Joe Gross

Today I went on a route preview ride hosted by the Davis Bike Club. There were about 70 randonneurs from all over the country joining us on the ride.

I was told earlier that it would be the first 37 miles of the PBP route. I wasn’t looking forward to working that hard today but I was convinced to join them anyway.

The pace was pretty fast and I worked hard to keep up. At some point I was glad I forgot my heart rate monitor strap in my hotel room since I probably wouldn’t be having nearly as much fun knowing how hard I was probably working. I thought, “These guys are doing a 1200k in two days and they’re flying down this course. What did I get myself into?”

Fortunately, only 37 KM later we were at the town of Gambais and took a quick break.

I thought we may stop for lunch but it was only about 5 minutes later that were off again for a fast return with a nice tailwind.

I don’t have any advantage on the flats, and between my heavy bike and my heavy me, we don’t have any hope of having an advantage on the climbs. One thing I can do well, though, is descend. I was really working hard to keep up with the group on the rollers but found that if I worked a littler harder on the climbs to keep from losing too many places and then put a tiny bit of power in the descents I would gain time on the descents and slowly worked my way toward the front of the group. In this way I was able to turn the endlessly rolling hills into an advantage just to keep up with this fast group.

Not that this was a race, far from it, but it felt good to know that somehow I was keeping up with this group of extraordinarily talented cyclists, many of them previously having done this or other 1200k events.

I’m told that the route is mostly rollers just like the ones we saw today. If that’s the case the route should be much easier (though much longer longer) than the Northern California qualifier brevets.

More pics are at
http://img.stimpy.net/pics/bike/pbp2007/davis-preride/

We did a short walking tour of Paris on Friday. I’m a terrible tourist so we just walked around the iconic landmarks rather than going in them.

The major intersections in Paris have “bike boxes” where they bikes are supposed to move to the front of the line of stopped cars.

We also saw a few of the Paris community rental bikes. They look pretty nice, although the reported $750M cost over 10 years could have probably been spent on making a better/cheaper system than what they have now.

The Arc de Triomphe was also pretty impressive. I had no idea it was that big.

After wandering around Lorah and I stopped at a cafe to share some wine and cheese, as one should always do in Paris.

More pics are at http://img.stimpy.net/pics/bike/pbp2007/paris/

On Thursday I went for a ride around town to find the start/inspection area and then go on a 90 minute or so ride just to stretch my legs. It turned out to be closer to a 6 hour ride.

It was fun finding my way out of town and just wandering around. The drivers around here are freaky-polite. It’s actually a little disturbing since I’m not quite sure what they’re going to do. I saw at least one driver stop their car at a green light to have me go ahead against the red at a cross street.

I went through a few cute little towns that only lasted for a block or two. I saw at least one neat Chateau along the way.

Of course I got lost getting back. Fortunately Lorah had picked up some GSM SIMs earlier that day so she was able to talk me in after about a dozen calls. French roads make it very hard to tell where you are since all the intersections (roundabouts, mostly) just have directions to towns or other landmarks.