The Kirks

We all got to the bar in the hotel and had what would laughably be called a “pep talk” by JJ.  This inspirational and motivational speech seemed to consist mostly of phrases like “tomorrow will be a bastard” and “it’s going to be really really tough” and “if you make it to lunchtime without a major acute myocardial infarction, you’re going to be one of the lucky ones”.  That all made us feel pretty perky.  It was also one of the contributors to a great deal of sleep being lost last night.  For some people it was phonecalls in the middle of the night, for others the sounds of the pimps arguing with the punters outside our hotel, for others it was the sweet sweet sound of freight trains clanking through Liege at 4am and for most of us it was the fear of the following day.  The heating in the rooms was on max so one had the choice of the pleasant sounds of urban Liege and a reasonable temperature or alternatively one had to sleep in a sauna.  Oh and the prospect of the 6.45 breakfast and 7.30 start weighed heavy on the mind…

So breakfast was a slightly subdued and tense affair.  Men of a certain age decked out in Lycra looking completely wasted didn’t really inspire a lot of confidence.  That being said, Tony Flinn brought his own breakfast!  12 Weetabix all the way from the UK.  You just can’t trust Johnny Foreigner’s breakfasts you know.

There was a tremendous amount of faffing around before we managed to “bike up” and get off through Liege.  It’s not what one would call a pretty town really and the traffic was heavy.  However, after about 3km we turned off onto the steepest hill of the day.  There should have been a sign in Dutch saying “De Bastard Heuvel” or something.  Really really steep, seemed endless, no warming up and at one point I really thought I might have to get off.  It was only the peer pressure and the thought of endless evenings of ritual humiliation at the hands of the L’Etape Boys which kept me going.  It should be mentioned that three of the group (John, Godric and Guy) are doing L’Etape this year.  So they are as fit as butchers dogs and consider today as just a gentle warm up for the main event.  For the rest of us, it was a lot more brutal.  So I think that hill was the last time I saw L’Etape Boys until coffee.

The hills kept coming and the group split up into a number of smaller groups each doing things at their own pace.  There’s a reasonable spread of fitness and speeds in the group so it’s hard to keep everything together.  However, it was all going well until we came into a town called Sprimont and Tim’s bike just stopped.  The chain had broken.  Now, there’s a lesson in this:  If you want to build your own bike, don’t get Guy and Tim to do it.  Use a professional.  Mick came back to pick up Tim and found a bike shop to fix the bike.  The rest of us just ground it out until coffee.  This was in a rather beautiful town called  La Roche en Ardeness.  A really nice run down into the town which sits in a river valley.  Now, that should have been a big hint that there was some pain to come but we all just drank coffee and felt good about ourselves.  70km done, the back of it broken, how hard can it be?  And only 30km to Lunch?  Dik is really quite unwell and so he took the car to lunch.  La Roche was also notable for having the fattest man in Belgium in it.  Really.  Huge.

Right out of La Roche, it was just an absolutely monster series of hills.  Rolling, long, steep in places.  Tony Flinn had been given a card by his wife entitled “How Hard Can It Be?”.  Well he managed to cycle into the back of a stationary car and cut his lip.  So it can be that hard.  He’s explained to me about 3 times how this can happen but I’m still none the wiser to be honest.  Seems pretty difficult to me.  There were some occasional slightly odd routings and we did end up doing a few backtracks and some time on woodland paths which was…entertaining. 

Lunch was in Saint Hubert about 100km from the start.  A nice little bistro with a Swiss theme…only in Belgium eh?  We’d planned to have a nice quick stop and get back on the road but by now, the sun was shining, the temperature was perfect, it was really beautiful so we kicked back and had some food.  Ed’s was particularly notable in that nobody really seemed to know what it was but when it arrived it was a horrible bit of cold fish with a horrible sauce.  Really really bad.  But there were chips and lasagne and meaty things which were great.  This is going to be a recurring theme of this holiday.  The food.  When you’re a “man of a certain age”, you get used to not eating huge amounts of food otherwise you end up like the “fattest man in Belgium”.  But when you’re burning up 4000+ calories a day…oh yes baby, bring on the deep fried lard and I’ll have two puddings thank you. 

I was the “broom” after lunch.  This involves staying at the back and making sure nobody gets left behind.  Sadly it was me who got left behind so I was my own broom.  The first section was being tarmaced and so by the end of it all our bikes were covered in tar and little tiny stones and shit like that.  It really was horrible.  Then it was just a long 50km on not very pleasant roads.  Quite a lot of dual carriage way, quite a lot of painful hills.   Actually a really big lot of painful hills.  The legs were feeling it a bit by then.

There was a really nice run down into the beautiful town of Bouillon where we’d decided to have a beer.  We’re hoping to have beers in Broth, Borsch and Bisque later in the trip.  The road was wide, flat and really nicely downhill.  Flying into Bouillon felt really good.  But the course had one last sting in the tail.  A huge long grind up to our hotel.  Not wildly steep but long and painful.  The L’Etape Boys raced up it.  I think John won but maybe it was Godric.  We can let them fight it out.

So, given that everybody was at a different speed, my personal Garmin Stats don’t reflect everybody’s performance.  The complete route is here:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/33917872

For me it was 149km, with just under 2000m of climbing.  That’s a lot.  And explains the pretty pathetic average speed of 22.5km/h.  I’m sure the L’Etape boys did considerably better than that.  I used 5665 calories according to the Garmin (although it’s probably more like 4000) and had an average heart rate of 141 which is mildly scary.

Everybody is feeling very perky now.  This is likely to be punctured pretty quickly tomorrow morning when we realise we’ve got to do the whole thing again and then do it again the following day.  Still, alcohol intake this evening should dull the fear…

Here is a photo album with a selection of Andy’s pictures.

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