That 3 kilometres almost killed me!

Yesterday, I had my first uphill climb on bicycle in my life. The original plan was to do a to and fro trip from Grenoble, Flandrin Valmy tram stop to Uriage les Bains, passing by Venon and Gière, which would be around 40km in total. But the uphill climb in between Venon and Uriage les Bains was way too difficult than I imagine. I managed only to do a 3km uphill climb, which is only the very beginning of the climb. 3km might seems short, but the road seemed forever endless for me. I cycle everyday at least 10km (on flat land). Even that I had to give up the climb. 

May be I am too ambitious, to pick a hard climb on my first try. My bike is good enough for the climb but I am not. Now I really respect those professional cyclists. After the biking session, I watched some clips about some famous climb in Tour de France. And I landed on this video, a climb of Lance Armstrong,

After some recherche, I found out that Mt. Ventoux climb is categorized as "hors catégorie" climb. In fact, it is a system to categorized mountains. There are category 1 (hardest) to 4 (easiest). And "hors catégorie" means beyond category, is the hardest of all, even harder than category 1. And Mt. Ventoux is one of the kind. 

I watched Tour de France a few times before. But it never got me interested. To watch the competition more than 5 mins is rare. Now I realized how difficult to be a pro cyclist. It is indeed a really tough sport. Don't even mention Tour de France, which is most probably the hardest among all cycling competitions. 

How much I accentuate how hard a bike climb is, I must say that the descent is a pure adrenaline rush. With full equipment and a good bike, one can reach very high speed during a bike descent. The video below shows exactly how fast can it be during a normal Tour de France descent,

The descent I did was fun, but also very dangerous. I don't think I reached a speed faster than 50km/h but for a beginner like me, it was very scary. You panic, but you must suppress the fear, because you know one slight mistake and you could be off the cliff. The road condition also my main concern. Luckily the road was well paved and there was very few cars on that day. 

Gosh! I must train more on climbing!