Days 13

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Day 13
As we awoke this morning we knew that it was the day we had been waiting for. The 1000km warm up was over! As we finished breakfast and started to work up to the col d’Abisque our legs were feeling and we were feeling good.
As we reached the bottom of the climb there was a sign telling us that we had 1200m to climb up to a height of 1710m and that we had 16km of winding road that would get us there. We decided that the bikes wouldn’t get themselves up the hill so we better get peddling...That’s where the real work started. Climbing up a 10% incline on a fully carbon unweighted bike is one thing but climbing up on a fully loaded bike is another compleatly and the looks we had on the way told us so.
At the half way mark we both declared that we hadn’t worked so hard for so long in a very long time, if ever. Stoph checked his heart rate at one point and thought it was around the 200bpm mark! Another 8km and we were standing on the top of our first mountain col, having cycled through a small ski town on the way, and now was time for the downhill.
Wow! The feeling of rushing down hill along winding alpine roads on a bike is amazing, and doing it for 18km is awesome. After racing down it was time to go shopping for dinner. This proved to be a very funny experience as we were so hungry and deprived of sugar that we couldn’t concentrate on anything and ended up spending around 20 mins in the shop for what should of been a 5 min trip.
After we had had some lunch (at 4pm)we found our next campsite. When we arrive at a campsite its like our bags have dynamite in them and all of our stuff explodes onto the ground. A very funny sight.
So its off up the biggest pas tomorrow. But the stats from today were:

Ride time 1:58:59
Average 16km/h
Distance 31.96km
Max 68.0km/h
Tirp distance 1221.95km

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