Sunday, September 21, 2014

Montería to Planeta Rica - a brutal ride

This was supposed to be a short day, but it was brutal.

The positive: stomach issues are gone.

I started by forgetting sunscreen and the sun was hot. Tons of clouds in the sky; just not between the sun and me. I tried applying sunscreen, but it was pretty late and I was sweating so it did not adhere real well.

The ride was mostly hills. To make it extremely difficult, there was most often very poor road at the bottom; either the road was washed out, poorly constructed or currently under construction.  This occurred probably 90 percent of the hills. This meant I had to slow down from 30mph to about 2mph right before the incline. I lost all momentum for the uphill ride and had to pedal the whole way up. It was extremely frustrating. My only positive was to assume that this would help for some of the mountains that I knew were coming.

Finally, I broke a cleat. I was able to replace it, but I did not know how to adjust the pedal. So I had to ride the rest of the way without locking in. It turns out after looking at the cleats that they were not the correct replacements for my pedal.

Given the difficulty of the ride, I decided to rest for a day in Planeta Rica. This also gave me some time to work with a shop to modify my cleats so that I could lock them into the pedals. I went to a motorcycle shop and we used a grinder to modify my replacements as well as we could. The modifications worked, but the cleats were pretty weak afterwards. I ended up making it to Medellin with just one cleat in reasonable shape.

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