Horizontal dotted line is mean across the cycling days. You can hover on each point to see information about the exact y axis value and a bit about the day.
This shows the total time from start to finish as the top point for each day and the total cycling time as the lower point.
Horizontal dotted line is mean across the cycling days.
My first reaction looking at that was that day 11 couldn’t be correct but reminding myself that it was the day that was definitely trying to belt along to be on time to meet J in Chouzé. Ah yes, looking at the previous plot I see that I hardly stopped at all. That comes back to me. Recognising that it would have been a pretty flat day and wondering if the wind was, for once, from the East all suggests to me that it may be correct. Considering the load proto-Toto was carrying that was pretty good going!
This is a bit silly as I might have hit the maximum for the day on just one short descent, but I’ll plot it anyway!
Actually that’s quite amusing. The day when I hit my fastest mean speed a, to my mind, quite impressive 23 km/h was the day I had my lowest maximum speed of 29 km/h. Which makes perfect sense as it was an almost completely flat day so no gravity assistance really at any point and as I was trying to keep a steady high (for me) speed. I am quite impressed that I hit 72.1 km/h though, when I convert it to m.p.h. it’s 44.8 which doesn’t sound so much at all. I do remember with Toto (who was Toto by then) well laden it did feel pretty nippy!
Those are the highest points of the day, not the altitude where I ended and they have surprised me. The climb up to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port was tiny, not how it felt on the day and the next day, to Zubiri took me far higher than I remember though that does make sense as I remember that the end of that day was quite a long and welcome drop out of the mountains down to Zubiri itself. Then the ups and downs in the maximum heights reached each day do make sense though they are bigger than I remember them.
Hm, again that’s a bit of a surprise, I had climbed more in ups and downs on day 1 and day 3 than I had realised/remembered and 1,463m climbing, with a fairly laden bike on day 22 was pretty good really. The day I remember that really hurt was day 31 with “only” 1,309m climbing but I am sure reason that was so hard (and I did have to get off and push one stretch) was because some of the climbs really were pretty steep, definitely more so than any other day in the entire trip.
This shows the total time from start to finish as the top point for each day and the total cycling time as the lower point.
Hm, that’s an overloaded plot showing each day’s minimum, mean and maximum temperatures.
You can see that on day 25 when the top temperature hit 43 I took on board a hard lesson and from then on I started out much earlier in the day. On at least one day I went off in near darkness and using Toto’s bike lights. Then I was also stopping at midday or soon after and perhaps having a rest somewhere and starting again if the temperature dropped enough, or just ending the day where I was if there was accommodation. The altitude on days 30 and 31 also helped bring the temperature down and at least one of those days we were up in cold damp cloud for a while and I remember changing into long cycling leggings perhaps for the first time in the entire trip and pulling on several top layers and my thin cagoule and still feeling my hands go numb with the wind chill on the descents. Hm, yes that minimum of 8°C on day 32 isn’t roasting is it?!