At last, with two days to go, there are indications that Kevin is almost ready for the trip to France. We did the usual “reference” ride (Pescadero/Tunitas), this time on our Bike Fridays, just to make sure they were ready for the trip as well.

!

Nothing spectacular as we kept the pace intentionally low, but the good news is that the knee issue that has bothered him the last few weeks didn’t show up at all until Tunitas, and pretty much went away on the upper (flatter) parts of the climb.

I did notice something a bit odd though (sometimes, when you ride slower than usual, you see and think about things that otherwise escape you). The “Grassy Knoll” where the steep part of Tunitas ends? It moves! Some days I find it 35 minutes into the ride; today it was 50. Very suspicious

The original plan sure didn’t work out today! Kevin needing to head to Kaiser to get antibiotics for the pneumonia bug that’s hit my family kept him from getting in a “real” ride today, but he did ride the trainer for an hour, plus we should count riding his bike to & from the doctor, right? We made the best of it, heading to the shop first, so we could go over the bikes we’ll be taking to France and make sure we have what we need.

After that I did get out on a short ride, heading south to our Los Altos store and then for the return, actually trying a new road or two… something not so easy for me to do after all these years!

It took about half an hour to get into the swing of things on the Bike Friday, although it wasn’t until nearly home that I was finally feeling comfortable putting some real power into the bike (on the ride south I never hit anything over 250 watts, but gradually my peak power crept up until finally getting over 500… still well below the 700 I’d typically see on my Trek, but y’know, when you’ve got a rack on the back and a large bag sitting on top of it, plus pedals and shoes you’re not really used to, and a bike that flexes quite a bit more… let’s just say it doesn’t quite feel the same trying to sprint up a hill!).

If things go as planned (which hasn’t happened often lately!), we’ll be doing the Pescadero Tunital loop tomorrow morning, at a pretty slow speed. We really don’t want to see issues with Kevin’s knee. Then we’ll be packing the bikes up afterward, so at least one thing will be ready for France.

We’re going to be hitting the ground running when we arrive; the train gets into Lourdes (in the Pyrenees) at 8:20pm, and the first ride (and stage of the ‘Tour we’ll be seeing) has us getting up early enough to catch a 6:30am train. Yikes! It won’t be an epic ride, but definitely challenging, as we climb the Col d’Aspin from the “hard” side and ride on back to Lourdes. That’s on Friday. Saturday, we’ll be seeing the ‘Tour ride over the Tourmalet, a relatively-short ride from Lourdes. Short does not mean easy though! That, also, will be an early morning, since the Tourmalet is the first climb of the day so they’ll be closing the mountain pretty early.

Too bad I’m not a morning person. 🙂