We woke up at 8, my knee is still hurting, i hope it will be ok today. We discover that breakfast is included with the hotel (great because the room was too expensive).
We start with good rythme, and I push apollon so that we keep a good pace on the easiest stint of the day. We take few 7 min breaks but keep going until 12h00 for a 20 min, we then push again for 1 hour to be right before objective lunch.
At lunch, we take a long break. The rest of the day will be tough, still 1100m to climb, and 3h30 hours to go.
What’s weird of about travelling on a bikecycle, is that your standards are lowered for everything, this is true also for many other sorts of travelling. Eating a weird lunch (4 day old bread and dried food) next to the highway, sitting on the ground, in a sort of clean place, but for some reasons life is great, and quite enjoyable, the food is somewhat good.
Time to go again, now the hard part begins, but we put our heads down and keep going. It is really hard, but you just look down and keep going. Pedalling uphill for this long is very mentally, we are going between 8kmh and 10kmh, and the legs and lungs can’t recover so they just burn. To keep going, you have to get in a meditative state, forget that pain exist, forget time too. And we finally make it, you then feel unbreakable, and high on climbing. The climb lasted for almost 2h40, we are glad it is over.
When you are at the bottom of the hill, my first thought is that we will never make it, especially during the first 10 minutes which feel like eternity, and once you are done, you almost feel like doing it again. The brain is weird, and bad at knowing what we can achieve if we stop listening to it.
We made it to the top ! The way down was pure ecstasy, 40kmh while not pedaling, no effort, a smooth road, and so so long. We then have a “small” hill to end the day. We then look for a restaurant and proceed to eat a very fat meal.
Life is good. Enjoy it