturday just outside of London. It's going to be a complete catastrophe I'm sure, but as long as I don't come in last, I will consider it a huge success.

Seriously, Stop Posting about Biking... Nobody Cares

Yes, I have become a little monotonous in my post topics. So I'll try to cut back on the cycling specific content in the future. But this one couldn't be helped.

The Tour of Britain started today with a short 2.5 km prologue around Crystal Palace Park, just south of London. I hopped on a train and managed to catch some of the amateur racing before the pro teams got on the course.

The amateur race was the London Grand Prix competition to win the Bob Chicken Trophy (I'm seriously not making that up). It was an hour long criterium race for the very fast, but non-pro riders.

The main event started at 3pm and consisted of a single lap of the course for each rider. They were sent off on one minute increments, and all finished somewhere under 3 minutes (aka, really fast). The winner was Mark Cavendish, a British native, and also the first British rider to claim the yellow jersey.

And now... for the pictures.

I took 553 pictures. Yes, that sounds like a whole crap load of pictures, and it is. But when you have a sport mode that can take 3 pictures per second, it's pretty easy to rack up quite a few shots.

Here are (nearly) all of the pictures. FYI, Picasa limits the size of an album to 500, so I had to trim back a few... I'm sure you won't mind.

If you don't feel like wasting lots and lots of time going through those, I've picked out some of my favorites.

I did have a lot of fun playing around with some new picture taking techniques. I tried a few dozen times to get that focused-rider-blurry-background shot, and managed to get a few good ones (one, two, three, four). It's tough to nail that shot though, they're going way too fast.

Also, I think that with 500+ pictures of cyclists, probably the best picture was of a lady bug. Oh well.

Bank Holiday Weekend Recap

That was a fantastically fun, and painful, ride - all at the same time. I had some great weather on the way down, and the whole weekend. Once I made it to the castle and to the beach I had a very relaxing weekend of doing nothing much at all aside from recovering.

The “beach” term is a bit of a misnomer, since it’s basically 30 meters of rocks between the ocean and the road. There is a tiny sliver of sand right where the water laps up against the shore, but that’s about it.

Here’s the route I stuck to for the ride.

I managed to follow it just about perfectly the whole way down. There was maybe half a kilometer of extra distance added on, but other than that, it was a marvel of directional know-how.

There were two distinct points where I was planning on turning in my wheels for a train ticket. First, around km 80 or so, I was biking through Buxted and travelling up a hill for what seemed like forever. Both of my quads cramped up on the climb and I was not a happy camper. I stopped for a bit and stretched out, got some water, then I kept climbing… and climbing… and climbing. I finally crested the top of the hill and was glad I only had 2 hours left in the saddle.

The other main I’m-about-to-get-off-this-bike-and-just-take-a-damn-train-home moment was about 15 km from the end. My left leg managed to get the infamous and dreaded simultaneous hamstring/quad cramp. There’s nothing you can do to make it go away. If you keep your leg strait your quad goes crazy, and if you bend your knee the hamstring locks up. After another few minutes of agonizing riding, it managed to work itself out and the rest of the ride went on without incident.

All in all, I made it to the castle 30 minutes ahead of schedule (5:28 of ride time), then managed to find my way to the hotel a few miles away and enjoy a much needed shower and rest.

The ride home was much easier and a lot quicker… possibly due to the fact that I was “riding” home on a train. Oh well, I think the 150ish km of the weekend was quite enough for me.

I’ll put up some pictures in a few hours once I get home and sort through them all.

Saturday Bike/Train Ride

Well, in what's turning into a series of "where did Bob ride this weekend" posts, I had another very long ride on Saturday.

The goal for this one was to actually follow the path that I will take this coming weekend and make sure I won't get too terribly lost along the way. And in that effort it was a great success. I managed to ride from my flat to Gatwick Airport. (Here's a map from south of the river to Gatwick.)

It was a pretty nice ride for about the first 2 hours, a little bit more traffic-y than I prefer, but nothing too bad. Then it started to drizzle a bit, and that's just no fun. I rode in and out of the rain for about another 45 minutes to an hour. I really wanted to find the entrance to a footpath that will (hopefully) lead me most of the way down to the coast. I managed to find the path, and I took some pictures of the planes landing in Gatwick.

At this point, I had been riding for about 3 hours, and was exhausted. I also hadn't really prepared as well as I should have by packing some food or gel or something. So I decided to turn around and find some food along the way back.

Along the route there's a town called Redhill, and I had seen the South Redhill Train Station on the way down to Gatwick. After the turn, I biked back about 45 minutes to get to Redhill and I decided that I would find some food, give myself 20 or 30 minutes to recover, then try to make it back. But then again, there was always that train station as a fall back.

So anyway, I got a footlong Subway sandwich and devoured it along with some crisps. Delicious.

Then I hopped back on the bike and started to get back on my route, when I noticed my punctured rear tire. Fantastic. I stopped and did a quick tire change. As I got back on the bike, realizing how heavy my legs felt, how full and happy my stomach was, and that it would be another 2 hours back home on an underinflated rear tire... yeah, I bought a train ticket and went home.

The good news is that first, it was a really great ride, and I have the first half of my route planned for this weekend. Second, my route follows along train tracks almost the whole way down, so if worst comes to worst, I can always pop off the bike and be home in about 30 minutes.

I still need to do a bit more prep work, especially when it comes to having some food for the ride. But I think I can take care of that this week and be ready to make it down to the coast on Saturday.

Saturday Ride

I had quite a nice ride on Saturday, although it wasn't exactly as I planned (when does that ever happen really?).

I've been using Google Maps drawing feature to plan my route to the castle, and also I've been tracking the path of most of my rides in the same manner. So I'll share those with you now.

First off, here's the original plan for my out and back ride (part 1, part 2). I would ride from my flat along a canal towpath and then into the Docklands area of London. From there I have to walk my bike through a footpath that goes under the river Thames to pop out on the Greenwich side of things.

I actually did pretty well for that first part. Made it along the canal just fine, but I missed the proper turnoff. So I got a little lost and then recovered and made it to the tunnel. So far, so good.

After that, things got a little shakey. I had remembered the general path of how to get down to Beckenham, which is to say I remembered one or two turns and a few towns I should have passed along the way. I wasn't really sure where I was, but I made it to the Lewisham train station, which I knew was along the route. Then, I gave up. I decided to just pick a direction and start riding. So yeah, my path diverted a little bit from that point on.

Oh well, I managed to make it back to my flat in once piece, so I'd call it a successful ride.
Next weekend I'm actually going to print out section by section maps beforhand so I know where I'm supposed to go along the way. I think that will make quite a difference in my chances.

Tour de France - Prologue

That was awesome!

So I didn't get to see all of the race, but the prologue was so much fun. I've put a bunch of the pictures up online here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/harwig/TdFPrologue
I think that my favorite photo is this one:



Also, I officially love this camera. I took 300 pictures before the race even started. And another 200 after that.

Tour de France - Kickoff

What an exciting Friday. I took about 200 pictures, so to make it easier on myself, I'm just going to send you a link to where they all are, and then talk about them here.

http://picasaweb.google.com/harwig (and yes, I know that I love Google way too much)

First off, and most important, is the greatest pub ever created.



Can it get any better than "Ye Olde Cock Tavern"? I think not. I have a few more pictures of some pubs at that link above.

I found that the other day, and then took a picture while I walked from my office to Trafalgar Square for the kickoff of the Tour de France.

I was a little late for the kickoff, so there was no chance I could get close, but that's alright. They were parading each team up on stage and interviewing the top riders. I missed out on seeing Discovery, but I caught the last few teams that went up.

I had no idea how many people were going to be there, the crowds were crazy.

I'm headed out today to check out the Prologue, and then tomorrow for Stage 1 (which goes right in front of my office!). Hopefully I'll have some great pictures of the events.