I've been given the task of leading the Kyoto ride for Rapha's Women's 100, along with Grecia and Peter, which I'm really looking forward to. Last Sunday we set off to check the provisional route... and it turned out to be considerably harder than we imagined!
Even Peter, who races cyclocross at Masters 1 level, was left pretty wrecked by the route! A lot of climbing, with lots of steep sections and plenty of relentless rollers in between.
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| Strava reckoned the ride was 'Epic'... |
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| 5750 kcal burned and a cap so crusted with sweat it went from black to white - a hard ride! |
Wasn't a boring route, either. Lovely scenery and plenty of excitement: wood-fired pizza at the halfway point, two flat tyres (one each between myself and Peter) and... a snapped spoke on my rear wheel. Crap.
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| Beautiful road! |
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| Puncture 1 (Peter's) |
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| Puncture 2 (mine) |
The snapped spoke is going to take 2-4 weeks to replace, apparently, and I want to rebuild the whole wheel to make sure the spokes are all tensioned evenly. Meanwhile, the wheel is basically totally unrideable (lucky the failure happened 5 km from home on a 125 km ride!), so I've had to pick up a set of NOS Shimano Ultegra 6700 wheels (the 6800s are out soon so my LBS is trying to clear his stock of last-generation stuff). They seem like great wheels, and when I've rebuilt the Planet X rear I'll have to make a decision on which set to keep, I think.
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| New wheels - much more classic look, but I like my deep carbon! |
Anyway, owing to the difficulty, we've altered the route for Sunday's ride - it's now the Hiyoshi dam route from a week or so ago, extended with a detour into Keihoku to the pizza place and with the easier side of Mochikoshi Pass added towards the end. Should be a nice route that will please everybody, and not too difficult.
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