Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Biking

The countdown begins!

PBP Course 2023

-460Days -14Hours -59Minutes -22Seconds

It’s one week beforeToday I start my first Paris Brest Paris Audax something I always said I would never attempt 🙂 but I succumbed and now we are in Rambouillet

 

I’m rider O195 with a start time of 19:30 on Sunday 20th August with a finish time 90 hours later on Thursday 24 August at 13:30.

You can check my progress at this link. Honey’s progress can be checked at this link she starts 30 minutes before me at 19:00.

Our progress is automatically updated at the control towns:

The times are my official closing times at each control, I can exceed one or two but the overtime has to be corrected by the next one. So my sleep is going to suffer, according to Autosleep my Sleepbank currently has over 9 hours of credit 🙂

 

Geoff’s Tour of France

Tomorrow as the Tour de France cycle race ends we depart to do our own little tour, interestingly back to the origins from which TdF was born!

Our proposed route for 2023 French tour

The first stage is from Luxembourg Airport to Pont Au Mousson to take part in the Federal Semane cycling week.

The next stage a week or so later is to ride to Rambouillet for the start of the Paris-Brest Paris Audax, the oldest cycle event in the world!  That is 1219km in 90 hours with a huge 10,618 meters of climbing spread out over the course 🙁

If we survive that then the idea is to ride to Chamonix to cheer on my son doing his second UTMB 100 mile run around Mont Blanc!

I suspect the French rail network will get involved at some point or two since all that adds up to 2,569km of riding and 21,000m of ascent!

The Paris Brest Paris (PBP) Audax

PBP Course 2023We have both qualified & received our places for our first Paris-Brest -Paris ride. We completed our 200km, 300km, 400km & 600km qualifying rides in Thailand. The 2023 PBP for me starts on Sunday 20th August at 19:30 and Honey at 19:00. We have 90 hours to ride the 1219km (757 miles) which makes my finishing time on Thursday 24th August at 13:30, although obviously, it can be sooner hahaha. Stop laughing I did the Isan 2020km ride with a few hours to spare!

June 23 StravaWe have spent June training in the UK, The PBP course is hilly with 11,750m (38,550 feet) of ascent, or roughly 1%. Checking my Strava it looks like in June I cycled 1923km and climbed 13044m which is 0.7% so getting close. However, my average moving speed was 16.6kph obviously I need to speed up a fair bit if I want to sleep on PBP.

I managed to get some sort of lurgy in the past few days which has had me shivering like crazy and non-stop peeing. But it seems to be clearing up fast now so hopefully training will resume tomorrow.

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