The special thing about 2007 trip, at least for me and Niki, was that we decided to carry all of our hiking gear with us. Bikearea provides accompanying transport for these tours and you only need to take your daily luggage with you – a bottle of water, some food for the day and basic bike repair parts and tools. In case of more severe bike break down you just have to get your bike to the nearest road that is accessible by the accompanying bus and that’s usually less than 10 kilometers.

However we thought that this is the perfect way to test whether it is feasible to go on a week long, self-sustained mountain bike tour carrying all of our equipment including:

• Bike parts, tools and accessories;
• Hiking gear like tent, sleeping pad and sleeping bag;
• Clothes, personal hygiene items and med pack;
• Two days worth of food and 2 liters of water.

Overall my luggage weighted 14 kg just as much as my bike weights. 9 kg in a backpack and 5 kg on a rack mounted on my bike’s the saddle stem. If anything went wrong we would have simply fallen back to the Bikearea’s bus services.

You’d be amazed how much do these 14 kg weight when you are on a 440 km trans mountain journey. Especially as we’ve participated in the 100 km around Vitosha MTB marathon just the previous week. We were consistently riding behind the main group and that’s how we become close friends with George. He had recently returned from the US, where he was studying in MIT, and bought a bike just one month before Rudopia. He was kinda newbie and was riding slower so our speed matched well

The Rudopia route is selected for light bikers and it was quite a struggle for us to keep up with the speed of the rest of the group. Nevertheless I succeeded to ride in full gear for five days before giving up. I decided I will go light for the day we were crossing from western into the eastern Rhodopi mountain.

Overall this was very useful experience. Now I know much better what my capabilities are. I know what constitutes good bike hiking pack list as well.

Related posts:

1. 100 km around Vitosha
2. First Real Ride of the Season

Although I really try to stick to the training plan I devised myself in order to prepare for the 100 km tour around Vitosha, I don’t always have the time for a proper ride. Quite often I have to substitute the cross country outing for loops at the nearby (West) park or even for the cross trainer session. But despite these obstacles I was glad to find out that my fitness level is good enough. Together with my brother Dave we covered 48 km and climbed 700 m in 02:50 h. We kept a moderate pace – according to the heart rate monitor my average heart rate for the whole exercise was 142 bpm. Not bad for so early in May.

I remember some of my rides several years ago, I’d go for 20 km with 300-400 meters climbing, and I’d be exhausted. It used to take me very long time to recover. Now I’m fitter even though I didn’t exercised much in the winter. I think this might be partially due to the low carb, high fat diet. I’ll cover low carb, high fat diet in more details in a future post.

No related posts.

On April 22 the Earth Day is celebrated with an estimated billion people participating in the activities in thousands of places around the globe. It is a day of awareness and appreciation of our beautiful Spaceship Earth. Earth Day is the only event celebrated simultaneously around the globe by people of all backgrounds, faiths and nationalities.

In Bulgaria the Earth Day is officialy recognized as of April 22 1992 when president Zhelyu Zhelev affirmed the Earth oath.

This year the Earth Day agenda here in Sofia includes:

• 17:30 people gather at the Sofia University for a photography to be taken from the university’s roof
• 18:30 cycling procession starts from the university along Vasil Levski Blvd, Vitosha Blvd and Graf Ignatiev St, joins the walking procession at the National Theatre “Ivan Vazov” and together they continue towards Borisova garden where there is a concert at the summer stage
• 20:30 bikers rally at the Ariana pond for a night bike ride (bring head-lights etc.)

And while we are talking about awareness watch this video:

Did you manage to count how many passes does the team in white make?

No related posts.

100 km around Vitosha is a cross-country hiking and biking tour around Vitosha mountain. The official site of the event is http://vitosha100km.hit.bg/. There you can find detailed map of the route, altitude profile, gps tracks (provided by my friend and colleague Nikolay Denev), gallery and the results from the previous year.

When I’ve heard about the tour for the very first time I found it very appealing so I decided I should take part in it. Unfortunately I didn’t pay attention and missed the 2006 tour. I had to wait for the next one in 2007. I’ve tried to keep sober view on the fact that this is a 100 km tour with quite a few hills to ascend and it ain’t gonna be easy, especially if you try to keep pace. Yet I underestimated the effort.

Me, my brother Dave and my friend Niki have never taken part in such a race so we decided to ride together and to try to complete it in 8 to 8:30 hours, having in mind that the best times from 2006 were just above 5 hours. It eventually took us 10:30 hours and I personally have never before felt so exhausted in my entire life. I think the main problem was that we didn’t know the terrain well so we tried to keep our average speed too high. Later it turned out (as you can see on the altitude profile) that almost all the climbing is in the first 50 km. Well, if we knew that we would have ridden at a lower speed and would have preserved our glycogen reserves so we wouldn’t have hit the wall so early.

Here is the distribution of finish times from the 2007 tour:

The green point is where we wanted to be, the yellow point is the median result and the red point is were we actually finished.

Well, we didn’t perform very well but this has only motivated me to try harder this year. Moreover I’ve never been good at endurance sports and I’m very curious as to how far I could go if I try. On the other hand 3 months are not that long period and with my extremely busy schedule I don’t expect miracles.

Watch this blog for updates

Related posts:

1. Rudopia 2007
2. First Real Ride of the Season
3. It’s time for TED 2008