For the long May bank holiday weekend we were due for a short break to Madeira and I decided to take my time trial bike in an effort to find some race form while enjoying the sunshine.
In the end it turned out to be a nice holiday, but one of the worst places to do any time trial training.
Firstly, the terrain is VERY HILLY. I normally don't mind hills, but there really isn't a flat bit of road in Madeira and the road either goes up or down. And the hills are steep... Generally anythigng less then 10% isn't even considered steep here. With my TT gearing I had to resolve to grinding up the gradients with a cadence that would often drop down to 50rpm and legs screaming of lactic acid. A typical 90 min ride would end up with about 1000 meters of climbing.
The road surface is bad. That's the only way to describe it. Potholes, old uneven tarmac, you name it.
I even managed to find some long stretches of "Belgian cobbles".
There is one road on the South side of the island where there road surface is new and smooth. Unfortunately the majority of this expressway seems to go through tunnels. These range from a couple of hundred meters long to 3km long, with the vast majority being over 1km long. Some have decent lighting, some are dark. One thing for sure - none of them seem safe with trucks going through them at 90km/h.
Finally, the weather. Being so close to Africa and the Canary Islands one would expect the weather to be similar, quite dry, sunny and hot. Nothing further from the truth. It rained on most days (making the roads even more tretcherous with the tarmac not being laid out for the wet conditions) and the temparature was around 16C at sea level. Given that the temparature goes down about 1C for every 100m of altitude climbed it made the mountains at 1400m feel very chilly, particularily if you add the cooling effect of the clouds typically sitting atop these mountains.
All in all it made for an environment not ideally suited to time trial training to say the least. Not surprisingly during our 5-day stay I only spotted one other cyclist on our last day and he looked as out of place as I must have looked on my TT bike.
If you're planning a trip to Madeira and are thinking of bringing your bike with you my advice would be to bring a mountain bike. Or better still, leave the bike at home and enjoy the other attractions the island has to offer.
