85km and crash

As usual I was going out early in the morning for my long ride. Today the plan was to ride from Vågsbotn, over Gullbotn to Os and back to Vågsbotn together with Terje.

The ride is 108km and the plan was for us to do most of the ride in pulse zone 1. I knew I would go into zone 3 in the climbs in order to try to keep a good average speed for the ride. However, I forgot to put on the HR strap before leaving home so I do not have a record of HR for the ride :(

Starting out it was quite cold. Temperature showed 1 degree Celsius in the car just before we started out from Vågsbotn at 06:15 and I did not really get warm until we started the climb up to Gullbotn. As we got to the top the sun was finally starting to warm two cold riders :).

The climb up Gullboten went well and we did it at an average speed of 7.8 kph which was ok for the purpose of the ride. I hope to go a bit quicker when we get to Bergen - Voss in June and hopefully the Tuesday sessions climbing Gullbotten 2-3 times will help :).

As we started the decent down towards Samnager and the junction where we would take off towards Rolvsvåg and Os, I heard a bad ticking noise from my rear wheel. We stopped and I found that one of the spokes had broken. Bending it back and forth for a while, I managed to remove the broken spoke. However, as we continued I was a bit more careful in the descents because I was worried that my back wheel would collapse.

At the beautiful seaside at Os

Going through Rolvsvåg was fantastic, the sun was up and there was hardly any wind to speak of.
We kept a nice and steady pace until we got to the climb up Hegglandalsvegen. The climb was harder then I thought it would be and I also started out to hard. I am glad Terje told me to calm down and go a bit slower as he had climbed this part the previous Sunday and knew how long it was.

We stopped at Os for 5 - 10 minutes, where Terje took a nice picture of me at the seaside, before continuing towards Nesttun climbing over Vallaheiane.

Rear tire in bad shape after the crash :(

As I was crossing the old rail-rode a car was taking more then his share of the road forcing me to take a shortcut and by doing so hitting a hole hard with my rear tire, causing me to crash. I as the picture shows my back tire was in a bad shape and it was not possible for me to continue.

As Terje was slightly ahead of me he missed my crash and called me after 4-5 minutes as he did not see me following him anymore. When he heard what happened he offered to come back to pick me up after finishing the ride back at Vågsbotn, which was very nice of him considering he still had 20km back to the car! As Janicke was home alone with 4 kids she was not able to pick me up so I ended up sitting at the side of the road for about 75 minutes until Terje picked me up. Thank you for coming back!!

Hopefully it will be possible to get my rear tire fixed or changed and I need to contact  Sykkelsenteret tomorrow to get it done.

Despite the crash shortening the ride it was at least good to get 85km and the longest ride of the season :)

Statistics of the ride can be seen here at Strava