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Well done. Glad you survived and that the bike was a success.
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Recce ride, looking down on Geiranger from the Hotel corner:
Stopping briefly at the waterfall to take the obligatory "bike in front of view" shot:
Recce ride, in the first valley heading toward Dalsnibba:
Recce ride, looking back down the first valley:
Bike fettled, race number on, time to hydrate before bed:
The closest our little cabin came to nightfall:
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good write up, well done to team lfgss
dancing james
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5awyr
TTM
Chalfie
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About
Dalsnibba 2014
Posted by
@Dammit
TL:DR WARNING - it was tough but beautiful.
This was to be the second year that Lee, Dan and I had tackled the Dalsnibba Duathlon. We were accompanied by my girlfriend and Matt of Talbot Frameworks. Matt and I had created a bike (or, more precisely, bikes) with this event in mind - and in order that they arrived unscathed by some baggage handling mishap Matt was driving all the way over from London with the bikes in the back.
Dan, the Mrs and I flew into Oslo on Friday, went through check-in for our connecting flight and went to the nearest restaurant to find some lunch. This, I should have remembered from last time, was going to be a shock- the poor chap behind the till practically had to drag the second 200 Kroner note out of my hand, so flummoxed was I by the £45 he’d asked me for in exchange for two plates of cod and potatoes (Bacalau). This is Norway, my friend, as Dale might once have said.
Sadly the trip was about to get more expensive - we’d all downloaded the Norwegian Travel Assistant App in order to have our electronic boarding pass, and this handy program featured a countdown to your flights departure- we’d noticed how accurate it was on the first leg of our trip from Gatwick to Oslo. Therefore as we sat around eating we kept checking our phones to make sure we didn’t have to rush off, marvelling at how great technology was. At one point Dan went to get a round of coffee’s, still with roughly an hour until our flight- or so we thought. However, and to our consternation on his way back to the table he spotted the departures board - our gate had closed. It turned out that the app hadn’t updated to the local time, despite the handset having done so- therefore it was running an hour behind reality.
There was nothing for it but to purchase new tickets for the Oslo - Alesund leg of the journey, which SAS was happy to furnish us with for ~32 Bacalau.
Arriving in Alesund late we were still met by a cheerful Lee, who waived off our apologies whilst laughing at our misfortune, but in a nice way. A short journey in the car later, enlivened by amazing scenery and randy cows mounting each other in the middle of the road we were at our cabin on the shore of the Fjord. After stowing our gear we headed into town and had a typical Norwegian meal - “all kinds of meat pizza” whilst watching the big boats passing each other against the backdrop of the encircling mountains, rising straight from the water to tower above us. We realised at this point that it was getting on for midnight- the bright sunshine made this easy to forget, but I could have been mistaken for a flip-top bin at this point so frequent were my huge yawns.
The next day Matt was arriving with the bikes so we headed over to Eidstal to get some supplies whilst we waited for him, stocking up on food, drink, and, somewhat randomly, knitting yarn (which turned out to be the only thing in the whole of Norway that was cheaper than its equivalent in the UK). Lee of course had his bike with him as he lived in Norway, so he headed off to work the kinks out of his legs by ascending Ornevegen. Dan and I lacked bikes at this point so we ran into Geiranger and up the initial part of the ascent, turning back once we’d reached the Fjord Centre. This was a considerable boost to my confidence as whilst I’d done a fair amount of running earlier in the year I’d done basically none bar a disastrous race rehearsal the previous weekend, which saw me stuttering to a stop with legs that wouldn’t obey me any longer.
Shortly after Dan and I returned to the cabin Matt rolled into Geiranger with his father in law riding shotgun, and all of our bikes in the boot of his car. Another advantage of this over air-freighting them was that they only needed the front wheel installing and they were ready to go. Matt stayed behind to pitch his tent as Lee, ‘er-indoors, Dan and I went off to ride the first section of Dalsnibba. This proved that a) mountains are steep and b) it was HOT and c) the bikes worked. Reassured, we got our kit ready for the next days early start, then hit the sack.
I was up early the next morning, running on nerves until the coffee machine was ready, making sure that I ate despite it being the last thing I wanted to do. We rolled up to the start with 15 minutes to go, 39 of us with a sufficiently developed personality disorder that we had decided to do “the double”, two ascents of the local peak, 1,500 metres above the surface of the fjord that washed gently at the shore to our right. The base of operations for the organisers was the local fire station, standing on the roof of which was a local with his hunting rifle - no effete klaxon here, it was a Moose stopping round fired into the scenery that sent us on our way.
I at once proved that I was an idiot by going out way too hard, whereas Lee and Dan hung back and paced themselves- this was to prove a canny move on their part. The climb up through the town was steep, tight switchbacks with little in the way of respite from the 9% incline. I span along, thinking that the day was already far hotter than it had been at this time last year. Soon enough we rose over the lip of the first valley, and whilst the road still went up it was much gentler - big ring time and in the drops. One thing that was already making me concerned was that I was down on last year - power output, heart rate, and time.
No matter- I pushed on, the valley now behind me and the second steep pitch causing a return to the inner ring. I’d been passing people up until this point, but now the distance between myself and a couple of chaps I’d passed earlier stabilised and started to come down ever so slowly - and there was nothing I could do about it. As we neared the end of the second pitch I saw Lee, climbing steadily behind me, rising every couple of minutes to pump away out of the saddle. He was going to catch me, I knew, and I didn’t have anything to answer him with.
Sure enough he came past me as we rose out of the tree line, the second valley now opening out around us, the meadow and pine of the previous flat section replaced with granite and snow. Whilst I couldn’t catch Lee I managed to keep him in sight, every now and again I found some energy from somewhere and closed the gap a little, but it always came back. Soon we came to the glacial lake, signalling that the final five km was about to start - and that the final 10% pitch was here, and going to hurt. This had been resurfaced since last year when it was clay and gravel, the new tarmac meant that getting out of the saddle wasn’t instantly rewarded with wheelspin - this was handy as all I had left was “out of the saddle and push”. We inched up the switchbacks and Lee finally crept out of view- he was to cross the finish line five or so minutes ahead of me, or as he put it when I met him next “I’ve been here at least half an hour”.
Last year I’d not taken advantage of the bag transfer, and had therefore pretty much ricoched from safety barrier to cliff face on the descent, so cold I could barely control the bike. This time I had leg warmers, a jacket and full-fingered gloves. Come at me descent! It had taken me one hour and forty minutes to climb the thirteen and a bit miles to the peak of Dalsnibba - 25 minutes later I was back at the start line.
The run was due to start at half eleven and the day was getting hotter and hotter, I discarded most of what I’d been planning on wearing and only kept my jersey on in order to have pockets for gels. Once more the local Moose hunter scared the wildlife, and we were off- Dan, Lee and I were back together again and we chatted as we went up through the town. Unbeknownst to me I was now deep in the process of creating the sort of two-day hangover that was a fairly regular feature of my life up to 2010, but hadn’t featured since I’d stopped drinking. It was hot, and getting hotter, Dan stripped off his shirt and shortly after started to fall back. Lee and I carried on together, until we started drifting slowly apart on the start of the second pitch, this time I was the one creeping slowly into the lead but it was really costing me to keep going.
I soon discovered that I am so ridiculously vain that I would allow myself to slow to a fast walk when Lee, or one of the organisers couldn’t see me, but as soon as they could I forced myself into a shuffling run again. This meant that I ended up in a sort of “run for a minute, walk for a minute’ rhythm, which saw me keep pace with the same two chaps for the next five km (they were both masters of the shuffle-run, I couldn’t run that slowly, but neither could I walk that fast). Coming though the second valley my feet started to try to get my attention - later, when I got my shoes off I discovered that I’d peeled back one nail and folded the other in half on the index toes of each foot. At the time I ignored them, but by this point my rhythm had changed to “run for 30 seconds, walk for 2”, whatever- it saw me up the final 5k and I crossed the line, totally fucked, in two hours and fifty minutes.
I staggered over the line, at which point a young lady dived at my foot- I had literally no idea why, and stood there in total bemusement until I realised that she was, very obligingly, removing the timing chip from my ankle- I imagine that the large number of zombies such as myself had a tendency to forget to remove them, or (not to put to fine a point on it) what our names were, what we were meant to do next etc etc. I settled on trying to eat my own body weight in the worlds driest biscuits, then took a very grim-faced selfie whilst waiting for the bus back to the start.
Out of the 39 who’d done the double with me I’d come in 27th, and I’d turned myself pretty much inside out to do it- there’s a lesson in humility in there somewhere. That said, and as I type this sat on the flight back to Gatwick, there’s not a doubt in my mind that I’ll be back next year, and the year after that.