Saturday, August 2, 2008

Back to France

After sucessfully holding onto my lead for the rest of the Polish 7-Day MTBO competition, it was time to pack the bags again and hit the skies. Destination was France again, via Milano where I met up with Andy Blair and Rosie Barnes who will be also going onto the l´Hexagonal VTT stage race in the 2nd week in August.

After a stinking hot drive across the border into the Alps we finally arrived at Alpe d´Huez ski village of Tour de France fame. Alpe d´Huez is not only famous for the 21 hairpin bends which make up the road climb to the ski station, as there is hundreds of kilometers of awsome MTB trails (and the 32km downhill ¨Megavalanche¨ course).

First full day here was spent exploring some of the DH trails and then smashing back up the road, full pro roadie style with jersey flapping open as it was pushing 35 deg. The climb is pretty solid, a steeper than it looks on TV but a fairly constant gradient. The next couple of days were long but not too hard, one day was spent at Les Deux Alpes, another ski village about 30km away and the next Andy and I went the soft option and got lift tickets and did many 1000s of vertical metres in downhill runs. Not that there is anything soft about the Megavalanche or the other DH runs, i´ll be the first to admit to walking quite a few sections. We did get some funny looks though as we went bombing down the runs on our cross-country bikes, no damage done thankfully to body or bike!

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