SankarAthlete: Tour of Nilgris 2013 !!

Day 3- Ooty-->Kunda-->Ooty

Start

with expected shorter distance for the day, we were all excited to start the day and that too little late at around 8:30 AM, we had now the third color in jersey, which is the orange jersey, won by the king and queen of kalhatty, who rode in the best possible time up the hill. We were happy for the first part of the ride this day, since it was all downhill, but the other way round back was quite a climb where we also had the competitive section.

Support Station 1 (SS1)

With all the scenic views in the way and quite a few technical downhills to go, all were happy enough to have such a scene after an horrendous climb up kalhatty the day before. At the end of downhills we reach the support station1, which was few kms away from the CS start section. This the point we noticed our barefoot hero Mr Taner from australia. His road bike had some problems with the hanger, and he had no option to other than use the Montra MTB trial bike provided by the Montra folks. The fun part was that it was decided at the last minute before start, hence he casually decided to ride the bike barefoot, but had a pair of sandals just in case it feels hard, but the sandals gave way, leading him to ride barefoot all day even up the hills with metal pedals :)

Competitive Section Start

This is the tricky part of the day, which has quite a good gradual up climb with some recovery sections in between. I considered it crucial just for the reason that I realized that the school kid from aroohi team was ahead of me by 30 seconds and the queen of kalhatti linda was 1 minute ahead per General Classification standings. The only motivation that day to keep pushing hard was to get past Rakesh the aroohi guy, pushed myself as hard as I could to the extent that I was almost about to throw up after the end of the race, yielding close good results of 30:34 or so in the cs. Was pretty much satisfied with my result, I couldn’t have done much more with my bike and my state of mind on that day.

Support Station 2(SS2)

After speaking to few of the elite riders about their time, I realized that my time was a decent one, joined those folks to start going towards the next support station eagerly awaiting for the lunch. We had quite a few climbs to make, had good spots to get a panoramic picture of spots, photographers of the tour Deepti, helped us with couple of snaps with a scenic background. Soon we reached the support station 2, to find bigger lunch boxes, only to realize that it had good enough healthy lunch with some sprouted greens, pasta and fresh veggies, with a gulab jamun in it. Had a nice lunch, waited a bit to see the brits take away from the station. After a few minutes we started to roll on, since it was potentially only another 9 km to go, yet there was the hill climb to the hotel awaiting for us.

Day end Ooty

On way from support station 2 to the hotel, christen found that his cabling had some issues and wasn’t able to shift gears rightly, bjorn helped him out in some fashion and he ended up with a small wooden branch helping him hold the cables at a particular gear :), we rolled on to reach the hotel well in time to enjoy our evening cup of tea