What went wrong with Stage 7 GPS info?

I believe we start being tired. Yesterday I was telling you that my average heart rate was 110 bpm. Today after a 1,200 meters elevation gain climb my average heart rate was 100 bpm and I haven‘t been over 139 bpm! In normal days it would be an average of 145 bpm and a max of 170 bpm. Anyway, this is boring stuff but it is just to say that we feel the last 10 epic days.

Today was a difficult start. First because we were tired (yes we are) we took a long time to activate. Second we got to change Sonia’s disk brake pads. The last descend yesterday was very steep. The brakes melted in the 10 km. Last, we started to follow the GPS track to realize we were doing the same route as yesterday backward. For some reason the stage 7 GPS info were the same as for Stage 6. We got stressed for a moment since without GPS info we cannot do what we are doing. We are not following roads and each stage contains hundreds of direction changes. We cannot rely on the road book for the directions; we would be watching them every 5 minutes. Hopefully I was having a backup of the GPS information on the Netbook (I‘m glad I bring it). We stopped in a park and connected the GPS watch to upload the real Stage 7 track. Voila!

Stage 7 was 102 km. Right from the start we were knowing that we would not be able to make it. We started too late and we were not having the stamina to do a long stage like this. Also we don’t want to arrive too early in Riva del Garda. Riva is beautiful, may be too beautiful. It is a tourist magnet. The crowd is a mix of windsurfers, mountain bikers and people just enjoying the beach. In the last two weeks we are used to remote areas where only mountain bikers, hikers and cows were able to get there.

We could have done the 60 km we did on road bikes. There was not a single section of off-road. On the 60 km, the only effort was a 15 km climb of 1,200 meters of elevation gain (between 6% and 9% grade). We did much tougher in the past days but still we were very happy to see the top. 15 km is long when you are climbing with no break.

On another note, Italians are really into cycling. Especially the retirees. There are groups of 70 years-old everywhere climbing the road passes of the Dolomites. This is very impressive.