For reasons that I shan't elaborate on, I did the Montérégie Challenge alone this year. It started in Saint-Rémi, just South of Montreal. It was surprisingly smooth sailing from my flat to Saint-Rémi in a rented car. I guess that one person moves more smoothly that three.
The forecast had been for showers as well as wind with gusts up to 70 km/h out of the South-West. I wasn't too worried about either as I had packed rain gear to deal with the first, and the course went roughly South-West from Saint-Rémi and back, hence tail wind on the way back. The latter proved inaccurate in the particular. In fact, there was relatively little wind and only two shortish periods of light showers.
The area around St-Rémi is mostly farmland with a particular emphasis on vegetable growing. A consequence of this is a non-trivial number of Hispanic migrant workers. At one point, I saw a party of about half a dozen or so on bikes presumably heading into town to shop, use the local library, and/or have a drink or two on their weekend off. At the end of the day, as I was leaving St-Rémi, I saw a store with a sign in Spanish offering Latin American food products as well as money transfer services to Latin America. I didn't notice a sign in French!
The terrain being flat, it was easy to make good time, relatively speaking. My stats for the day were: 5 hours, 47 minutes and 24 seconds of biking in which I covered 128.35 km, for an average of 22.1 km/h, with a maximum of 42.6 km/h. Not too bad.
However, the thing is, on
Leonardo I am relatively slow for the distances I aim for in these challenges. While there are slower people in the challenges, they typically opt for shorter distances which means that for much of the time, I am one of the slower people on the road. This doesn't do my ego much good, especially as I am currently experiencing middle-age insecurities as to my fitness.
Still, as I mentioned earlier, my average speed is pretty respectful. So while I may not be the hare, I am at least a fast tortoise. ;-)
