Sungai Merab Rolling Hills Mission

Sunday ride crew and friends at Diplomatic Precinct

Earlier this year, its not that long ago anyway, we agreed to diversify cycling routes for 2011 cycling calendar. Ideally Saturday ride’s route will be Sungai Long, short distance and lots of climbing, perfect route for cadence training. Sunday ride would involve long distance ride mission with minimum 50 Km to-and-fro.

The original plan was for Sunday Ride was the Setul mission. Due to changed circumstances, we decided to ride to Putrajaya. In order to make it a "sweeter" ride, the ride plan had been improvised from the normal Kajang-Cycberjaya-Putrjaya via the SKV expressway to the Kajang-Jalan Ayer Hitam-Sungai Merab-Putrajaya.

The fun part about this route was the rolling hills of Sungai Merab.

I couldn’t recall what triggered the idea to propose this route. The last time we rode through this route was when I tested my USPS- TREK 5900. Back then I had much better fitness level compared to now. But I'm pretty sure we had a lot of "fun".

There are two ways to “enjoy” the rolling hills of Sugai Merab. The first one is the Bangi bound form Desa Pinggiran Putra’e exit and the second one is Putrajaya bound via Jalan Ayer Hitam. To make it simpler, lets just call the first option as Sungai Merab Outbound or SMO and the later as Sungai Merab Inbound, SMI in short.

Both have different difficulty level depending from you enter it. Personally i think the SMO route is much easier compared to the SMI.

The biggest test for SMI is first hill after the Jln Ayer Hitam exit is an 11% slope. One would get into trouble if he or she didn’t have the right gear to climb this hill. I called this the Terror Hill, the one that could make a grown up to cry like a baby or swore obscenities like never before.

To be honest, I've lost count on the number of hills, big and small, we had to climb. But worry not, we shall make every effort to mark them all together together with elevation and difficulty levels on our next ride mission.

After the Sungai Merab routes we continued riding casually through Putrajaya's Persiaran Selatan and took the exit to the 5th Precinct and climbed the Putrajaya International Convention Center. Due to a convocation rehearsal, we had to cut short the break and headed straight to the Diplomatic Precinct via the 2nd Precinct on to Dataran Putra.

From there, we took the ginormous roundabout (Persiaran Sultan Sallahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah), passing through the Botanical Garden and took the exit to the Diplomatic Precinct. We had our break there at a mamaks' bistro before continuing the ride back home via Jalan Ayer Hitam enroute to the SKVE heading towards Kajang and Semenyih.

Thanks to the crew, Dr. Azlan, Zaha, Farizal, Zam Kechik, Zam Besar and Suhaimi for joining the ride. I hope the you guys had fun apart for sore thighs and calves.

Videos:

Video 1: Jalan Ayer Itam To Sungai Merab

Video 2: Coasting from Kg Abu Bakar Baginda

Video 3: Sungai Merab to Putrajaya

Video 4: Persiaran Putra to PICC

Below were the pictures taken turing the ride. The 2D images didn't really show the depth especially the elevations. But they still looked really "fun". Please click on the images to enlarge.