Whilst riding in the Alps, I was using my heart rate monitor, which was recording lots of stats about the riding. Here are the stats for those that are interested…
Riding Stats
Day 1
Route: Chatel – Morgins – Les Croset – Champery – Chatel
Riding Time: 5 hours 40 minutes
Vertical Descent: 1800 metres
Average Temperature: 29 degrees celcius
Average Heartrate: 118 beats per minute
Maximum Heartrate: 186 beats per minute
Day 2
Route: Pre La Joux – Muddy Downhill – Lindarets – Morzine – Avoriaz – Pre La Joux – Chatel
Riding Time: 6 hours 8 minutes
Vertical Descent: 2275 metres
Average Temperature: 29 degrees celcius
Average Heartrate: 111 beats per minute
Maximum Heartrate: 185 beats per minute
Day 3 – Boys’ day
Route: Pre La Joux – Nice downhill twice – Pre La Joux – Chatel – Premium downhill twice – Chatel
Riding Time: 4 hours 51 minutes
Vertical Descent: 2615 metres
Average Temperature: 28 degrees celcius
Average Heartrate: 116 beats per minute
Maximum Heartrate: 178 beats per minute
Day 5 – Mechanicals and crashes a plenty
Route: Pre La Joux – Nice downhill twice – Pre La Joux – Lindarets – Les Crosets – Champery – Chatel
Riding Time: 6 hours 48 minutes
Vertical Descent: 2740 metres
Average Temperature: 32 degrees celcius
Average Heartrate: 102 beats per minute
Maximum Heartrate: 185 beats per minute
Day 6 – Last day
Route: Pre La Joux – Avoriaz – Morzine – Les Gets – Morzine – Avoriaz – Lindarets – Pre La Joux – Chatel
Riding Time: 8 hours 37 minutes
Vertical Descent: 3435 metres
Average Temperature: 31 degrees celcius
Average Heartrate: 113 beats per minute
Maximum Heartrate: 185 beats per minute
I also undertook a scientific experiment to see whether drinking at the Tunnel bar made any difference to the time and effort that it takes to ride from Chatel up to Petit Chatel where Lloyd lives (involving about 100 metres of vertical ascent). Therefore, each evening I measured the stats and compared beer intake. Note that this looked to be proving that beer intake inhibited my climbing efforts until day 6…
Beer-aided hill climb stats
Day 1
Beer intake: 2 pints
Riding time: 8 minutes 46 seconds
Average Heartrate: 164 beats per minute
Maximum Heartrate: 172 beats per minute
Day 2
Beer intake: 1 pint
Riding time: 8 minutes 20 seconds
Average Heartrate: 171 beats per minute
Maximum Heartrate: 180 beats per minute
Day 5
In theory this should be the fastest time…
Beer intake: 0 pints
Riding time: 7 minutes 33 seconds
Average Heartrate: 174 beats per minute
Maximum Heartrate: 182 beats per minute
Day 6
But was blown apart by this effort…
Beer intake: 5 pints
Riding time: 7 minutes 19 seconds
Average Heartrate: 173 beats per minute
Maximum Heartrate: 186 beats per minute
So in conclusion, beer inhibits climbing until you reach a threshold of 3-4 beers at which point it becomes beneficial. It must be said though that the beer-aided climbs were all less painful than day 5’s sober control climb!
Statistics from a week of biking in the Alps 0
Biking in the Alps 0
I’ve just got back from a fantastic week of mountain biking in the Alps with Neil (referred to as Rach below for the purposes of confusion prevention through name obfuscation!), Lou, Nich and Liz. Once again we were hosted by Lloyd and Louise Grace in the lovely French village of Chatel.
Three days of varied and at times extreme (but excellent) freeride biking culminated in a mental all-lads day where I was certainly biking as fast as I’ve ever biked off road. For the first time this year I was hitting the jumps on the Super Chatel downhill. This was fantastic fun and felt great as it was an indicator of progress.
On Monday Neil and Sofia turned up whilst en route from Italy to Bordeaux. This meant that it was necessary to drink excess beer and spend Wednesday morning recovering. A nice afternoon at the lake quickly segued into a trip to Montreux in Switzerland for the jazz festival. Although only limited music was enjoyed, the evening was a really relaxing affair in a beautiful setting.
Thursday meant getting back on the bikes and a planned trip to Champery was almost scuppered by a mechanical. Make that two mechanicals. On two separate valleys, both Rach and Lloyd’s son, Ben, were destroying their rear mechs with great aplomb. Spookily enough, Rach’s bike destruction happened in almost exactly the same place as where he managed to induce spontaneous combustion from his forks last year. Last year this was also the scene for a bent rear mech by myself and a high speed front blow-out by Lloyd. Anyway, despite protestations that the mech could be fixed by Rach, he finally accepted Lloyd’s point of view (that it was “f**d”!) and proceeded to remove the remnants of derailleur and chain that were left attached to his bike. Then we proceeded down the mountain and into the next valley in order to grab some lunch and a new mech (Shimano LX at a bargain XTR price ;-)).
On the way back home in the afternoon we ventured into some nastily rutted singletrack where I got it a bit wrong and found myself cartwheeling down the mountain and falling very heavily on my ankle. After two hours of sitting with my ankle in cold water we were ready to go and enjoy the Bastille day celebrations up at the lake in chatel. There the local community staged a spectacular fireworks display which was as loud (with echoes down the valley) as you could ever want.
On Friday we got up really early and headed for the long multi-mountain ride over to Les Gets which is about as far as it is possible to ride in a day from Chatel on the VTT. Just as we reached the furthest point, Rach pointed out a problem; his bike was leaking hydraulic fluid in a strange and somewhat ironic deja vu manner. This time his brakes really had exploded (unlike last year where he deliberately removed the two bolts that held his forks together!) meaning no more downhill tracks for him that day… or so we thought. Lloyd, Ben, Nich and I headed down the Les Gets downhill (first time for me; this track was great fun) whilst Rach took his bike back down to the lift station.
Returning to Morzine, Rach was able to get some dot 5.1 oil for his brakes. However, he managed to drop this and watched on helplessly as a car ran over it. Fortunately the shop stocked more than one bottle and one chairlift later Rach’s front brake was fully bled (quite a field repair this one) and working better than ever. This meant that we could head back down the Pre La Joux downhill (not the ridiculously muddy one we’d attempted on Monday) with Rach zapping at maximum speed.
A final blast up and down the pass montagne ended my biking week in excellent style. This was aided by several beers in the Tunnel bar followed by a fantastic barbeque with Lloyd, Louise, Ben, Daisy and us lot. This was a fitting end to a wonderful week and we were already talking on the plane on the way home about preparations for our return next year.
I’ll put links up to some videos in the coming days but in the meantime, take a look at the trip photos on my photo site.
Keane and Steve Lukather Concerts 0
Two concerts in two days and how different could they be?! Very is the answer. Yesterday I went to see Keane with Nich, Liz, Amanda, Jon, Lou, Helen and Katherine. They were playing in Hyde Park as part of the Wireless festival and they were excellent. Wasn’t sure that a band with no guitarist or bassist could fill a venue like that but 20,000 people (including me) seemed to be pretty happy with how they did.
Had a great day and evening with lots of banter, beer, pasties and fun shared by all! I managed to get a few photos from the evening and they’re up on my photo site plus I have posted some videos here.
And today I went shopping in London before heading for the Mean Fiddler to see Steve Lukather playing with a band made up of Steve Weingart (Dave Weckl’s keyboardist), Joey Heredia (who’s drummed with Scott Henderson and Frank Gambale) and bassist Oskar Cartaya (who according to Mr Lukather has sniffed J Lo’s bottom whilst on tour with her).
This band rocked and I was taken back to one of my favourite concerts ever, which was when I went to see Steve Lukather play in L’Atelier in Luxembourg with Steve. That was one of my fondest memories from growing up and 8 years on, seeing Luke play again brought it all back; shame my bro couldn’t be there again but I was thinking of him!
For Steve’s benefit (Purcell, not Lukather), I did manage to get a few videos, including a guitar moment from Luke. Have a look here to see them. Unfortunately I didn’t catch the funniest moment of the evening, which was when the guys launched into a ridiculously cheesy, latin-american “It’s our groupo and it’s your groupo too” effort which was cited as the band’s theme tune! Good effort Luke!
