We Conquered Nuvali-Tagaytay Ride 🚴🏁

April 02, 2015

We Conquered Nuvali-Tagaytay Ride 🚴🏁

There's no better way to get in the right state of mind than connecting with nature. [Source: Tweet from Novak Djokovic]

I had a nice cycling ride today with my bike buddies, this time we're trying out Nuvali-Tagaytay route, something new to us than going around the usual city-bike from Manila. We drove from Manila to Nuvali and parked our car just across Seda Nuvali which marked as our starting point. Our biggest challenge was the 1st 7km uphill slope, where the group nearly gave up and took me quite some convincing power to push with our planned goal of climbing up Tagaytay, with the one who underestimated the activity and also had doubts for our preparation prior to our ride (didn't accept the challenge for reaching the top, took the tricycle and top-loaded his bike), and the other buddy who took up the challenge so we went on, otherwise I'll be giving up for climbing up alone 😊

One strange thing is that I tried swapping my Foldie (folding bike) with my buddy's MTB only to find out that there's something wrong with his bike. My Foldie can overtake his MTB with ease and less effort, though we checked his tire pressure at 50 PSI, it should be fine. So my friend decided to swap with our buddy who top-loaded his bike only then he felt that our ride went smoother and lesser effort to riding upward slope. After our 7th km of biking, there, we pushed ourselves to the limit, took several stops to hydrate and rest a bit, literally my mouth and throat dries up for gasping air for exerting too much effort to climb uphill.

Upon reaching our 13th km, we saw our buddy who took the tricycle having his break, so we stopped by and had my coco juice and the other 2 buddies had quick snack to gain some energy lost along the 13km road. We then ride farther and reached Tagaytay for 3 hours at around 17km with total ascent of roughly 588m. My thigh almost cramped up but managed to rest and did some stretching along Calamba road, perhaps need more practice! There we took selfie of the breathtaking view of Taal volcano and we could say, 2 of us could say rather, "we conquered Nuvali-Tagaytay ride!"

We went 2km downhill, to eat lunch at Loumars and took our time to chill. After all the uphill ride we went through, going downhill was such a breeze, the semi cold wind brushing your face was pretty much relaxing, the result of time spent going downhill bothered us a bit, it took us roughly around 30-40mins to reach endpoint (no sweat!) with total distance of 34km back and forth. However, the uphill ride will be charged to experience, we can say we leveled up from our typical city road biking, a new milestone indeed. Another good thing to note upon meeting co-bikers along the way is that they nod at you probably acknowledging the same passion you have for biking 👍

At the parking area...