Big Bad Log

Today my original plan was to go to Nonceveux and ride the O2 route there, but when I noticed on meteox.be that it was raining I decided to stay home and try out some stuff with my Garmin Edge 705 GPS. I had made a Course file of the 2008 Belgian MTB Marathon Championship trail and decided to ride a chunk of that. First I put the .crs file on my GPS's SD card but that proved to be the wrong option. Turns out the GPS only selects Courses that are saved in its internal memory. So from the start in Pecrot, I biked back home, moved the .crs file from the SD card to the Garmins' memory and headed back to the start.
Obviously I was getting a good workout in the meantime because the area between Meerdael and Pecrot is not exactly flat.
In Pécrot I selected the 'Do Course' option on the Edge, and hey presto, I got the trail on my screen and I could start. One thing I noted was that as soon as you press the 'Do Course' option, the Edge resets all counters to zero. That is not a problem because the history files can be downloaded afterwards on your PC (or is that uploaded ?) and all is there. But its nice to know and it isn't in the manual.. just one of those things.
If you remember my entry a few days ago I was complaining about the 705 powering off during the navigation along a .gpx file. Obviously it is made to follow Courses, because today it didn't power off, and I had all the history without losing as much as a metre along the way.
My theory is that navigating along a gpx track demands too much of the units' processor, causing it to bunk and bail out by powering off...
When you follow a course it doesn't have to do any navigating, just indicating where you are on the map and keep tabs of your speed, heightmeters and other parameters. You don't get any warning before an upcoming turn, but you do get an audio and visual warning when you venture off of the Course. And when you get back on it you get a beep and a message as well. Great, looks like Courses are the way to go. Now lets ride !

So I did the first 20K of the Championship trail today. The first kilometers after that start next to the railway station in Pecrot, are on tarmac , with a long and steady climb ending in a turn to the left into what could be called a double singletrack. From there on , the track twists and turns and eventually has a very dangerous downhill dropping you into Nethen. This downhill consists of a series of washed-out gullies, with big stones and other debris making it very hard to keep the rubber side down. In Nethen, you then take some cobble and tarmac before arriving at a very steep climb , very narrow and I don't think anyone will be able to ride this. Check the picture. After that, a little singletrack takes you around the plateau before dropping you back down along a narrow track. Then there is the famous 'jungle' hollow road, which I didn't do because it is unrideable. Instead I took a little detour which I believe the organisers should take too. It consists of another hollow road going up parallel to the jungle track but with better traction and above all, no deep gullies. Then the trail moves towards Bossut before turning to the left towards the Varadero manege. Here I hit the 'End Course' button. With 20K on my lap counter I decided to call it a day. I will do the rest of the trail in the coming days.
I took a turn towards the Meerdael Forest where I had a bit of fun on my secret Meerdael trails before arriving home.

GPS track (in gpx format) of the first 20K : CLICK
Trail map of the first 20K:

Ride Stats : 61.5K and 725 heightmeters in 3h11mins

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