Can you ever cycle too much and too hard?
I never thought so, but now it seems the answer is a definitive yes.
Even Justin is feeling the effects of our previous four days and 18,227 feet of climbing from our base in Sospel. “I’m falling asleep,” he said earlier this afternoon. Seconds later we both crashed and napped for an indeterminate length of time.
So…
Yesterday we took the train from Sospel to Nice and didn’t ride. A well-deserved day off the bikes. Justin went to the Chagall Museum, while I rested up and blogged. We did have an interesting check-in at our hotel, the Hotel Victor Hugo. It seems they don’t have a place for our bikes. Not inside, not outside, definitely not in our nice, but very petite room (“I will not allow bicycles in the room, it is too small,” said the owner, who, other than this, was quite nice and kind of humorous and had some definite opinions about Trump). And so, we took the bikes back to the bike shop where we rented them, which fortunately is only a few blocks from the Victor Hugo. They’ll keep them overnight and we can get them tomorrow morning.
We had a great seafood dinner at Peixes. Thank you Justin.
The next morning…
We checked out of the Victor Hugo. There is no train to Vence, our destination (for four nights), and you can’t put bikes on the bus and so … knapsacks. We squeezed everything we could into our knapsacks and left our suitcases at the Victor Hugo (they do have room for storing suitcases). I debated whether or not to take my laptop (it’s heavy!), and finally decided to pack it … so I could blog. Plus, I don’t quite feel right without my laptop. An iPhone isn’t enough. We walked over to the bike shop, got our bikes and started riding.
The first half of our 16.5 mile ride to Vence was flat, on the bike path along the Nice promenade, along and past the aeroport and into the sprawling town of Cagnes-s-Mer. This is where it got confusing as we tried to find the right road to Vence … and finally did with the help off offline Google maps. And then began climbing, about 1,210 feet in 7 or so miles. My right knee made a bit of a grinding or maybe a clicking sound on some of the steeper climbs. But, my back and neck, weighted down with my knapsack, did OK. That was a relief.
We arrived in Vence, a great, walled town atop a hill, found our hotel, the Hotel la Lubiane, and checked in. Plenty of room for our bikes! And, our room has three beds (there’s only the two of us) and a great view.
We walked through the walled city, had lunch, visited the tiny cathedral, got some water and supplies at Monoprix, headed back to the hotel … and that’s when we crashed. I’ve been up for 30 or so minutes and am still a bit groggy from my nap and my right knee is still sore, despite the two Advils I took just before I fell asleep.
“Why am I so tired; I shouldn’t be as tired as I am,” Justin just said without prompting as I was writing the sentence above. I’m not sure if he can get out of bed.
Here’s what I think: I can’t do bike trips like I’ve done bike trips the past 30-plus years. Which is to say riding long distances every day and climbing everything in sight. Age and injuries and all this climbing really are catching up to me and allowances must be made. This is kind of sad, but maybe not. I’m still doing bike trips and I/we just climbed the Madone and Turini (twice) and St-Roch cols in the past week. And then some. Maybe it’s OK to be tired and I just have to start planning my bike trips a bit differently. Adjustments will be made.
Then again, maybe it’s global warming …
“The heat definitely makes me tired; my legs are fine, but the heat gets me,” Justin said when I asked him why he was so tired today. “I think our last day of riding, two days ago, was really hard and yesterday should have been a good recovery day, but I was off all day and the heat was maybe why I was so tired today. Today’s ride wasn’t hard. Except for the heat.”
FYI: The WIFI here is very weak, so I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to post this blog. If it’s posted, that means I succeeded. If not … (It took five tries over four hours, but I finally got this to post and gave up trying to post more photos as they just wouldn’t post). Oh well, that’s life on a bike trip.
The Biking France Blog 