VTT day ... and a half!

Today was the day that Pat and Kevin were going to have a look at the forest tracks route that Kev had identified on the map and which looked, on paper, like it should be around 33km with 700m of ascent. Yep, I'm up for it, I said, sounds like fun, particularly since I had really enjoyed my mountain bike outing with Pat last week. Besides, it would be good to get a feel for some more of the forest tracks in the area so that Andy and I can take ourselves off and explore further in future.

The first part was along a very quiet single track road on the other side of the valley from the Col de Port. Easy riding. After about 50 mins, we reached the point where we branched off onto the forest track. My Garmin GPS training device was showing 12 and Pat chirped up '12km, yes, that's about right'. I remember thinking 'has it really taken us nearly an hour to do 12km?' We hadn't exactly been hanging about! I should have listened to my intuition. Anyway, the turning that we then needed to take off the main track should apparently have been another 4 to 5km further on. We realised after too long that a) we had missed the turning and that b) my Garmin was for some reason showing miles and feet instead of km and metres! We had no idea where we there. The only sensible thing we could do was to turn round and retrace our steps. Anyway, here is a piccy of Kev!
The return route, once we reached the road again, seemed to go on forever...it seemed to be one steady incline whereas I didn't remember it being a downhill run on the way out. And to make matters worse, it soon dawned on us that the 12km that Pat had expected from where we had parked was in fact more like 12 miles! I didn't recognise the route back and questioned whether we were in fact on the right road. I kept on expecting the van to be parked over the next hill but each time I was disappointed. I started to suffer from a lack of fuel and bonked in the last couple of miles as the upwards gradient took its toll. There was nothing left in me. I was shattered.

It was only when I got home and downloaded the data from my Garmin and plotted it onto my Memory Map mapping software that I discovered we had in fact covered over 65km with over 1300m of ascent during which I had burned over 2000 calories! No wonder I was dropping. Lessons were learnt from the outing but it was an enjoyable few (4!) hours on the bike. My legs had felt strong and I felt fit. So it's all good :-)