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Old 04-15-19, 03:52 PM
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djb
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Originally Posted by alicewithbike
Hi There

Was planning a 8-10 day tour in Greece this May but haven't been able to find a route I'm happy with so am thinking about doing Corsica or Sardinia (or both!).

Does anyone have any experience in either (or both!). I'm looking to do a 300-400 mile ride that I'll be doing solo and unassisted. Trying to avoid serious climbs as I am by no means a professional cyclist. I've plotted a few routes but unsure how exactly to read the elevation profiles (not sure what 1000m at a 6% grade looks like in real life).

Alternatively, if anyone knows a company in Italy/France that sells routes that would work too!

Thank you in advance for any help!
I've ridden a lot in mountainous terrain, and personally I enjoy it, despite the hard work and very slow average speeds.
One suggestion I have, that I learned from travelling companions, is to use google maps etc for a given days route, and generally it will show you the accumulative altitude gain in metres (Im used to meters) and this is a great way of using modern technology to get an idea of your day, and what realistically is a doable numbers of kms in a day (without killing yourself or running out of daylight etc)

given that you will be carrying camping gear, its fairly realistic to assume you'll be carrying 30, 40lbs of load (water and foodstuffs included) so the most common sense approach is to have some sort of loop in your area with climbing involved, figure out how many metres is involved, and do a bunch of loops and see how it feels to climb X meters in X kms.

there are free phone apps like "maps.me" that can plot routes and sort of give altitude gains, and you can download OSM open source maps , for countries all over the world to put into your phone or tablet so that maps.me has the maps for a given place.

maybe you have a fancy gps bike computer, or a phone app that can be on during a ride and will tell you altitude gain over a ride.

no matter how, getting a real idea yourself, with all the stuff on your bike you plan to take, will give you real world ideas of , "ok, if I'm climbing 500 meters in a day over 50kms , this is what it will feel like"

for me, I find a 1000m climbing day to be a reasonably hard day.
Its tough if you havent done much hill riding loaded, or unloaded, as a big part of climbs is having the right low gearing to make things easier for your legs and knees, and 2- the mental getting over aspect that is tough when you havent experienced it before, and can be disheartening.

the "disheartening" thing really does get helped with doing rides beforehand on hills, cuz lets face it, like I always say, "there is always another hill" and you just cant get away from it (well, not in Corsica anyway, go to Holland or Florida I guess ;-)

the main mental trick is to find a gear that works well with enough cadence to not overtax you, and just plod along, let your mind wander, and the more you do it, the better you get, like anything else.

proper low gearing and not taking too much junk is crucial though. so good luck with riding loaded , get out there and keep at it.
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