BAM!

If there were a sound effect for my ride today that would be it. I think I also might have heard my knees make that noise at least once… I finally figured out why everyone says the riding along the coast isn’t very good. It’s actually not a reflection of those roads, but of how incredible the riding is in the mountains to the north. I think today might be deserve the title of the nicest ride I’ve ever been on.

I was shooting for a solid 5 hours with tempo climbing, and made a nice playlist for the ride of some old school favorites like Grandmaster Flash, Biggie, and Talib Kweli. It was about 5hrs straight of music and the idea was I couldn’t go home until it was over. It takes about 15min to get out of town going north, but when you’re out you’re definitely OUT. The climbing begins a few km’s after that, and lasts 25km to the Col de Levens, which is only about 600m (1970ft) high but of course you’re coming from about as sea level as it gets. That was a nice climb, very steady highway grade in the sun. After that is a long twisty descent for about 15km, which was GNARLY and super cold. All the north-facing hills were a solid 10 degrees colder than their south-facing colleagues. There was also a big temperature inversion, so the valleys had ice on the sides of the roads (which are salted) and my hands and feet went totally numb, but on all the Cols I was nice and toasty.

The descent takes you all the way down to about 200m (650ft) at the north-most point of the ride, just shy of a town called Roqubilliere. At that point you turn onto a one-lane road and begin the hardest part of the ride, the climb to the Col de Turini. It’s a switchbacking ascent of 17km, and the summit is 1767m (5800ft). That comes out to just over a 9% average grade for those who slept through math class. The first half I was happy to be getting warm again, the second half I was perhaps less happy about the whole thing but occupied by the incredible road. The road skirts a deep canyon, and at times the road is just etched into the side of a rock face and as you ride you can look over the edge to the floor a few thousand feet below.

That climb seemed to take forever, and I saw maybe three cars the whole time since there’s not much going on up there. The descent to town starts almost immediately, and was even better than the last. From Turini it’s about 50km back home, and except for a brief climb over the Col de Nice about halfway, it’s downhill the whole way. The first 20km or so are all one-lane, super-twisty with switchbacks and cliffs and such. I really wanted a road bike at that point to rail it, but it’s probably for the best I didn’t have one because I probably would have ridden off a cliff going to fast and giggling.

In all, a track bike is far from ideal for jaunts through the Pyrenees, but today I think I really nailed the fixie descending technique. It’s a lot better with switchbacks because you only get up to about 35mph on the straights no matter what bike you have. With just a front brake, the key is to let it rip on the straight-aways and spin your legs out (in the gear I’m riding that’s about 180rpm), then jam HARD on the brake before the hairpins but modulate it so that you’re doing a rolling stopie and the rear wheel lifts just a bit so you can skip into the turn, and right before the apex let the rear float around to the outside to reduce the radius. Then voila, let off the brakes, drop the rear wheel back down, pedal through the turn, let yourself just roll back up to speed, and repeat about 500m later at the next turn. I should say though, there’s no pain quite like 180rpm after a few hours of climbing a 50rpm.

My playlist was just shy of ending, but when I got back to Nice I’d ridden 4:45 and it was 19C (66F) in the shade so after lunch I went to the beach for a nap then read until the sun set. Tomorrow it’s Saint Tropez or bust… I mean, the mountains are great, but a guy’s gotta get a tan.