Minimum altitude: 169 meters
Distance: 28.6 km
Slope Aspect: Various
Vertical Climbed: 526 meters (1,726 feet)
Vertical Descended: 525 meters
Rating: 3
Late afternoon ride out into the Monts d'Or above Lyon, rolling out just after 17:00 in warm, almost perfect conditions. Traffic was fairly reasonable for a Saturday, although the drag up towards Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d'Or always comes with a few impatient cars early on.
On the climb through St Cyr I got passed by a woman riding a bike very similar to mine, a heavy commuter setup, but with drop bars. She came by with good speed after carrying momentum off a downhill section. I managed to come back to her wheel, but then her boyfriend dropped back to pace her and she opened a small gap near the Rapace path. It didn’t last long though, and I finally came around just before Mont Cindre. I felt slightly guilty doing it because she’d unknowingly sheltered me from a moderate west wind on the exposed section of the climb. Still, I’m not above a bit of opportunistic wheel-sucking when the gradients bite.
It was a hard effort all the way up. My watch recorded a max heart rate of 184 bpm, one beat higher than my recent recorded maximum. At my age, that seems to bear little resemblance to the old “220 minus age” formula.
After that effort, I took the climb to Mont Thou more conservatively. The temperature dropped noticeably near the top and the wind picked up, so the windbreaker came out before the descent. GPS glitched briefly during this section, but not enough to ruin the ride data.
Back into town afterwards meant the usual return to civilisation: busy streets, distracted Saturday shoppers, and questionable road awareness everywhere.
A couple of PRs came out of the ride too, both on the 14 kg commuter bike.
Previous best: 29:18
New PR: 28:16
I also improved my Mont Thou time, bringing it down from exactly 48 minutes to 47:33. Interestingly, the Mont Cindre to Mont Thou section itself was actually slower than before, pretty clear evidence that I’d burned a serious match getting the earlier PR.
Previous best: 48:00
New PR: 47:33
A tough but satisfying evening in the hills.
Warm but windy up top, shorts but needed a wind breaker back to the valley. Lots of fallen trees that had been cleared after the recent storm.