7 Peaks - Falls Creek (2/7)

Over the weekend of 7 - 8th November, my friend Dale and I decided that it would be a great time to head to the hills and do some training/tick off some of the 7 Peaks Challenge climbs.

I had already done Harrietville - Hotham as the first of the 7 Peaks during the Bright Training camp with Bayside Tri Club about 3 weeks ago.

So we drove into Porepunkah on the Friday night and stayed at one of Dale's family friends house. On the first night, I realised that I also know Dave as he trained under Tri Alliance at one point and we both did the 2013 Melbourne Ironman.

The plan for the first day was to tackle either side of Falls Creek - 3 Peaks side or the 7 Peaks side, back or front respectively. During the Alpine Classic weekend, I will be doing the Falls Creek route which is Bright - Towonga Gap - Falls Creek return (130km with 3 climbs). We decided that this route (inc the ride from Porepunkah would be too much for us to handle at this stage of training so we decided to start at Mount Beauty and ride up to Falls (7 Peaks Stamp) and back. This ride would be approx 60km and I estimated that it would take me sometime between 4 - 5 hours to complete based on my 3 hour climb up Mt Hotham time.

We left the house at 7am and was ready for the ride at 8am at Mount Beauty. I started without a gilet or arm warmers as I knew that I would warm up quick. The ride along passed Bogong was quite manageable and I was able to keep my cadence 60-70rpm. There were a few rolling hills and so it gave me some time to recover the legs. Then the last 6km of the climb was a steady which I did feel harder and my cadence dropped to < 50rpm at some points. I felt the climbs were still not as hard as Hotham or Donna Buang.

It took me close to 2:40 to climb Falls Creek which was a surprise for me as I thought it would take closer to 3. The stamp was actually within Foodworks and I also bought an apple juice (instead of a coke). I took a few photos and then it was down I go.

Stamp #2

Valerie (the bike) at the finish point 

Wearing my Warsaw cycling kit

I will never say that I am 100% confident about the descent but I am getting more comfortable the more I do it including left and right hand turns. Luckily there were no crazy cross winds which helped. The descent took me about an hour.

My heart rate analysis - very high!

The whole ride took me under 4 hours to complete which was less than the 5-6 hours of training I had planned for the day but I guess we did plan on doing more climbing the next day and from what I was told, Buffalo is also a harder climb overall compared to the Falls Creek climb.

As this was my 2nd of the 7 Peaks climb, I would rate it as easier than Mt Hotham so my current rank of the 7 peaks climb looks something like this (hardest to easiest):

1) Mt Hotham
2) Falls Creek