Cycling

I started cycling when I started High school, age 13 in this country. Have done a lot of it since then. Never in races, mostly just for myself and every now and again a longer tour with some other people. At age 30 I considered myself experienced enough to try and ride a tour on the parcours of Liege-Bastogne-Liege, one of the spring classic races in Belgium. And it definitely is a race parcours. You start with about 100 km going up and down not too steep hills to Bastogne, continue doing that for another 60 km and then start the grand 'finale'. Which is close to 80 km of roads up the steepest hills they have found in all of the Ardennes. I think there are 8 of them and the steepest one is, of course, La Redoute, starting in Remouchamps.
At the time I thought it was a tough ride, those 240 km. But I did not know then that I would ride LBL another 8 times during the last 17 years or so. And I did not train well for all of them. Definitely not. I now know that the first one was one of the easy ones. Nevertheless, I finished all of them.

If you ever are in the neighbourhood, here are some things you may want to know about the race. And this is a GPS route of a 235 km variant. The site is in Dutch but GPS is international if you have the right kind of hard- and software.

This is me, in this years La Marmotte on the first climb of the day; Col de la Glandon. If you want to ride La Marmotte; look for the roadbook link on this page. Or wait about a year, there will be another edition early july 2007.

End of season

Last saturday I had what I think will be my last longer cycle tour for this year. Only 150km near where I live all in typical Dutch flat country. Beautiful, but flat. For anyone interested, this is the ride I did. Not very special, just fun to do a ride with a lot of other people (1200, 500 for 100km and 700 for 150km) in the places I use for training. And see if they have found roads I did not know yet. Unfortunately, I knew all of them.
I have done longer distances this year in a day. Just for showing off here is what I registered using my Polar cycling heartrate/ distance/ speed/ cadence monitor:

# Exercises 160,
Duration 309.33 hours,
Distance 6747.9 km,
Calories 238071.

Weekly averages:
# Exercises 3,
Duration 5.57 hours,
Distance 129.767 km,
Calories 4578.

The longest ride I did was one day in the 'hills' of Limburg, the 250km version. The hardest one, and the reason I started cycling again about 2 years ago is La Marmotte 170km of climbing four cols with a total of almost 5000m to climb. I'll save the events of that day for a separate post. For now I am just content that I still can ride some respectable distance on my bicycle and not be totally wasted afterwards.

Getting old

My daughter created her own blog this week. And in a couple of days she created more posts than I did in a couple of months. But then again, she wants do something in 'writing'. I am just an IT junky. Luckily for me she is writing in dutch. So not many people that read this, will read her posts.
Fun to read was that she had the same misgivings about starting a blog as I had. Is there anybody that is even remotely interested in what I want to write in a blog? I did not think so, and given the few months I have had this blog, others as well. Not that I have tried to interest people in my blog, but it is freely accessible on the internet.

Unique tiger

Before

Last winter I had a small collission with a car. My bike fell over but had no real damage. The car needed a new fender. Since my no-claim rebate on insurance fee would suffer anyway I decided to claim my own damage as well. I had some scratches to the tank and the wind screen. But it seems repainting is too expensive over here. So the insurance guy decided to fund the money to replace the tank and screen. I was given the money directly. That gave me the possibility to do whatever I like with it. And did I?
I had it repainted in a color that is famous in the netherlands because of a cycling team that used to exist and was sponsored by Amstel beer. My bicycle is painted in the same colour.
Now I have two bikes in 'Amstel Red metallic'. I think it was worth the trouble of missing my bike for six weeks (there were 'some' delays in ordering and deliverance of transfers and a painter who did not know how to do a proper paint job).
And so I have a unique, one in the world, Tiger.

After
My ´other´bike

Recording Albums

I just finished recording all my old albums to MP3. I have been meaning to do that for years, but now it is finally done. It has taken about half a year, in between other 'projects'. And it is great to hear all the excellent music from the 70's and the 80's again. Makes you want to be a student again. Of course there are some albums not in the least bit interesting for anyone but me. Most of them even my children want to hear now and then.
I even bought a car stereo that plays MP3 CD's so I won't have to listen to the not so interesting music (also called crap in a more rude tone) on the radio. Everything is still burnt on CD audio though. The hifi set I own has a much better sound than the DVD surround system, no wonder with those small speakers.
Anyway, only one thing left to do; make an extension for my cd-rack.

The first one

I just created this blog to be able to react to the blog of Tom Kyte. And to get the feel of it. I see a lot of useful info appearing in more and more blog's. So I'm starting myself. Don't know how it will go or if I'll ever add another post. But the first one is there.