Training Log Archive: Charlie

Rhonda's morning class. First time I'm several months I think. Very hard in my current condition. Seem to have jammed my shoulder a bit when I took that hard fall yesterday.

Class would probably be a good thing for me to keep up for a while.

Event: WCOC Pond Mt
 

Beautiful day at Pond Mtn on the Red Course. Drove out with Bill Duncan, pleasant company. Generally finding controls fine, but navigation was a little loose. Only one big mistake, at #8, but had to look around a bit on a few of them when I got to the right general area. The only person I saw out on the course was Jenny Hawkins, Tiny Feet's grandmother. She was heading uphill toward #6 when I was going down toward 5, and then I passed her on the way down toward #7, although she had a different control there.

Compression socks kept my calf happy, but the back was aching and I wasn't able to run at all fast. 1 and 2 were fine, going on trail as much as possible. Took a hard fall between 1 and 2 and had to lay there a while until the shock of it wore off. 3 and 4 were a tough climb. All that bike riding didn't prepare me adequately for how hard that was. 5 I stopped a bit short and had to look, but just kept going and eventually got there. 6 I stopped short and looked around passing the big line of bare rock, but kept going and banged right into it. 7 I was a bit off to the left and had to stop and look until I saw it. 8 was the only significant error. I was too far right, and then climbed too much until I realized what was going on. Had a harder time coming back down! The rest were pretty unremarkable, running pretty good routes and finding them just fine. For the long leg to 13, I realized that a road/trail approach would be the fastest, but wanted to do more in the woods. I angled toward the Trail heading N and left it after the bend, contouring around the worst of the hill and going not far from 14 in the process. Very tired in the latter part, but hustled a bit to stay under 100 minutes.

The map with route. Nominal distance 6.9K, so I seem to have done a bit extra. More extra than I would have guessed.

Red - Splits

Lots of catching up to do for work, and spent most of the morning on that. Zack was home and hung out with him until he left around 1:30. Then I put the bikes back together in anticipation of a ride, but just as I was changing clothes, we got a call and our friends Isabel and Peter Huntington showed up, so no ride after all. It's appears to be the fruit of some of Rhonda's long term planning, as in "don't you think that Isabel and Peter would really like each other?" We'll, it seems they do, but it has taken about 5 years to get this far. And by the time they left we could barely keep our eyes open, so no ride today.

Turkish Air is pretty fine. Comfortable, feeding us well, and free wi-fi. Long flight though. Left Tirane this morning at 9 am Albanian time, changed in Istanbul. Due at JFK around 5. Lovely dinner last night with our Albanian friends Marsela, Livila and Junid. Marsela brought us to the airport this morning.

Home again at 9pm, uneventful except for standing in line at JFK for an hour while immigration's computers were down.

Food in Albania was amazingly cheap as well as amazingly good. Our dinner the last night we were there, in a very nice restaurant, shared among 6 of us, and more than we could finish: arugula salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and olives; several kinds of Berat olives; grilled vegetables, mostly eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, onions; a mixed pepper and onion ragout with a creamy sauce; peppers stuffed with white cheese; feta cheese al forno with some pepper garnish; delicious lamb rib chops; maybe some other things, delicious chewy bread with plenty of olive oil; wine and sparkling water. The price? 6000 lek, including tip, or about $56 for the 6 of us.

Said a lot of good-byes and had a 3 hour bus transfer back to Tirane. Some roads are ok, some are dusty, sporadically paved and full of potholes. Drivers generally courteous, but I was really glad not to be riding that stretch. We are pretty tired, and I suppose this is a rest day, but the van ride followed by disassembling and packing the bikes didn't feel particularly restful.

During most of our cycling tour we saw only maybe 1 or 2 vehicles a kilometer, mostly trucks. A lot of the local transport is in little donkey carts in the rural south. Met many people, generally only briefly, but they were unfailingly friendly. We never had a bad meal, or even a so-so meal. We ate lots of vegetables, some lamb, some fish. Turkish coffee from time to time takes a bit of getting used to, and I am happy to stop, but many places would make us cappuccino and that was always welcome.

The physical report is that I am in better condition than when I left home. Back and hamstring much better. A new injury to the L calf, but it seems to be mending already. Saddle soreness diminished greatly after 3 days.

The more general report is that this was a very successful trip, very enjoyable. Some daunting logistics all seemed to work out fine. We fly home tomorrow.

C • Sounds fantastic! 4

Out from the beach at Qeparo and the biggest climb of the trip heading north toward Dhermi. At one point I was following Rhonda up a 15% section and she got off to walk. I thought I would pass her, but she started pulling away, so I walked that pitch, too. We stopped after the big climb and had lunch at a spot where we saw whole lambs being roasted on a rotisserie powered by a generator. Wonderful. We sat on a patio next to a rushing spring coming down the mountain. Then the last few miles to Dhermi, where we had another swim in the Ionian Sea, the end of the cycling.

Armand was admiring my shoes and offered to buy them, which I said would be ok, but then it seemed like the right thing to give them to him as a gift, and he was quite pleased.

Then a long bus transfer over the Llogara Pass, which would have been a beautiful ride, but very, very hard, and we were pretty done. Eventually we got to Berat, to the most beautiful hotel of the trip, and walked up to tour the old castle at the top of the hill. Another steep climb, thankfully on foot.

When we got to Berat, Rhonda sent me to the little market next door to buy her a beer. Good Albanian beer, 100 lek for a 500ml bottle or about $.93. I picked the bottle out of the cooler and went to the counter, where the guy was talking to be animatedly in Albanian and making gestures. Seeing how dumb I looked, he asked if I spoke Italian, and then asked me in Italian to return the bottle when I was done, except he couldn't remember the Italian word for return. Ritornare? I asked, and he was satisfied. Then he asked me if I was Indian. Not sure what made him think that, but guys in Berat may not get around much. No, americano, I told him, and he seemed to think that was quite remarkable. And very happy when I showed up 15 minutes later with the empty bottle. Now that I think about it, ritornare was not the right word anyway. That is more like go back. I think we were both looking for restituare or perhaps rimettere or ricambiare. Hard to get some of these things right under pressure. All's well that ends well.

C • cheat 5

My best day so far, from Sarande north along the coast, along the edge of the mountains with climbs and descents and many switchbacks. I had an ace bandage and a leg warmer on my sore left leg and the pain was gone, so I was feeling pretty lively. All the climbing was doing my hamstring a lot of good, too. It was a lot of work, but good roads and feeling pretty strong. Always beautiful views of the sea. Eventually we descended to the beach at Qeparo, where we stayed in a guest house right on the beach and enjoyed a lovely swim in the Ionian Sea. Very blue, very clear, very clean. No one else along the beach. The water was very cool, but not too cold, and even Rhonda went if briefly. Dinner was freshly caught fish at the guesthouse, grilled on an open grill, with the usual salads, vegetables, fried potatoes, bread and olive oil. Local wine. A very happy time.

I think this was a little shortcut of the day. I think the guide had originally planned we would stop there for lunch and press on to Dhermi, up some even bigger climbs, but this felt right for the group and was a good place to stop. The distances are not so great, but not a bit of flat ground anywhere along the route.

The road surface the last few days has been excellent. Earlier in the trip, particularly in the mountains, we had long stretches of bumpy road with lots of potholes. Strangely, the downhills were really bad, but the uphills much better in the direction we had been going. I only recall one really bumpy uphill, and it was awful.