Hi there
Well I arrived safely in France at the Triathlon New Zealand base camp after some 30hrs of traveling. I will be here for the next 9 weeks as I train for the Hawaii Ironman world Championships in October, this will be the first time I have not done my build up in Australia. The training is just fantastic here with some of the best cycling in the world right on your door step and some great trail running as well. I had the luxury of seeing one of the toughest stages in this years Tour de France, stage 14 a 197km ride through the Pyrenees mountains, and with the tour going so close to our village we had no excuses to go and watch!
We decided to go and watch from the 1st mountain top of the day, what a tough climb, we rode from the base camp to the top of Col de Pailhere's which topped of at 2001m (17km climb but more like 30km when you take in the initial ascent just to get to the start) the Col de Pailhere's is an uncategorized climb, meaning outside of what they determine being hard, we had a some of the guys drive to a village called Quillian (about 45km from the mountain) and we stopped there and picked up our back packs and then rode to the top. My bag had about 6-7kg of food and clothes as it wasn't a warm day at all. Half way up my back was killing me due to carrying all the extra weight, we eventually made it to the top after about and hour of solid climbing, this mountain had no give in it at all and when we saw the riders come through they were in a world of pain (and they still had another climb to go!)
After taking 4:50hr to get to the top (from our base camp) we nearly made the rest of the trip home in 2:20hr!!! We didn't make it all the way home as we hopped in one of the cars to take us home other wise it would have been a 7:30hr ride!!! That just shows you how much climbing we did, we also had a very strong tail wind all the way home!!!
I'll let you know how my training is going in the next few weeks and give you another update.
Kind Regards
Cameron
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