#mallorca2025

[gabriellademonaco]

Queen Letizia’s Outfits 2025

[gabriellademonaco]

Queen Letizia’s Outfits 2025

[raiding]

I'd like to keep these posts going, as a training diary (tagged "2025 training"), since it helps me understand how things are going. Here's week one. I've completed all the sessions as planned, slightly exceeding targets for duration and TSS.

I've increased the intensity of this week's rides by between 2% and 5%, to lean into continuing that process. The small gold cup on Saturday's ride ("Avalanche") indicates that I set a new power record compared to this time last year: it was at just over 30m.

Good news: the AI worked out my FTP had increased by 3.2%, largely probably as a result of Mallorca's riding. On the other term in the PWR equation, I've lost 0.7 kg in weight this week (ahead of my target), so I've given both numbers a good first shove in the right directions.

My Garmin still rates this as productive training. I've worked out what it means: when I work hard, it's productive if my VO2max increases (as estimated by the Garmin). If that's not what's happening, it'll tell me to back off and recover. The screenshot above is from TrainerRoad, which also keeps an eye on how much I'm doing. It warned me not to be too intense on Monday and Sunday, after hard rides the previous days, and I paid attention.

Today (Sunday) was meant to be an outdoor endurance ride, but my Ultrarandonneur bike is at the workshop being serviced. Skinnymalinky has been rebuilt, awakened, and set in the turbo trainer, which is running much smoother now that I've got the right cassette in it (d'oh). I did a 45m indoor endurance ride, which probably equates to twice that time outdoors (where, half the time, you're not pedalling).

So far, so good.

[raiding]

I thought I might do some souvenir shopping (to add to the smoked almonds in my bag) but my timing was wrong, and the shops were shutting. That included the place I got inspiration for my second ever carved spoon, but they had an inspiring set of salad servers in the window. Walking back to the hotel, I admired the flora and fauna of the streets, but I didn't manage to get a picture of the Saturday-evening Mallorquin wearing a beret and riding a sit-up-and-beg bike with one hand, while carrying in the other an enormous oiled steel paella pan. He turned down a side-street, too quick for me to catch him.

[raiding]

Having recovered a bit, I set out to return Gary's bike, and then tackle the one climb for which I couldn't use it: the 365 Calvary steps. I counted 412. I worked out on the way down that they start a couple of flights up from the square, not at the square itself.

Also on the way down, I stopped at a favourite shop, Sol y Tierra, where they sell wonderful spiced salts, smoked almonds, flavoured gins, and the like. It's run by a German woman, and I waited while she helped a German customer. When she turned to me, I said "Hallo," and she said "Sie spechen Deutsch?" I confessed that things would go better for me in English, but she complimented me on my pronunciation of "Hallo." It's a start.

I wandered on, enjoying peering at and into the buildings. I liked the exposed modern steelwork skeleton, and the neatly made louvred hatch hiding some earlier piece of modernisation. I have no idea why there is an "Economic Figure Street" in Pollença. Neither does the internet, so it remains a mystery. Perhaps Rachel Reeves has a holiday home there. Or maybe it is prone to subsidence, or the house numbers go up every year by the higher of CPI and average earnings.

[raiding]

I made my slowest ever descent of the Coll de Femania, which was partly prudence (the rain, though slight, might have made the roads slippy) but partly also because I stopped to take a picture of the entrance to the vineyards that supplied my wine of earlier in the week. The hillsides nearby seem to be more stone than earth: it's a wonder that vines will grow.

[raiding]

The coffee is good at the Santuari de Lluc, and they have serious battery of machines with which to make it. I eschewed the various cakes, for I am saving my calories for dinner tonight, and instead had a double espresso with a little sugar to fuel me home.

Lluc is an odd sort of place. It is a monastery, founded here to mark the spot where an Arab shepherd boy found a statue of the Madonna (it is said) in the 13th century. It is also famous for its boys' choir, Els Bluets (for their blue vestments), founded in 1531.

It is the main site of pilgrimage in Mallorca, whose patron saint is the Madonna of Lluc. Every year in August, pilgrims walk here through the night from Palma (about 25 miles away). The shop opposite the cafe is mostly devoted to souvenirs for pilgrims. A working lifetime of being in meetings where decisions (sometimes) got made leads me to wonder what kind of a meeting resulted in a decision to make Madonna of Lluc cookie-cutters. Clearly, however, pilgrims buy them.

Today, the Santuari was the scene of a demonstration by the Mallorcan mountain rescue team of how to lower a casualty to safety. Many of those attending were firefighters, who came in their vehicles. These are marked "Bombers de Mallorca": the word means "firefighter" as well as all the things it means in English. The mountain rescue team is a specialist part of the fire brigade here.

I was feeling some temptation to write up this picture by poking a little fun at the mountain rescuers for what felt like the incongruity of setting up to rescue a "casualty" by lowering him into a monastery from beneath a giant crucifix. Surely they could have left it to a higher power, given the location?

And then... something, perhaps a higher power, caused my phone to start playing music in my pocket, a few km up the road from the monastery. I have a hearty dislike for the kind of cyclist who gets his motivation and tempo for climbing from disco beats blasting from behind him. It gave me a start to discover that I was doing something of the sort. I let it play just long enough to work out what it was: Bach, the cantata BWV 1127, "Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn' ihn." It's a work only rediscovered in 2005 in a library in Weimar, where it twice – miraculously? – escaped from devastating fires. How apt, as to both text and history.

[raiding]

Another Mallorcan church. This is the Esglèsia de Immaculada Consepció in Caimari, known there as "the new church" (it was built between 1877 and 1891) to distinguish it from the village's "old church." I liked it. I read later that "The architectural style is characterized by its simplicity and stringent design," and I recognise that.

It's also hard to miss the fact that these churches are typically much the largest buildings in their locality, speaking to the wealth of the Church; though in fact this church was built on the site of a convent which fell into disuse after "la Desmortización", in which the Spanish state confiscated church wealth to pay for (in this case) the first Carlist (civil) war, of 1833-1840.  

The focal point of the church as a whole is the figure of Mary behind the altar. The second picture is (I later learned) of the chapel to the Madonna of Lluc, of whom more in a moment. I was interested in the pile of olive branches. These, as well as palms, are distributed on Palm Sunday. The following year, they are gathered in, burned on Shrove Tuesday, and the ashes used the following day, Ash Wednesday.