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Published: June 30th 2008
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Photo 10
The First Col a baby one So.... we finally got to the Pyrenees and we were delighted to see such a beautiful snowed topped mountain ranges as we got here. The weather was so sizzling when we arrived far too hot to bike ride, fortunately on the day of our first ride it was quite cloudy phew...
The Pyrenees is much quieter that i expected, Sam wondered what i thought would be at the top of a great big mountain, the towns are just stunning and have a lovely feel during the day, we have pictured one that we were at yesterday which is right by where the bottom of our second Mammoth Col Du Menthe started..(except for lunchtime 12-2.30pm when it is like a Ghost town, nothing stops the French having lunch!)and quiet during the evening, i.e. no night life, not that Sam and I particular ravers but there is literally NOTHING going on. Fortunately we have been here a week and met some amazing people, we met a really nice couple from Devon Annie and her husband Tom had some amazing stories about world war one and two,his dad was in both and he was a Jew who grew up in Berlin! Plus a
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That is the hill that is the Col Du Mente bunch of keen nutty mountain bikers who did some riding with the same co that we hired our road bikes through also pictured. Mark see...... was a doctor and told us some interesting stories about A and E, one that particularly tickled Sam and i was about peoples excuses for foreign objects being in usual places, but i don't think i should right it is as this is only a PG blog.
So......., the riding is great in the Pyrenees it is on the doorstep and there is so much choice, the roads are so quiet and its more unusual to see a car than not. We did our first proper ride at the beginning of the week with a really good co called Pyractif who organise rides which is run by a really nice couple called Chris and Helen, you can also board with them but we were of course in Betty. We started on a small Col, Col des Ares, which was a reasonable sized Col( just to explain Col's are a bit like cars the bigger the better as far as the French are concerned it doesn't matter how many miles you ride it is how
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Col De Mente The details many Col's and what distance and altitude they are) So basically as Col is just another word for a huge mountain !! Our first Col was not too hard the total ride for the day about about 55k and the Col in the middle was 797 Meters high, 7-km long and took about 45 minutes of constant hill climb to get to the top, to be honest it wasn't really that painful in truth, but still fairly hard work.
HOWEVER for our second ride up the Col De Mente also pictured, it was a very different story, i should start by telling you that this particular Col is last years steepest average gradient on the Tour De France, it is 9.5-km long and at and Altitude of 1349 meters. It has an average gradient of 9% and we rode this bugger without stopping for 1 HOUR!!!! We were determined not to stop but it was probably the hardest challenge i have ever set myself, half way up i was convinced that we must be near the top because i couldn't understand how anyone would actually want to do this voluntarily otherwise ??? but the hills just kept on coming
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Summit Col De Mente and the nearer we got to the top the steeper the hills got, in 31 degrees of heat it was so hard not to just stop, but we keep on going( i should also point out that i was in front of Sam the whole way up AND beat him to the top, which i thought was ironic seeing as Sam had said in no uncertain terms that he would NOT be waiting for me on the way up as he didn't want me to slow him down ha ha......) it was certainly a good mental challenged as well as physical.
Eventually we did make it to the top feeling to be honest really good about it and apart from being tired we felt a really good sense of achievement, until we met a group of 60-79 years old who had done a similar ride no problem at all????? They were a group of friends who had ridden all their lives and did regular group rides. Needless to say that they were huffing and puffing much less than we were at the top and they even offered us refreshments so i think we must have looked quite green! Also
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Friendly Locals pictured with me at the top in the orange T Shirt.. After some quick refreshments we did recover and continued our ride for the day in total we did about 80k and at the end of the day the other mountain bike riders we meet treated me to my favorite, see pictured below. For those of your who know me, i didn't feel guilty at all about eating nearly 2 cakes after 5 hours of hard core riding!
So you would ask yourself would we want to do any more? the sensible answer is no, but as you all know Sam and I are not the most sensible people and we thought we would go out with a bang so we decided to do one last Col today, which was double the length of the previous one!!!! Yes i know Crazy, It took us 1.5 hours to get to the top, it was 17km long and with gradients of up to 12% in some places, and it is 1779 meters above sea level. Apparently this is a good time, we were with about 10 other riders and I was 5th to the top, without bragging, the other 4 were
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Debbies Descent scarily fit so i felt quite proud.. Once we got to the top we had a speedy decent and then stopped for lunch, after that we had a nice flat road and only about 25k to get home, believe it or not a few of the group decided to do another Col after lunch! Now they really are mad!. As you can see from our pics the view was spectacular and we were riding with a really great bunch of people so it was a great way to end our time here,
So to sum up the Pyrenees, we have had an amazing time here the views are spectacular see other pics and although we have biked every day and we both feel great for it and bizarrely very relaxed!
We are heading off to Pamplona for 2 weeks with Ollie(Sam's Brother) apparently it involved lots of drinking and dressing up.. YIKES..
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Ailsa
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Looks good
Hey guys, from my seat in the library the pyrennes are looking pretty good. Must be great to do so much exercise. We are having rainy, short days and working too much. Poor diddums I know. Had a really good weekend with Mum, Dad and Daniel in Raglan for their collective bdays. We ate and drunk too much in true Tuck style xx