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Published: September 8th 2023
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We left our salubrious 2 level 3 bedroom apartment in Nis just after 8am. Apartments suit us well. They give us plenty of room to spread out, and if we're lucky, we each get a bedroom to ourselves.
Our destination today is Pirot, some 68kms away with two significant climbs included. As is normally the case, it's slow going winding our way out of a big city. We've only covered 12kms in our first hour of riding. While it's been flat, we've noticed a bit of head wind today.
There's no denying today's ride was all about the climbs. Individually, neither of them are too fearsome, but with two back to back and with over 3,600kms in the legs, we didn't know how much of a factor fatigue would be.
For those that ride and climb hills, you'll be able to relate to the description below, for those that don't, imagine putting all your effort into turning your pedals, while gravity is pulling back on the 30 plus kilograms of bike and bags and add your own body weight to that, reducing your speed to less than 10kms/h, and having to keep that effort up continuously over the
A steep Climb
It might not look it, but it was! whole climb. At times it feels like you're being overtaken by ants.
The first climb was just under 400 meters in vertical height over about 7kms. The gradient started off quite shallow but ended with one kilometer at 11% (aka very steep). I was looking for an extra gear or two at this stage but we all just had to grind it out lugging our bikes up the hill. What goes up must come down, and the descent was certainly enjoyable. Not too steep, so we weren't braking a lot and it glided out for 9kms with hardly a pedal stroke needed. The wind was very strong on the descent and did push us around a bit so we did have to be a bit cautious.
We stopped for our morning break around 10:30am knowing an equally hard climb was ahead of us. When we took off we had a small amount of flat ground before we came into a town and then left it by stating to climb up the side of a hill. This time we started with the steeper section first, and the compound effect from the first climb was certainly evident. Not so eager to
push up the hill and a heaviness could be felt in the legs. This one seemed to go on forever. We had a flatish section in the middle for about 3kms before we pointed up again to finish off the hill, climbing to just over 700m. From the top we basically coasted most of the way into Pirot with only a few undulations along the way, the headwind still blowing strong. As you'd expect our average speed was much lower today and it took us until 1:30pm to do the 68kms required. While it was warm the temperature only got to about 27C which was quite manageable. Put simply, it was a tough day in the office, our toughest one so far.
Our accommodation today is the Hotel Ana and Lux Spa. Emphasis on Spa! We all enjoyed the sauna and spa while Jeff and I also had a massage, just perfect after a day of climbing.
Tomorrow we had planned on going to Dimitrovgrad but have not been able to find any available accommodation there, so we are changing course slightly and going to a place called Dragamon which will have us leave Serbia and enter Bulgaria.
This means more hills tomorrow unfortunately, but makes the ride into Sofia on Monday easier
Distance travelled today: 68kms
Distance travelled so far: 3,738kms
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