Just keep telling yourself that one of these days it’s going to start getting easier. The average ascent has crept up relentlessly of late. When you crossed the border from Latvia into Russia, it was five hundred feet of climbing per stage: now that average is over six hundred. In just sixty nine stages, you’ve managed to add over a hundred feet of climbing a stage to the average. But you’re not out of the woods yet because stage 136 comes in at 633ft.
There’s a certain irony about this stage because if you look at the geographical perspective of the route, it would look really scary if that was the elevation profile. Well actually it’s not that far off.
The rollout kicks off uphill straight out of the pen so a decent warmup is advised. Then you’re downhill from two miles to four miles in order to cross the Bol’shaya Kalinovka river. After that you’re into the forest and climbing: it’s short and steep before a lumpy wee descent precedes another sharp uptick to the junction where a side road heads off to Okhovskoye, running pretty much parallel to the E22 highway.
There’s a tremendous wee descent down to the Pyshma river at ten miles: it’s short, fast and furious. That’s the signal to start a five mile ascent that tops out just after the gentle right hander at Koksharoskiy at fifteen miles. The rest of the stage is really just a big detour around the northern side of Okhovskoye, Kamyshlov and Zarechenskoye.
That five mile climb is followed by a dissimilar five mile descent in which you only lose half the ascent that you’ve gained. That takes you round the right hander at the junction to Galkinskoye and it’s at that point that you’ll be hoping that you brought your climbing legs with you. The miles from twenty to twenty two ascend to the highest elevation of the stage before dropping back down steeply to the finishing line: that comes where the road out of Kamyshlov on its eastern side meets back up with the E22 heading towards Tyumen.
Distance: 25 miles / 40 kilometres
Ascent: 627 feet / 191 metres
RGT Magic Road: 7abejdasEi3J
Max elevation: 1277 ft
Min elevation: 1047 ft
Total climbing: 623 ft
Total descent: -580 ft
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