Hard in the Ardennes.... (Part I)

After an awesome, and very social, trip to the Dolomites I set off for a weeks solo riding in the Ardennes region of Belgium.

Across seven days of riding I had some great and challenging routes planned across some of the best and most iconic road/climbs of the region. Credit where credit is due, the routes (and in fact the hotel used as a base) were based largely (totally?) upon the rides that make up Phil Deeker’s excellent “Hardennes” week that is offered as part of the training programme for Cent Cols Challenge participants.

Riding the routes solo, pushing the air all day on my own, was going to be a tough test and, in many ways, perhaps more challenging than the seven days riding in France I was training for.

I was certainly going to get used to my own company.

Day 1 – In search of… La Petite Ourse

Day 1 saw a super early start as I headed off to St Pancras station to catch the Eurostar to Liege (via Brussels) with my bike broken down and packed up into the excellent Ground Effect Tardis and all my kit for the week crammed into a 20L rucksack. I had definitely packed light, but still faced the prospect of having to cycle the 55km from Liege to my hotel for the week.

I arrived in Liege to glorious sunshine (in what I hoped would be a sign for the week to come) and unpacked/built my bike on a grass verge outside the station. This attracted some quizzical looks, particularly when I dropped my jeans to reveal a pair of bib shorts underneath.

Bits of bike everywhere...!

I was set to go in no time, loaded the route on my Garmin and started out on the ride to my hotel, La Petite Ourse. Almost immediately on leaving the streets of Liege I was cycling up an 18% wall of a climb, weaving all across the road as the extra weight on my back made even the granny gear hard to push.

The route wasn’t really going to get any flatter (although thankfully I didn’t hit anything quite as steep again) for the rest of the route and I continued up and down many hills as I cycled at a comparatively snails like pace in the blistering heat.

After Williams insisting on the Dolomites trip that he would like to see me climbing with an extra 20kg strapped to my back, I got a sense of what that would actually be like. Tough! Although in fairness, if I was 20kg heavier I would want, or expect, the weight to be distributed a little more evenly than just being at the base of my back. Surely some of it would be in the leg muscles….

That bag was... HEAVY!

Finally I arrived at the hotel and checked in, explaining that yes I had cycled here from Liege.

The day was rounded off with several large Jupilers, a beer I was to get relatively well acquainted with over the course of the week, whilst sunning myself on the hotel terrace.

Day 2 – In search of… Amstel Gold (and sunshine?)

After a taste of what the roads would be like, hilly and rough/covered in potholes, I was prepared for a big day in the saddle. I had a 200km route planned that would take me north and briefly into the Limburg region of Holland, just outside of Maastricht. Whilst in Limburg I would be tackling some of the climbs that feature in the Amstel Gold race, one of the three Ardennes Classics normally held in mid-April.

Having had such a glorious day the day previously, I checked the weather forecast with no lack of optimism. Overcast, but brightening in the afternoon with a nice high (for Europe, that is) temperature. Pleased with this news I went light on the kit: a lightweight jersey, no base layer and no Ass-Saver (a fab little bit of kit that I would recommend to anyone). I almost didn’t take the arm warmers or the emergency wind jacket! My optimism was to be short lived.

Heading out of the hotel the day started relatively badly as I managed to jab myself in the eye and lose a contact lens. I carry a spare with me (as I seem to lose them all the time, particularly when descending) and was quickly on my way again, but the omen was not good. Within an hour it was pissing it down and, other than for a brief period, it wasn’t to stop for the remainder of the day.

I stopped to put on all the layers I had, but I was seriously under prepared for the extent of the deluge and was very quickly completely soaked through, all the while getting further and further from the hotel.

Never ending rain

It really was a rude awakening to the European weather (something that I fortunately hadn’t had to suffer through during the winter – it was warmer/sunnier in Hong Kong in January than it is currently in Europe). I was struggling to understand how it could be so cold and miserable – who’d have thought you’d need to piss on your hands for some warmth in the middle of June?!

When the weather is so dreadful and the skies are so grey it is really difficult to appreciate the scenery around you as you ride. You’re just grinding out the kilometres. The roads were hilly and dreadfully paved in places, but I couldn’t really tell you much more about the first half of the ride.

'Somewhere' in Belgium...

As I reached the Dutch border, however, the rain stopped, and whilst I wouldn't say it was sunny it got noticeably brighter. The roads also seemed to fill with Sunday cyclists, the cafes were full of people sat outside and the tarmac got a lot smoother. I was glad to have left Belgium behind.

The two ‘featured’ climbs of the day were the Loorberg and the Camering, both featuring several times in the Amstel Gold. Not particularly long or difficult climbs, they stood out in a novel way to me – they had designated bike lanes up and down both sides and the start and finish points along with the name of the climbs were painted on the road. It felt like the cyclists were getting priority on the roads, an odd feeling…

After a brief stop and refuel (a salami and cheese baguette made from the hotel breakfast) I started my 105km journey back to the hotel. No sooner was I back in Belgium than it started raining again and all other cyclists disappeared. Grim.

It was a long afternoon’s ride back, the roads constantly rolling up and down all the way. The only real stops were to grab cans of coke and chocolate gaufres along the way.

The day had its final brush with incident as, with a little over 40km to go my Garmin flashed up a ‘Low Battery’ warning. Not withstanding the fact that I wouldn’t get a full days stats if it cut out early (a disaster in its own right…), my route home was loaded into the Garmin. Without the route home I was effectively stranded in the middle of rural Belgium, in the driving rain, with no idea which way to go. I was left with little option but to put the hammer down for the final 90 minutes or so and hope that I got close (enough) to home. I arrived at the hotel with little more than 15 minutes to spare before the Garmin died.

Completely soaked through after 200kms

Totally soaked through and completely frozen I showered fully clothed (minus shoes and helmet…) before heading downstairs to the hotel restaurant to inhale a lovely three-course meal and several more Jupilers.

Day 3 – In search of… the Belgian 2013 National Road Champs / La Roche-en-Ardenne

After being burnt the day before, I paid particular attention to the weather forecast. It was supposed to be partially cloudy to start before getting brighter during the day – given this forecast was pretty much the same as the previous days, I felt that was mildly optimistic.

I did, however, set out in similar kit as the day before (somewhat restricted by the amount I had actually packed), but the arm warmers and wind jacket were already on this time rather than in a jersey pocket. The arm warmers would stay on all day.

In many ways the day's ride was a lot less eventful than the previous day's, with the lack of elements to battle against making it an all together easier and more pleasant ride.

The route I had planned for the day was slightly shorter than the previous day's and stayed close to the La Roche-en-Ardennes area at all times - I was never too far from home if I needed to cut the ride short. The ride covered all the best climbs in the La Roche-en-Ardennes area and closely followed the route of this year's Belgian road race championships, although one hopes that some of the roads were repaved for the race itself.

Cote, Col or Mur?

The loop really included some great riding and tough little climbs, with many of the cotes having riders' names still written across the from previous races that had passed through. Andy was (at least at the time of writing them across the road) pretty popular, with a few Phils appearing too.

The lack of rain (and a fully charged Garmin battery) meant that I could take my time a little more, and the first couple of hours involved a fair degree of faffing - the bike had developed a little tick every revolution of the peddles and threatened to drive me to insanity in something akin to Chinese water torture. Some extended faffing was involved in a vain attempt to fix that, then some more to try and stop a bit of chain rub. The bike was definitely going to get a service before heading out to France (I was surprised to see that it had already covered almost 3,000km).

On the way I went through a number of cute/sleepy towns (the whole area is pretty sparsely populated), I can only imagine that with a little more sun they would be even prettier. La Roche-en-Ardennes itself was probably the nicest of the lot, lying quietly beside a bend in the River Ourthe with a lovely medieval castle.

The ride also covered a lot of the "Route des Forets" today. Most of the Ardennes seemed to be covered in dense forest, and was considered impenetrable to armoured vehicles during WWII (falsely, as the invasions of the Battle of France and then the Bulge later showed). Much of the roads that I covered were lined with tall trees and covered by their canopies, often providing a quite imposing tunnel.

Forests of the Ardennes

The day finished without event and I again inhaled a great meal at the hotel (having the restaurant to myself as perhaps the only mid-week guest) and polished of a few Julipers.