This year has been quiet for Coming Thru, but it’s been amazingly busy for us behind it. Luckily there’s been thousands and thousands of you visiting us and our articles every month and we appreciate that a lot! We hope you’ll enjoy reading our articles and next year looks great for cycling, gear and time for writing new posts.
Enjoy 2012, it’ll be the best year yet!
Preparing ourselves for the Grand Raid Verbier on the 20th of August this is the first in a series of posts.
We got ourselves a nice cottage next to Grand-Halleux, collected 5 bikers and filled our fridge with after-ride rewards local style: Chimay trappist beers. Mind you we didn’t get the rewards that easily, a hundred kms a day on the bike was the minimum distance required to earn one!
Day one we started off with a trip towards the Hautes Fagnes nature reserve via Malmedy. City Navigator doesn’t show the topo maps meaning all looks nice and straight forward on (digital) paper so we did the warming up by climbing the Côte de Wanne from the La Vaulx direction. Yes, the Côte de Wanne from the Liège-Bastogne-Lìege classic that is (2,2k at an average of 7%). Arriving in Malmedy we climbed the Barraque Michel and took the turn towards Spa combining beautiful forest roads with fast descents. After a quick lunch in Spa we returned via Franchorchamps and it literally feels like a race track with Ferraris, Porsches old and new and motorbikes passing you at 150k/h on a public road. Mind you the climb from Spa is around 4k and it doesn’t go well without digesting your pasta carbonara. We retuned via Trois-Ponts and Lieurneux, some pretty nice and quiet roads round there, to Grand Halleux totalling 105k and 1600hms. First Chimay earned.
Day two had the roundtrip to La Roche en Ardenne scheduled. Starting towards Vielsalm and Lierneux we selected mainly paved forest roads looking for some shadow as temperatures went up to 28C again. Taking the main road from Houffalize towards La Roche took us to a nice pizza but we can’t recommend the descent. One day later a serious accident happened with a motorbike missing a turn. It didn’t surprise us looking back at the insane maneuvers we saw on our descent.
On the descending part and we like it.
What comes down must go up – if you are staying over on the other side of the valley. A nice scenic climb took us out of La Roche and was followed by a steep descent towards the Ourthe river valley. Meaning we had to climb more or less the same height again towards Nandrin – two for the price of one right? After Nandrin we started climbing towards Baraque de Fraiture (680m) via the quiet Bois de Saint-Jean, still one of my favorite roads in the Ardennes. After crossing the E25 we continued direction Lierneux and Grand-Halleux. Day two: 109kms and 1770 hms.
On day three the mountain-biker inside me got a bit nostalgic and I still remembered a few nice roads from my Christmas training in the area round Houffalize. Fresh from breakfast we started out with a 300hm climb to the Mont le Soie and after a quick descent we continued through the Grand Bois (yes, it is a pretty big forest) towards Gouvy and Limerlé. The roads are low on traffic and the views are great but the surface is a bit of a mosaic of trial and error repairs. A fast descent from Tavigny took us into Houffalize for our lunch stop. We seem to have an issue with strategically, read stomach friendly, picking our lunch spots as our dessert was the 300hm climb out of Houffalize direction Sommerain and Halonru. Again nice and pretty fast forest roads towards Vielsalm and continuing all the way to Trois-Ponts. For “topping off” our third day we decided to climb the Côte de Wanne from the Trois-Points direction. The 250 hms are divided over almost 5 km before reaching Wanne and it’s actually a bit of a boring climb in my opinion – taking it from the Norths side over 2.2km would have been much nicer. A very fast descent back to our basecamp in Ennal and we could start the re-fueling. Day three: 103 kms and 1610hms
All in all a good training camp (320kms and 5000hms in 3 days) in what I still consider to be the best biking region in Belgium. Great to see the Teamskelle boys back on the bike, drink some local liquids, see the physical progress confirmed and have a good daily recovery. Definitely “on trial” to Verbier.
Sometimes it's good to let your lower self rest.
Right. I’m half-expecting to be flogged with an inner tube for TMI, but let’s be adult and sensible and learn how to avoid saddle sores. If you are affronted by discussions of the derriere, go to the next post now.
In most of this series I’m trying to cover the kind of information I really, really wish someone had just laid out for me before my first bike tour, because I trawled the internet for info and often came up with cryptic, embarrassed anonymous posts about stuff like chamois cream and whether you wear anything under your bike shorts. And while I have read enough to see that not everybody’s tush needs the same kind of TLC for long riding days, here’s what might help. First off, the enemy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_sores
Saddle sores. They are real.
You’ll get them near your sitting bones, where there’s the most pressure, heat, and friction between skin and saddle. They start out as irritation, then can move on to a pimple- or boil-like thing and, for the final showstopper, open sores. My first touring day wasn’t so bad, but by the middle of the third I was scouring pharmacies for something, anything to help. The last 20km of the day are endless when you can’t sit without making whimpering noises, and nobody likes a whimpering cyclist.
So: There’s a reason why you take two pairs of cycling shorts. Seriously, in an emergency, you can double up and the little bit of extra padding can help. You did pack cycling shorts, didn’t you? And tell me you’re not wearing underwear underneath (prudes of North America, I’m looking at you). The whole point of those shorts is to avoid abrasion and moisture. They’re not meant to be worn with knickers. They’re meant to be worn with:
Chamois cream! Not everybody likes/needs/has a fetish for this, but I am a proud supporter of the chammy. I would never ride more than three hours without it now. There are plenty of brands; I picked up Udderly Smooth on my third touring day and it saved my life. No, hang on, before you call the squick terror squad in, calm down. Take a deep breath. It’s just a slippery cream. Brand legend says it was used by dairy farmers to avoid chafing udders (on the cows, not on the farmers). You can slap it on your shorts or right onto your cheeky bits before you start riding… and enjoy that cold, squidgy moment when you sit on the bike. You forget about it soon enough… because you’re not in pain anymore! See what you just did? No, it won’t ruin your shorts. Go on, everybody’s doing it.
The road is the most comfy for your derriere.
Your seat could also be giving you trouble. I cried “saddle sores” at a bike shop in Newcastle and a very nice bloke (they’re all very nice when you’re a single touring girl) pointed my saddle tip about 5mm downwards. I never, ever would have thought that could make so much difference. I would describe the difference to you here, but I fear the editorial boys would wilt out of delicacy. Suffice to say the difference was noticeable. Saddle too high, wrong angle—change it up. That goes for the rest of the bike. I really appreciated having drop handlebars because they gave me lots of options for riding positions and shifting weight.
Roads matter. Many tourers stick to real roads, as in roads what cars use, but there are so many lovely cycle paths, nature paths… ahem, bridleways. Some of the national cycle routes in the UK are on bridleways. More than anything else, two words on my tour became my private screaming nightmares: headwind, and bridleway. A couple hours on one of those with saddle sores on skinny tires and no ass that ever lived will ever be your friend again. Avoid long uneven paths if you’re sore.
Stand when you can. Some awesomely dedicated people will make rules like “stand 10 seconds every 2 minutes” or something equally retentive; I like to think that being on a bike is fun. Having said that, pushing yourself to stand a bit more will definitely take the pressure off your bits. Turning the logic around, you could also wait until you get saddle sores and use them as an incentive to learn how to climb standing.
If you’re getting/have gotten sores already, get out of your shorts as soon as you can when the day’s done, get clean, all that stuff. Don’t sit around in them at the beer garden if you can avoid it. I also discovered a cream that’s used for bedsores and nappy rash and the smell of it will take you right back to when you were in diapers. Sudocrem is one brand I found in the UK; my mom used to use Penaten cream on me and my brother when we were babies, and it smells like the same stuff. It will heal those nasties faster than you would believe possible. Put it on at the end of the day or before you go to sleep. So yeah, that’s two creams. Chamois cream doesn’t really help you heal, it just takes out the friction while you’re riding.
Another read covering similar stuff but with much more authority and advice.
Markus is going to love me for all these long posts, I know; you wouldn’t think there’s that much to be said on the subject of saddle sores. But that’s until you get them. Horror stories welcomed in the comments below. I am thoroughly un-squickable.
The summers are very nice here in Finland
It’s been about a year now since we started this process of documenting things we like about cycling and it’s amazing to be writing the 199th post to be published. Tomorrow’s post by Johanna will be number two hundred and we think that’s a lot. A lot has happened in the last year: Both Maarten and me changed jobs, got more responsibility and had to choose whether we spend our time riding or writing. There’s really only one answer to that question. We have new bikes we haven’t told you about and so much gear we hardly have even mentioned.
The weather has been awesome here in Finland: Very warm temperatures (sometimes a bit too warm) and beautiful, sunny days like you can see in the photo above.
Now we’re just waiting for those rainy days so we can write some reviews on the gear we have and the rides we’ve done!
Until then, we’d love to hear from you and hope you enjoy Johanna’s touring posts this and next week.
Rosie on the seaside in a brief photographic moment.
Oh, speed, the penis length of the cycling world… even for plenty of us girls it is. I had a hell of a time planning my tour because while I had a pretty good idea of how hard I was willing to work every day, I’d really never done more than 30 km in one day’s riding, I didn’t have the bike I was eventually going to tour on (or a bike even close to being similar to it, or the bags to ride with gear), and I knew I was stubborn and competitive by nature. There’s a reason why my bike’s middle name is Hubris.
When planning your first tour, there’s like this catch-22 going on because you’re not sure how far you can ride, and yet you need to plan your route if you want to book hostels or guesthouses or your lavish four-star. (You might take that for comedy, so let me outline right here: my next tour will include one night of total luxury. Two weeks of handwashing your shorts and swallowing dive-bombing bumblebees, surely, earns you an evening of pure downy comfort.) You could take a tent, but that’s more weight, more hassle, less mattress, and fewer hot breakfasts when you roll out of bed. I think a person on a first tour would do well to focus on the cycling and leave the cub scout out of it. And then but so if you lock yourself in to your accommodation, you kind of have to get there, which means you might not be able to stop along the way and see something you like. I still kind of regret not going in to Castle Howard and instead pressing on for Whatever-upon-Something just because I was on a schedule.
The guide books I looked at were mostly for cyclists who were going to do about 35-70km each riding day. The websites I looked at were mostly experienced cyclists and distance junkies who were doing 100k rides all the time and up to 180km in one day. I knew I could keep up around 20km/hour pretty easily, but a 35-day seemed way too short, and 100, while theoretically okay once in a while, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do day after day for three weeks. And people like me don’t trawl the net for information; it’s confirmation we’re after. Confirmation that somewhere out there is a person whose body and brain work in a similar fashion to ours, and that we are not going to scare the wildlife and local gentry with our freakish, two-wheeled, 90km/day brutishness.
The vast majority of tourers with gear I met were going more slowly, and they were often families or couples. The vast majority of road riders passed me with a smile as languid as their resting heart rates. In Norfolk someone mistook me for an Audax rider and I took it as a huge compliment. Well. That’s Norfolk.
Look at all those funny names!
Clearly, one speed does not fit all. They say the best way to know your distance is to do practice rides with gear before you go for a tour, and you should. That’s smart. I am not smart, however; I am reckless. Which is why my overall plan got shafted on the very first day of riding. It involved a hill and two hours getting up it. Finland should import a couple of these hill things if they want to do anything with cycling, really.
I got very good at keeping contingent plans on permanent juggle in my mind, and became far more intimate with the British Rail system than I ever intended. None of these things put a damper on my trip, though. Trains are great if you’re just knackered and want a break. Just don’t do the time-distance math while you’re on the train, or you may start to wish you were a train and start to cry, just like a baby, just like you did on the third day when you turned the corner of your umpteenth hill at three in the afternoon to find another hill waiting for you. What I love most about that moment is that you really could get off the bike and throw a tantrum by the side of the road, but then you’d have to sleep there. So now you’re crying and cursing up what you’ve decided is the last bloody hill you’re going to tolerate today so help you God and the terrors of the Earth, and you get passed by some Audax maniac trumped up on Red Bull. Oh yes. I’m getting happy just thinking about that.
In the end I did this:
Roughly 1200 km between Edinburgh and Oxford
Between 80-100km on most days
150km on my longest day (but Cambridge-Oxford was a great challenge!)
45 km on my shortest day
tried to alternate shorter and longer days and throw in tourist (rest) days
had nothing short of a brilliantly awesome time
Because in the end, it’s not how fast or long you go, but how much you enjoy the ride. (Sorry. I’ll get my helmet.)
This video is hilarious. It’s about a guy from New York called Casey Neistat and it begins by him filming himself getting a ticket for not riding on the bike lane in New York City. The thing here is that Mr. Neistat has not only a blog, but he has a TV show on HBO with his brother, so unsurprisingly these videos have been seen by 700 thousand people.
Casey Neistat feat. Justin Bieber | Photo ©Casey Neistat
Spread the word and support cyclists!
(And have a good weekend!)
Some nostalgic expats may disagree, but I think the town of Bruges isn’t exactly planet earth’s most exciting place. Except for the weekend when the Ronde van Vlaanderen comes around, that is. Those two days, when the air is thick with anticipation, this town becomes the centre of the universe, for those who care. And the fact of the matter is, that weekend, everybody around here does care. And the great thing is that, despite all the talk about Cancellara’s stunning form and Tom Boonen’s new bike, the extra newspapers and the incredible gathering of about 800.000 cycling enthousiasts alongside the race course on sunday, there’s still plenty of honour in spare for the 4000 amateurs gathering under the Bruges belfry the day before the official race, ready for their 260k struggle with concrete roads, including 30k of kinderkopkes and a total of 18 climbs. Tell any Belgian you’ve climbed the Zoncolan mountain and a total lack of enthousiasm will be your reward, but the mere suggestion that you rode the ronde will turn your newfound companions into an admiring crowd, for you’ve gained the official title of “flandrien”. It’s this almost tangible thrill that turns the rvv into maybe the most exciting cyclo in the world.
Cause it ain’t the scenery that makes it unforgettable, trust me. Though the race course may differ for over 50% every edition, the pattern is trademark: take a map of Belgium, a bottle of strong ale, a glass, and some abbey cheese, sliced in dices. Put the bottle on the town of Bruges and the glass on the village of Meerbeek. Open the bottle and empty it into the glass and take a sip. Then close your eyes and throw the dice halfway the bottle and the glass, and there you have it, the ronde. Now, every possible pattern implies you getting at the first cheesy dice, by bike of course, and that means riding Flemish concrete roads and dito cycling tracks. These roads will take you through an almost endless string of villages ending on “-gem”, (which you pronounce like “-hem” while riding in the province of West-Flanders) and all will look pretty much like any other –gem that you may have passed or ever will, thanks to our flourishing ribbon development. When entering the hillzone the scenery gets more picturesque indeed, but that will be none of your concern when riding the ronde, since you’re going to keep focused on the crevasses in the road in front of you.
And now to the race! Variations in the racing trajectory mean variations in toughness. This year the rvv organization dropped their first cheesy dice after only 80k which meant it was meant to be a bloody hard edition this time. The weather however didn’t 
share the same ambitions, though. With 22 degrees celcius and a pretty favourable wind, this was to become the first ever summer-ronde. What was it going to be; tough as hell or smooth like a baby lamb cutlet? Well, at 8 in the morning, me and my fine racing quartet gathered around the Bruges belfry to find out the answer. Fact is that after the first 100k the moral was still 100%, and the legs were still turning in the butter, to use a local saying. But there and then we were to have a rendezvous with the cobblestones of Wannegem Lede. Cobblestones come in various forms and conditions, from very polite down to revoltingly nasty. These ones were of the last type, rumour says they were thrown out of a German Zeppelin at the end of the great war as a primitive form of cluster ammunition and afterwards mistaken for a road since they are, in a certain way, leading to Oudenaarde. The copybook way to master such a nasty stretch is by gearing up and kicking like hell, something I did eventually try. Things however turned out for the bad when I decided to take the smalle dirt-track beside the, er, road in order to overhaul a Dutch mobilehome creeping along the stones at a ducks pace, an ambition shared by an Australian rider just in front of me. That turned out to be the wrong wheel to follow, cause all of the sudden, as though the geezer had just realized he were riding upside down, the aussie jammed his brakes and thus forced me to do exactly the same thing and consequently caused the inevitable launching of my body on his own back. Nobody got hurt, physically that is, but as a consequence I lost my pace and had to deal with the rest of the stretch in rather painful conditions. Conditions that made me wonder about the meaning of this quite grotesque race.
And you know what I finally got to understand –after another 160k of relentless contemplating? Well, that physical hardship, or plain pain as it is also called, is part of the fun in the ronde. Even more, it is the essential ingredient of the ronde. There is the 
obvious sore butt. The aching stomach –caused by an overdose of sugar in all its possible forms, from hard as in dades, over thick as in perperkoek, and gelly as in energy gels to fluid as in all those drinks that aren’t sold in any decent pub for the very good reason that they are utterly gross. Then there is pain in the neck caused by a too heavy head. And last but not least, pain in the fingers. On cobbles it is imperative that one puts his hands loosely on top of the handle bars in order to absorb eventual shocks. After 200k however one tends to lose some of his agility and therefore finds him or herself clinging on his or her bike as it were a life belt and thus receiving every single crack in the road as a good old beating. Yes, it’s in this pain that lies the true meaning of the ronde, I thought the day after, when watching the start of the ronde on television. A journalist asked an old man what he appreciated in the ronde and the bloke answered: “I like seeing the racers suffer”. “Well, old man, you bet I suffered yesterday”, I thought, contemplating my sore butt. “But did you suffer enough?, the man asked. “is an aching bum all it takes to become a flandrien ?” I looked deep into myself and answered, “Well, to be really Honest, my old man, let’s pray for a shower of rain next year and a little hailstorm and an icy wind, and then I’ll show you !”
And the same counts for Nick Nuyens.
Tomorrow it’s prologue time at the Cape Epic 2011 in Cape Town. The best mtb marathon riders in the world will be battling it out once more in teams of 2 over 8 stages and 770kms. 4 years ago I stood there myself. At the time the start was in Knysna, a beautiful bay town 5 hours east of Cape Town. Ever since I’v been following the event with more attention than other mtb stage races – saying that I have a bit of a bond with it might be going too far but still.
There were the breathtaking landscapes, sunrise starts in the morning, endless roads, dessert singletracks and countless punctures. The daily victory, crossing the finish line after another 9h+ day in the saddle, sharing the experience with your teammate and wondering where those daily 7 to 8 liters of liquids went. The breakfast and dinner tent with the other 1198 participants, daily measuring of the bike damage and wear, the massage (moment of the day), fueling up on energy (anything goes) and promising yourself you will never eat those energy gels again.
peacefull and quiet - before the torture of the day
It was also suffering as on day 3 when we punctured 5 times and had to race against the clock to make it to the cut off time in 9h45m. A fantastic teammate who was on all days (except maybe one?) superior and fully supportive. The disappointment of abandoning the race on the second to last day at 20k from the finish line – at the same time the reason for returning once more in the future to finish the event. Cause in the end, every year again, when the Cape Epic starts you really wish you were there.
If you want to get some impressions on our 2007 experience (partly in Dutch, partly in English) check the teamskelle archive.
This year the organizer is again providing live reporting with gps and polar tracking (and video feed?).
Up north you can still freeze to your frame in 0-30 secs so a trip to Belgium where it’s 9Cs sounds almost tropical. Certain of my compatriots are celebrating the sublime state of democracy of the nation (at least us Belgians hold some kind of world record), others are starting to focus on what really matters: the upcoming bike season.The boys from teamskelle seem to have had a decent Winter and are obviously already motivated at this time of the year.
Flat in the flatland
On Saturday we gathered up near the medieval town of Damme (10 kms North of Bruges) for a ride in the “Polders”. Main features of the area: flat, flatter, flattest topped off with an always present northern wind from the nearby North Sea. Following the canals we did some border-hopping in the southern Dutch province of Zeeuws-Vlaanderen cruising through villages I had never even heard of and which have 50 inhabitants max. Nice roads, no traffic so a perfect area for building up the overall fitness
Filip was once again our local gps, and from halfway onwards also my wind shield – much appreciated. It was my first ride of 3.30h since November in Malaga and a great intro to the opening Spring classics of the coming weeks – at least I can sympathize with the pros a bit more understanding the windy and rainy conditions. Overall goal was to stay alive during most of the ride and I only bended during the last half n hour – an average heartrate of 168 is not exactly staying in G2. Slightly undercooled afterwards but pretty satisfied we got 87kms on the training sheet.
Looking forward to Spring and in the meanwhile I’ll just spend some time on my Tackx watching the pros on television…
Snow, melt, more snow, slush, more melt, frost, more snow, rain, frost, more snow. In exactly that order. We don’t wanna go down as the biggest bike winers ever but with a weather like this… our bikes just refuse to be taken out! 10 cms of snow and a solid -5C is what we need – that would at least allow us to take a spin for an hour every now and then.
On the professional side – if we would have been real professionals we’d been in Spain or Down Under now – your composers of cycling poetry and other sentences both made a “team transfer”. Both of us are pretty busy impressing our new colleagues so yet another excuse for not sticking with the tagline of our blog.
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