I created this page to keep track of my three cycling trips in Piedmont, Tuscany and Burgundy, ridden between 2022 and 2026. Piedmont felt the hardest, Tuscany had the most climbing, and Burgundy covered the longest distance. Every road below is colored by its gradient, and the heart-rate charts help explain what my body was actually going through.
Each map shows the total ground covered during the trip. Hover over a band in the key to isolate roads of that gradient, or a day beneath a map to isolate that day's route. Each map can be zoomed and dragged.
The chart below breaks that terrain down by gradient: how much of each trip was flat, climbing, or descending.
The same pattern shows up at the extremes: Burgundy's steepest climb, at 9.6%, is gentler than either Piedmont's or Tuscany's. Gradients below are averages over a segment's full length, not peak values at a point.
Average heart rate alone doesn't explain why Piedmont felt hardest, Tuscany left me constantly hungry, or Burgundy left me simply worn out. The shape of each day's effort comes closer. It came from a wrist sensor; calories are Strava's estimate, built from the recorded samples.
Piedmont's heart rate swung the widest of the three trips — a 10th-to-90th-percentile range of about 49 bpm on an average day, against roughly 40 in Tuscany. That fits short, steep ramps followed by descents, over and over, rather than one sustained effort: a day made of repeated hard surges, not a steady push. It's a plausible reason Piedmont felt like the hardest trip despite having the lowest average heart rate of the three.
Tuscany ran the highest median heart rate of the three trips on every single day, and the narrowest spread — a steady push rather than a series of spikes. Sustained effort like that burns through glycogen continuously rather than in bursts, which lines up with how the week felt: never any one unbearable moment, just a constant draw that left me hungry no matter how much I ate.
Burgundy ran the lowest median heart rate of the three trips, but also by far the longest days — over four more hours in the saddle than Piedmont. Lower intensity for longer still adds up. By the end it showed: less hunger during the days themselves, but real fatigue, and a resting heart rate that stayed elevated while sleeping through all five nights of the trip — a sign the body wasn't catching up, even though no single ride felt especially hard.