Photos from our recent cycling in Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Slovakia

I want one of these!

Quite pleasing outward speed but I’ve gone faster down the hill from Quality Street junction to Cramond (32mph) and I’ve never yet maintained over 10mph up that hill. One of these days….

It’s back!

Twas bad
My first two spins after returning from holiday were, er, not enjoyed. The bikes, the exercises, the music were all fine – Andy dropped in the William Tell overture for jumps and climbs and The Orb’s Little fluffy clouds – a brilliant track as far as I’m concerned! But I was just plodding along, slowly going through the motions, with hardly enough energy to turn the pedals. I guess that during our holiday I’d got used to slow, long cycles, rather than spinning’s breakneck surges and intense climbs. But I don’t truly believe it’s the explanation. Maybe I was just on a post-holiday down.

Getting better
Then came Sunday, and the Tour de Forth. When we finished I was quite high – flapping around full of mental energy, even though parts of my body felt as though they’d worked.

By the way, here’s some photos:

On Monday, spinning felt much better. My legs had better ideas of what they were supposed to do. No stratospheric feelings, no mental mayhem but just gentle enjoyment and reawakened belief that I could get good feelings from this sweaty madness.

It’s back!
And then tonight it was back! My legs worked fairly well (I still can’t run at any speed out of the saddle), the music was fun and full-on (including Hell’s Bells and the William Tell overture for the final set of sprints and surges), the bike was just right – plenty of turn between recovery and ‘pedals-won’t move’, with the balance between resistance and cadence working for me and by the end I was up there. Not the most stratospheric I’ve been after spinning but up, happy and enjoying it!

This is why I spin – why I’ll drag myself out in the evenings, even if the rain and snow are hammering down, even if I have far too much MSc or freelance work to do, why I’ll sweat my bits off in small room full of humidity and noise, why I’m happy to deal with dripping kit and squelchy shorts night after night. More often than not it’s just fun, and there’s always the chance of something cosmic.

Of course there are other reasons – it’s good for me, it allows me to hope (or should that be ‘pretend’?) that one day I’ll be more than a commuter-cyclist, it’s safe cycling to music, it’s an excuse to wear the brightest lycra I can find and of course the Lifescycle folk are caring, encouraging, professional but fun people to be around. The attention they pay to new spinners, and to the rest of us, comes not simply from ‘hey, we’ll keep this customer if he or she has a good experience’ but because they’re genuinely enthusiastic about people. But I have to acknowledge that I’m a selfish bugger and that I just enjoy the whole deal. Thank you in large lumps to all the Lifescycle crowd!

We’re just back from this.

I think there were about 8 Lifescyclers doing this ‘classic’ version and I caught site of at least one Lifescycler who could eat the sportive version (same distance, but going at it harder, aiming for a time) for breakfast.

There was sunshine, some headwind, occasional cooling breezes – this one was fun!

Thanks to Ian and Jane for coming to meet us and encourage us at Culross. Congratulations to all who took part – especially those who were getting used to new bikes*.

Thank you, as ever, to Lifescycle for getting me fit enough to do this. And public congratulations to Elly on completing her first non PedalForScotland cycling event!

So just two questions

• Could I have done another 35 miles? (I want to do a 100-mile event.)
• Sportive next year – on my beloved touring bike? Yes sir!

Mapping
I mapped the ride in two parts because I thought my main phone was about to give out, and I didn’t bring the portable battery.

*It can take a couple of months to get a bike set up just right. For several months I thought I’d bought the wrong bike and wished Lev would be stolen, so I could get insurance money to buy something different. Now I wouldn’t swap him for any other piece of kit. He just takes me where I want to go!)

Right, time to soak some gently throbbing particles….

UPDATE
Results are here. Not sure I understand them. (Chip time = 6:18:23, which is pretty near to the sum of cyclemeter’s sum of ride and stopped times [6:28:23]. Gun time = 6:55:26])

Photos are here (Facebook)

77 miles today.

this morning was quite hard. Lots of roadents going in both directions: the older male roadies were all mustachioed and mulleted as if they had retired from 80s German porn.

We obeyed a ‘radweg closed’ sign and so found ourselves a bit lost in a wee village called Asten. I think the closure was a relic of the floods 6 weeks or so ago.

I was quite wobbly for a few minutes: some glucose and my last vegan chocolate bar fixed that for the moment. Drinks-break in Enns (organic Darjeeling and coffee) helped a lot too.

Then we pushed on past Wallsee, looking for lunch – yet more salad and bread for me and Elly’s first Schinkenkäsetoast (ham and cheese on toast) of this trip. We couldn’t refill our camels with tap-water here: the recent floods had contaminated the water supply. A bloke sat at our table described how the floods had covered all the farmland for miles around.

Lunch really rejuvenated me, as if I’d not cycled at all yesterday! I have to recommend the wee ice-cream shop in Enns: vegan Marillen (apricot) ice cream just can’t be beaten. Or was it simply the heat?

And so on to Melk. By now the headwind had died down and the evening was starting to cool. Bet was very welcome, but after the rich dark Czech and German brews, ‘lager’ is losing appeal.

Again this sounds like moaning but we’ve cycled through some beautiful countryside (I need a helmet-mounted video camera!) and I’m quietly proud of this amount of cycling.

And today I abandoned the base-layer and padded tights. My nether regions will take a while to forgive me.

For some of this to make sense, you might need to read Elly’s and my Facebook pages. Here’s the map.

Bit spaced just now. Elly’s post mentions the drop into Linz. Usually I enjoy them – the reward for toiling up the hill in the first place! But this one had me slightly concerned: would our brake-pads last? Would I keep concentration? I was also freaked by how closely some cars passed Elly. I think the lack of en-route photography is understandable!

I’d like to do it again, on a road bike to see what speed I could achieve. I was holding back quite a lot, mostly to stay behind Elly but partly because my luggage made Lev feel slightly top-heavy. Still, if Cyclemeter is to be believed, earlier today for a moment I was going downhill at 46mph. It would have been on a descent before Vyšší Brod. There was a crazy descent along a forested road to the Vltava: it was even marked as dangerous!

But enough of the negatives because they are minor. The major things today were cycling on beautiful tarmac though stunning countryside with my better half, Lev Davidovitch and Fidel taking on cobbles and loose gravel – and winning! – their seeing others enjoying the river, getting back on track, fab weather, passion fruit sorbet in Zwettl an der Rodl, seeing roadents going **up** our fearsome descent, the feeling of slight burn in my feet, meeting a roadent who had cycled from Vienna to Linz (220 km = 140 miles) today as part of a trip to the source of the Danube, and tonight’s dinner!

Never has tea with soya milk, a beer (Edelweiss Hefeweizen), Petersiliekartoffeln) boiled potatoes with parsley and a mixed salad been so enjoyed. The salad even had thin strips of pickled beet root, some kidney beans and a few Essiggürken (gherkins). Now I know I’m in Austria!

Not sure what we’ll do tomorrow. We know we could reach Vienna: the route is just about flat and we have a good guide-map from last year. (The route strays away from the river quite a lot.) But the last few hours would be just grind, so we’ll set out and see where we get to. Watch this space!

It’s 8:57. In a compartment on the 9:15 from Prague to Linz. We’re going as far as Olbramovice – just 2 stops. The seat numbers on one side are
22, 28, 24, 26. On the other side they are
21, 23, 27, 25.
Duh?
Slightly perplexed. I thought we’d bought bike spaces yesterday but we were still charged 60kr (£2) to put the bikes on the train just now. We have a receipt for this so I guess we just made reservations yesterday.

With some help from Google translate, this is confirmed. We bought yesterday merely a mistenka (reservation).

Train v full. Our compartment has us, 2 older bikies, a local woman and 3 primary-aged boys.

Boiling hot outside. I wonder what the it will be like later when we’re cycling. I might have to abandon the base layer. Can the Czech republic cope with my peely-waily arms?

This morning in Dečin
Knee-pain is a good thing when it leads to pleasant mornings like this. A visit to Dečin’s synagogue was enhanced by meeting the bloke (Vladimir Poskoliče) behind its restoration. He has 3 gold medals in javelin! Very chatty in broken German and so friendly and full of energy at 80. The altar painting is of the sun, which shines on and for everyone. Exhibition (in Czech) about Reinhard Heydrich had me choking – not really a surprise.

On his recommendation (Vladimir’s, not Heydrich’s!) we walked up a hill to some fine views of Dečin. I’ll post a photo or two later.

Then back to the hotel to collect bikes and on to the fortunately nearby station. Not too much trouble to buy tickets for us and bikes. (This explains what  to do to get a bike on a Czech train). Just now chilling in the outside bit of the station cafe over tea and water…

This evening in Prague
So we’re in hotel Aida, in a north-eastern suburb 4 stops up metro line C from Praha hlavni nadrazi (main station). Plans have changed a lot! Our first thought was to get a train to near the border with Austria, as near as possible to Linz, then cycle to Linz and then do the Donauradweg (Danube cycle path) to Vienna.

Most options were ruled out because south-bound trains with bike spaces were rare and south-bound trains with uncooked bike spaces were non-existent. It turns out there are train works between Olbramovice and Tabor, so replacement bus services are the order of the day. I’m amazed the buses can carry any bikes at all!

So our plan, with thanks to a very helpful lady in the ticket office is to take a 09:15 train to Olbramovice tomorrow morning, arriving around 10am, then cycle 39 km to Tabor. Then we have a train to Ceske Budejovice at 18:54. Even I shouldn’t need 9 hours to cycle 25 miles, especially now my knee has a support that has taken away all the pain!

Deciding and redeciding what to do, along with buying a knee support in the station pharmacy, took about 2 hours. So food was required! Fortunately only 14 minutes’ walk from the main station is Radost FX, a vegetarian/vegan eatery and nightclub. I’ve just had a tofu burger, which goes excellently with Budweiser Budvar Tmavy ležák (dark Bud), while Elly had had an African-style tofu and peanut stew over couscous and an orange and banana smoothie. Yum!

And now cheesecake! All the while Barry White and the Love Orchestra have been serenading us. And not a single Orc in sight!

As for after Ceske Budejovice, who knows? I’d like to cycle across the Czech/Austrian border and Elly would like to cycle some of the Donauradweg. But neither of us are sold on cycling all the way from Ceske Budejovice to the border so there may be more train. More as and when…

Elly puts it much better
Adventures on Czech railways today. Bit of sightseeing in Dečin this morning, including meeting Vladimir (photo) who showed us round the very moving reconstructed synagogue – and also showed us the medals he had won in international javelin competitions. Then to Prague by old-fashioned corridor train with bikes in the luggage van, which was easy enough once we worked it out. Prague metro with bikes interesting but probably less stressful than cycling through rush hour traffic over tramlines and cobbles. This evening’s entertainment involved a pantomime in the chemist’s shop since we can’t say ‘please’ in Czech, let alone ‘knee’ or ‘support’. In spite of this, Bruce now has leg assistance. We then tried to book rail tickets for tomorrow to get us somewhere close to the Czech border so we could carry on to Vienna in easier stages, but no luck. The words ‘rail replacement bus service’ seem to spread chaos in any language. Thanks to the sterling efforts of a very enterprising assistant in the main railway ticket office, we are going by train tomorrow morning to Olbramovice and we will see how Bruce’s knee holds up after 20 miles or so by bike to Tabor. Another train booked to take us on to Ceske Budejovice tomorrow evening and then we will have to work out a new plan from there.