ramps, grunts and drags

Lance describes sprinter hills as inclines he can ride up in less than a minute. Hence, he sprints them. My friend Rock describes some climbs as grunts. I ride up ramps, pinches, pitches and drags.  

A drag is not steep, but it’s long and usually straight, so you can see the work stretching uphill in front of you. A pinch is short and steep and the only gear left is getting out of the saddle. A grunt is a bit longer or steeper, and being in the saddle is not an option. A ramp is a steep pitch that’s part of a much longer climb.

Nouns can’t describe the grand climbs of the Tour de France. Only adjectives suffice, and barely. The Tourmalet is unrelenting, the Plateau de Beille hellish. The Col d’Agnes is remorseless, the Peyresourde grandly unhelpful: it allows you no rhythm.

Graeme Fife avers that a cyclist never conquers these climbs: all he can say is that on a given day the climb did not defeat him. He, like me, takes a climb in one hit—no stops for snaps or snacks. The only valid reasons not to continue to the top are an overwhelming need to piss, to remove or don clothing, or to get the stinging sweat out of my eyes so I can see. It’s a matter of honour.

Grand climbs are not always the hardest. Tasmania’s C137 from Ugbrook to Sheffield has two of the meanest climbs. The southern ascent of the Gog Range immediately after crossing the Mersey River is two kilometres of pure pain with a maximum grade of 18 per cent and regular 14 per cent grinds.

Over the top the descent is brilliant, but the C137 flatters and deceives. The kilometre long climb to Paradise, visible across the Minnow River flats, looks innocuous. But it’s already a horrid drag before the broken bitumen hooks left to reveal an unseen, brutish, lung-busting grunt to the top.  

Michael Waterford is an anaesthetist. I rode with him in Tasmania. He climbed the Gog aged 73. He’s a Pom; raced as a younger man; likes the vino. He rides a beautiful fire-engine red Italian-framed machine. On one side of the down tube are the words (in Italian) Down with skinny young men, and Don’t talk to me when I’m climbing on the other. Yes, indeed, Michael.

In tonight’s Cycle class Kirsten drives us up hills, thrashes us on town sprints, and threatens us with bastards from the bunch are up our arses. She depends on our honour, to add gears, to push our limits.

It’s 38 degrees outside and about the same inside. I think my training regime says I’m supposed to be having an easy spin.  

pinch flat

Australia 0 Japan 1. The Socceroos do not win the Asian Cup. I go back to bed at 4:30 after the game but sleep doesn’t really happen: I’m all anticipation and back on my feet at six and in the car at half past.

I park under a tree at the Castlemaine Botanical Gardens and at 7:04 I’m pedalling up Richards Road past the bacon factory, through Muckleford to Walmer and down Maldon’s empty main street at 8:04.

By 9:04 I am past Perkins Reef, Welshmans Reef, Newstead, Strangways, Yapeen, and into Guildford, where I know the suffering begins.

10:04 is a different story.

Maps. Wonderful things, maps. My time in France is based around maps. Tired of riding Bendigo, I consider the maps, and plan this morning’s Castlemaine loop. I’ve done sections on other rides, but the purgatory of Fryerstown is new to me.

Riding along the old Castlemaine–Dunolly Railway in the Loddon River valley from Newstead to Guildford is like being in France; Strangways (it rhymes with gangways, unfortunately) is Gallicly bucolic early on this perfect, warm, sunny morning.

Then it’s up to Vaughan Springs, up to Irishtown, up to Fryerstown. Up yours, the road says. I climb out of the saddle and out of the valley on lumpy bitumen that arcs up close to double figure gradients. These are not sprinter hills: these pinches are for gritting the teeth and grinding.

This is the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park: scrubby, gravelly, miner-blighted country. Irishtown—this is no doubt where the poorer miners who couldn’t get a toe-hold in the outrageously gold-silted creeks below came to scrabble a living.

After Fryerstown I struggle up more cussed pinches, thighs punctured, before the final hallelujah descent into Chewton. My firm grasp of the handlebars is wrenched free halfway down: the front wheel thumps into a hole hidden in shadow and the machine bucks and judders. I pull up fast and check the pressure. It’s OK, but 500 metres on I pancake to a halt.

No problem. I’m outside a pleasant house with shade along the front fence. I whip off the wheel and rip out the snake-bitten tube. But the spare has waited so long to do its job that the patch on it has peeled off.

I double patch the pinch flat to no avail, then lean my broken machine against a post and stick out the thumb. Twenty seconds later I have a lift. Enter James the Postie and his empty van.   

Both James and his spluttering vehicle leak smoke. James is possibly my age but could be ten years younger. Lank, straggly hair, soggy rollie. He’s done it tough, I’d say. Drugs. Says he might have to move soon: the outskirts of Chewton are getting too built-up. I ask him how he makes a living.

“Postie,” is his one-word answer. “Doesn’t pay much, but I scale my life down and get by all right.” Says he worked in a detox house in Bendigo once.

He drops me at the Botanical Gardens.

I ride 69kms at 26.5kph before the pinch flat. But that’s OK: I was already pinch-flat.    

the thousand steps

The Carmichael Training System’s intermediate level seven-week program (to the perfect ride) deems Mondays as rest (recovery) days. The logic escapes me, but beginner level rest days are Thursdays.  Advanced level riders get no rest. I work most Thursdays, but not Mondays, so Thursday is my rest day.

On this Thursday morning. I’m at the hospital getting my left wrist x-rayed. My good woman has come with me because the hospital is near the Ferntree Gully National Park. She wants to walk The Thousand Steps.

The forest is as beautiful as ever, the steps no less steep or slippery. It’s only 20 degrees but at the top I’m awash in perspiration; my heart rate recovers quickly.

Back in Bendigo later in the day I pass up the opportunity to do Thursday evening Pump class—it’s my recovery day—and do the Friday morning class instead.

Saturday morning I’m out early. My ride is a circuit around Bendigo’s outskirts. From Baxter Street I depart via East Bendigo, thence to White Hills, Ascot, Epsom, Eaglehawk, Myers Flat, Maiden Gully, Kangaroo Flat, Diamond Hill, Mandurang, Strathfieldsaye, Junortoun, Strathfield and back through Bendigo East. I cover 69.53kms at 28.2kph.

My current Bible, The Lance Armstrong performance program, features regular sidebars titled “What would Lance do?” I’m inclined to ignore them. Come on, the man’s won seven Tours de France. Only the most arrogant amateur would even consider attempting what Lance does.

Lance refers to any incline he can ride up in less than one minute as a sprinter hill. In other words, instead of grinding up the climb at a nice steady pace in a manageable gear, he attacks the hill and sprints up it. Lance, you’re the man.

Despite the name, White Hills is dead flat. The first serious incline is Lightning Hill. It’s like a small cube of vintage cheddar—it doesn’t last long but it makes you suck in the cheeks, arcing up to eight per cent. It’s a sprinter hill.

Not being Lance, I can either blow the hill away, or it’ll blow me away. I blow Lightning Hill to smithereens, then shrug off Specimen Hill, which strictly speaking is a bit longer than a sprinter hill. So is Diamond Hill, but I cruise it.

The whole ride I choose low gears and keep the highest cadence (and heart rate) that I can. Beyond 50kms it’s hard work but I keep the cadence in the high 70s and into the 80s all the way home.

The proverb says that the longest journey begins with one step. The French Alps remain a thousand steps away. Climbing them seems more like ten, twenty, fifty thousand steps.

The training began on 25 December, five weeks ago, but only now do I feel like I’ve taken the first step.      

on childhood streets

It’s Australia Day. Patriotic fools drape flags around themselves and wander round the supermarket.

In the afternoon while my good woman sleeps off some jetlag, I cycle to my sister's place, Vermont to Hampton, a return distance of 50 kilometres and one metre. I zigzag my way south and west; Warrigal Road is the watershed between Melbourne’s east and south-east.

The south-eastern suburbs—Ormond, Carnegie, Bentleigh, McKinnon, Murrumbeena—are the streets of my childhood. 

I pedal along Woornack Road where my father played Sunday morning tennis in his early forties. He gave up smoking 60 untipped cigarettes a day at 41 and just survived a massive heart attack at 44. He’s 85 now.

Oakleigh Road is shorter than childhood legs measured it. I look for the house where two female cousins lived as university students; it had a tennis court I was allowed to play on. I snuck though a window as a thirteen year-old to examine their underwear, as any self-respecting thirteen year-old would.

I ride the bus route I took to school for nine years; the streets now have traffic-taming devices no bus could negotiate. Two blocks from the house my family occupied for 17 years the private girls school my sister attended now occupies the entire block.

The small park next to McKinnon Station where Mike Tamblyn and I played Test cricket is gone. A multi-storey monument to residential cubism squats there. The squash courts where Stiffy McLaughlin beat me sixteen straight games one hot summer holiday afternoon are gone. So is squash.

The genteel California bungalows of Ormond were just houses in my teens. I scan Grange Road for 16 year-old Prue, the doctor’s haughty daughter, pert breasts and shapely brown legs in a blue and white checked school dress. Gone.

At the other end of Grange Road I wheel into Lyons Street—cement pavement instead of bitumen—alongside my primary school. No fourth grade kid could get the footy off Jackie Krafcek or me in 1961.

In Koornang Road Iranians, Indians and Indonesians cross at the lights on this Australia Day evening. There were no migrants in exotic Murrumbeena when I ventured that far from home in the 60s.

take nothing for granted

I am in Melbourne. I have three tasks. Task one is to see my doctor in Emerald and determine if my scaphoid needs repair. Task two is to organise six days of training I will present in Melbourne, Bendigo and Sydney. Task three, no task at all really, is to pick up my good woman and her two children from the airport after their trip to Serbia.

I leave my good woman’s empty house at 8:30 for Upwey where I take the front wheel out of the car, hastily put it back, and drive gingerly around Upwey village looking for a toilet. Luck and timing are on my side.

Having unloaded myself, I unload the Cervélo and set off for Emerald. I find a lovely steady rhythm from the Puffing Billy bridge below Belgrave—the one in all the photos—all the way up through Selby to Hermans Saddle.

Pedalling through Menzies Creek, where I lived, twice, I realise not for the first time, how beautiful it is. Yet I took it for granted: this place, where I brought up my children, where I finally bought a bike, aged 44, and began cycling.

Later, living in Croydon, I rode the Mountain Highway, the “one-in-twenty”, from The Basin up to Sassafras. One in twenty is the gradient: it rises one metre vertically for every 20 metres horizontally: five per cent. Little of it is five per cent. Most of it is three, some is four, and a tiny amount is five. Go figure.

But it's seven kilometres of cycling paradise and surely one of the great cycling roads anywhere in the world: smooth pavement, a steady seven kilometre testing ascent, a fast sinuous descent, a towering avenue of straight-trunked trees all the way.

I rode it so often I took it for granted too.

In Emerald I lean the Cervélo against the toddlers’ playpen in the medical centre’s waiting-room. I’m no longer dripping by the time my doctor summons me. She examines my wrist and thumb and writes a referral for x-rays. She assures me that any treatment needed can wait till after France.

I ride back to Upwey. At 28.5kms the ride is short, but not a metre is flat.

Back in Vermont I tidy house, shop, get petrol, mow lawns, then go to my planning meeting. At six I return to my good woman's home and put the cat out. I drive her large car across the metropolis to the airport. Her flight has landed but she and her children are the last to come through the sliding silver doors.

The love of my life has been in Serbia for five and half weeks. She migrated to Australia in August 1994 with a husband, a toddler, 20kgs of possessions, and no English, in front of her a second bellyful of child and the daunting task of everything.

She, and the daughter she brought with her, became Australian citizens on 19 February 1997. The son was born here. The husband who persuaded her to leave her warring country is gone back to Serbia. Her family still lives in Umka, where she grew up, an outer suburb of Beograd, the city Westerners know as Belgrade.

This is her fifth visit to her native country. Each time it's different, she tells me: “Or perhaps I am changing.” She has changed my life.

I've been sensible enough to live with only two women, and only for a total of seven years. One day I will live with this woman, but there's no hurry. Her children are her priority. If you meet a woman from the other side of the world, you must take time.

And take nothing for granted.

fit or what?

The four people I share an office with keep telling me how fit I am. I don’t openly disagree, but they haven’t a clue. What they mean is that I ride to work and go to the gym so I must be fitter than they are, although they’re years younger and much better looking. But fitter for what?

Training to be a phys ed teacher, I learned that fitness is entirely relative. In a general sense fitness simply means physically fit, a meaningless definition. More specifically, and usefully, fitness describes suitability to a particular purpose.

Hence tuna fisherman Dinko (Dean) Lukin, Australia’s only Olympic gold medal weightlifter—he won in 1984 when the Soviet bloc boycotted the games so the field was open—was fit to lift huge weights, and big fish. Gary Ablett senior made his debut for Geelong that same year and kicked eight goals for Victoria in an interstate game.

For all his remarkable abilities, Ablett was not fit to lift the weights Lukin lifted—nor as a born-again Christian, but failed human being, to be a fisher of men—and Lukin was never fit to play first grade football. Fitness is relative to the task or purpose.

I work for a community welfare agency. My office-mates work with adolescents at risk of homelessness and their usually dysfunctional families. I merely occupy the fifth desk in their office because I’m an ‘odd-bod’ and the desk is spare.

For twelve years I worked in specialist school settings for adolescents with social and emotional problems, ending up as principal. I did what my current colleagues do: worked with difficult, unlovely kids and their often difficult, unlovely families.

These days I don’t truck with the adolescent form of any species, especially homo bogensis. My colleagues are fit for the task (of working with young people) and I am not. So when they tell me I am fit, I demur in a vague way and move on.

The fitness that obsesses me is the fitness to ride a bicycle up mountains. Right now I struggle up One Tree Hill, but come Sunday 24 July—182 days from today—I will ride up the Col du Galibier, whatever the weather, and whether I’m fit for the task or not.

This evening I take my first evening ride for a long time and what an agreeable thing it is. Pedalling east down Tannery Lane, as the sun westers, I cast a twenty-metre-long shadow in front of me. The heat seeps out of the day and although it’s still 28 degrees, the zephyr that wafts over me has a cool tinge to it.

I pedal 33.28kms at 27.7kph but that’s irrelevant because I’m now in Week One, Day One of the Carmichael Training System’s intermediate level success plan, and heart rate is all that matters. My ride tonight is supposedly “one hour in zone 2 with ten minutes tempo on flat terrain”.

Based on a maximum heart rate of 176, zone 2 for me is a heart rate between 115 and 122. I sort of did something roughly like that. A bit. Well, maybe. Supposedly.

Forget the numbers: I feel good and ride well.

family days

Wednesday after work I go to Katie’s Cycle class. I’m on Bike 2. A small Chinese woman is on Bike 3. Whatever class she does at the gym she does at 150 per cent. This little woman flogs herself like no other.

I feel daunted when she starts pedalling next to me, but I needn’t. She’s got no idea about riding a bike. There’s no fluency: one minute she’s spinning at 130+, then she’s grinding at less than 50. Her upper body is all over the place. If she rode this way on the road, she’d be hard pressed to stay upright.

But I can’t but admire her enthusiasm.   

Thursday I ride to work, all two blocks, and home again, but I declare it a rest day because I feel like I need a rest.

Friday I go to the Tom Flood velodrome early. This time I do the field test properly, if time trialling on the slick surface at the velodrome is ‘proper’. Everything is ideal. I have a shit before riding; the surface is not uphill; there is no 90-degree corner; there is no wind.

I complete the 4.828kms (three miles) in 8:15, a minute and eight seconds less than my uphill time trial on Sandhurst Park Road, and only 15 seconds outside Advanced status. I’m happy to discount Beginner as my start point for the seven week program and begin as an Intermediate.  

My sister and her husband drive my mother up from Melbourne to ‘see the baby’, my daughter’s daughter. Nerri is four and half months old and changing every day. I cater, cook and clean for my guests, a rare privilege. And a full-time job.

When they return to Melbourne on Saturday, I hop a lift to Kyneton and ride back to Bendigo. At 1pm it’s hot and my computer tells me it’s 36 degrees on the road. The country is all undulating through Metcalfe, over Granite Hill, skirting Elphinstone and back to Bendigo via Sutton Grange, Sedgwick and Mandurang.

The climb up Granite Hill is short but tough, the other climbs mostly long drags of one to three per cent. I tell myself that this is what I’m out here for: to work hard on the uphills. And I do, although I don’t push past about an 80 per cent effort. The heart rate touches 160 only once, but slips below 130 only on the descents.

When I step off the bike in Baxter Street I’m in a lather and my feet are red-hot, as they’ve been for 50kms. I cover the 70kms at an average speed of 27.5kph.

On Sunday I can ride with the gym bunch to Axedale on the O’Keefe rail trail, but at 11:30am I’m Driving Ms Caitlin, a young woman with a psych disability I take for driving lessons as a voluntary supervising driver-slash-mentor. She’s not at the unit when I pull up outside in the L2P car.

No ride, no drive. The dog gets an extra walk and I ride late on a hot afternoon.   

field test

At 1.35am something crashes in my house. I get up and inspect each room but can find no picture dangling from a broken wire, no bike on its side, no vase in pieces. A huntsman is above the window in the lounge room but I doubt his clattering woke me.

At 6:38 I wake again. This morning it’s the field test. Last night at the gym I bust a gut on Kirsten’s Cycle class, then stay on the bike for another half hour, in recovery gear, but maintaining a cadence above 110, then 120, and 130 for the last minute.

Today I finally do the Carmichael Training System field test. It’s a three-mile (4.828km) time trial to determine whether I start the CTS seven-weeks-to-a-perfect-ride as a beginner or intermediate. Advanced is out of the question: I’d have to complete the distance in less than eight minutes. Less than ten minutes will do me. Over ten minutes will depress me.

Sandhurst Town Road proves insufficient—it’s a kilometre short. And it proves to be not as flat as thought. I make up the extra kilometre in Myers Flat Road, which means I have to round a 90-degree corner and the course will then be ever so slightly uphill.

It’s supposed to be still but it’s not; by my estimation there’s a 10 to 15 knot westerly, although I’ve no idea what a knot is. This will be a crosswind from my right, which seems sort of neutral.

I don’t ‘go to the bathroom’ before riding, as the CTS suggests. I lie: I do go to the bathroom but don’t manage to shit. (American English is so puritanical.) I’m supposed to have a protein drink 40 minutes before the trial, and I do, but otherwise I’m not to eat for two hours before riding. For me it’s twelve hours. None of this is ideal.

I prime the navigator on the computer and set the stopwatch on the HRM and off I go. I start in the second highest gear in the small ring and quickly reach a cadence of 90. Once round the corner and onto the ‘uphill’ it’s hard to push 80. I hunker down and get into the work. The last kilometre has a couple of bumps which lift the heart rate above 160.

I stop the clock at 9:23. I’m happy with that, but resolve to do it properly at the velodrome. By the time I’m back on my doorstep I’ve logged 42kms at 27.3kph.

I boom back into Bendigo on the big ring and catch two boy racers idling into town to join a bunch. One detects my way ancient grey-bearded presence at the Thistle Street lights and hares off. Wouldn’t I like to be able to rip it up like that whenever the fancy took me? You betcha!

Now I’m off to Pump class to rip the upper body. Pity about those squats and lunges. 

the galibier

The Galibier featured in every Tour de France from 1911 till 1949, and regularly since. Until 1979 it passed through a tunnel at 2,556m to the descent on the other side. An archway collapsed, the tunnel was closed, and a kilometre at 10 per cent was added to reach the shoulder of the massif. 

Now it’s 2,645 m tall and only two climbs top it: the Iseran at 2,720m and the Col de la Bonnette-Restefond at 2,802m.

Graeme Fife rode the Galibier, the sacred monster, on 12 September 1995. He describes his ascent in The beautiful machine. From Valloire, where his ascent begins, it’s 18.1kms to the summit at 6.9%, height gain 1245m. What follows is his account.

We set out from Valloire … into cold rain, skies as grey as dull unenamelled steel tubing. Lightly laden I went ahead. Shorts. No tights. No overshoes. Hadn’t heard of them. No gloves (keeping them dry for the downhill). Minimal waterproof. Seventeen kilometres to ride. The road up ahead marked ominously with double chevrons on the map.

The approach across the open ground towards Plan Lachat, at halfway, was about as unromantic as a freezing wet day in the high mountains could make it. I passed clumps of dishevelled farm buildings, which even the flower-spangled glory of a hot summer would hardly render handsome. They crouched, hunkered down, sodden and morose, in stagnant swamps of thick cowpat-brown mud. A knot of shuttered chalets. Bleak moorland. The waters of the Valloirette River course unseen. Wetness everywhere. To the west, a mighty wall of mountain, the Aigles d’Arve; to the east, another rampart, La Sétaz Vieille. Threatening banks of foul weather. Ahead the col, somewhere, overshadowed by two majestic steeples of rock marking the end of the two opposing ridges: the Grand Galibier and the Pic des Trois Evêchés. The road noses into a line of dripping trees—no shelter there—and out the other side.

Plan Lachat is a huddle of ugly wooden ski chalets in a crook of the ranges. Beyond it, the meandering road swings abruptly right and steeply up—frighteningly steep—onto the first of the ramps, the real start of the climb, the proper testing stuff. Everything till now has been preamble, no great tax of gradient, yet I’ve been in my lowest gear since we set out, which means that the only gear I have left is out of the saddle …

From here on, the Galibier is horribly exposed and, on this day of slantwise rain-cum-sleet, wintry cold. The road breaks every vertebra in its spine with stress fracture on the bare rock. No trees occlude or shelter the way forward. I can see the next hairpin snapping back on itself overhead as the hairpin I am on unbends from its tight V. I’m riding very slowly. Pedal stroke by pedal stroke. Suddenly, being on the Galibier is very scary. Had I thought much about it beforehand? Well, I had, but here I am inhabiting the gap between the mental image and the reality, treading the gulf between what I had nursed as possibility across the insuperable fact of my own limitations. This is a massive alp with a deserved reputation … Occasionally I stand up on the pedals to relieve the cricking ache in the small of my back, 80 metres or so, and then settle onto the seat again.

The rain turns inexorably to snow. Now, when I honk (get out of the saddle), the back wheel occasionally loses purchase on the settling slick and I have to plonk my bum down to counter the skid. A Dutch camper van shoots past in a vile, wet, freezing broadcast of slush and liquid and very nearly takes me out.

Not far from the top, I see a huge gully to my right, a funnel between two huge gaunt pillars of rock, a chasm plunging over a precipice, swirling with ghostly flurries of blinding white snow in chaotic spirals of wind. I am riding into the lost region of thin air where the frost makes pastel rainbows and the legendary demon of misfortune, the Witch with Green Teeth, trails nets of ice-fibre mesh to trap the unwary rider and sweep him into the thrall of mechanical failure and punctures, if not to throw him off the machine altogether. This is the realm of Frost-Blink, and I am riding a glacial brook not a tarmac road. But I think of the men of 1911 and then cannot match this, any of this, to what they did …

I get nearer—how near? Never inquire, just stick with it—and the realisation that I am going to make it begins to break, but no: absit omen. It’s never over till it’s over. Then I see ten or so cars parked either side of the road, a snowplough beyond them on the left-hand verge. The car passengers stand around in fur coats, overcoats, muffled with scarves, hats, gloves, their breath pluming in the frosty thin air.

I stop, dismount and call out: “Is this the col?”

It’s the col, and, as I fumble woodenly with frozen fingers at the straps of my saddlebag to liberate my gloves and a thick sweater, one of the dungareed snowplough men calls over to me in a sullen tone: “A car’s slipped off the road. We need your help.”

Right. They need my help. They’ve been stooging around waiting for a bike-rider. They have the population of a small skiing chalet togged out in toasty warm clothes, standing around like tripe at fourpence, the driver of said car included, presumably, and they need my help. I reply, with some acid incredulity in my voice: “I’ve just cycled up the Galibier and you want me to help you with a car?”

Fogartys Gap

West Ham 0 Arsenal 3. The game finishes at 6:25am EDT. The dog gets first dibs today, so it’s a dawn walk for us.

The rain stopped less than 48 hours ago as I wheel the Cervélo out the gate about 7:50am, hoping the roads on my 80km Porcupine Flat-Harcourt North circuit are passable. The sun is out and it’s already warm.

I haven’t done the field test to determine my maximum heart rate, so I’m working on a cadence never below 70, even climbing, and a heart rate around or above 130. The heart rate is always between 130 and 155.

Water still seeps across patches of road and there are washouts—driveways, corners, low places, where loose gravel and soil has washed across the bitumen. Near Muckleford Creek ten metres of bitumen has removed itself into a paddock.

The greatest damage is to trees. I pass scores of them, quietly lying on their sides as though having a nap. High winds tear off branches and leave the roads littered with leaves and twigs. There was no wind; there is no debris. These trees, their roots loosened by the run-off, simply keeled over under the weight of water in their foliage.

At Porcupine Flat I turn hard left into Fogartys Gap Road. A col is a gap or pass: this is the Col du Fogarty. At 419m it’s a doddle. But after a stop at 56kms to eat a nut bar and check out the overflow at Barkers Creek Reservoir, nothing is a doddle. My legs just don’t want to turn any more.

I flog myself up to the gap at Harcourt North (the Col du Harcourt Nord) but the legs still don’t respond. I flog myself up Laudens Hill coming back into Bendigo and remember my old training principle: always finish strong. So I work hard along Retreat Road. For me there is no retreat. The ride is 82.57kms at 25.9kph.

I think I’m making slow improvement. Tomorrow the field test.    

the beautiful machine

After six days that set a record monthly rainfall for any month ever recorded—and it’s only the fourteenth—the sun shines on Bendigo in the afternoon, so after work I tog up and wheel the Cervélo out the front gate, planning to take a stroll out to Hartlands Eucy farm.

Flooding closes all roads west of Bendigo. I head north-east and the back road to Huntly seems fine until I hit a couple of wet patches; then water streams across the bitumen from a nearby creek-burst; then the road becomes the creek.

I turn around and straggle back into town via a circuitous route. Many roads are closed on Bendigo’s fringe. Many times I slow to less than walking pace to negotiate water five to ten centimetres deep. The brakes are useless for minutes after each dip.

It might be a couple of days before I can complete any of my usual loops. This evening’s 23kms @ 26.3kph is better than nothing.

By jumping out of the saddle and bunging on half a dozen gears you can sort of simulate climbing a hill on a backyard trainer or gym bike. But even on humid high-perspiration days, you can’t simulate flooding, although my backyard trainer came close this week.

Of course, nothing on Earth can simulate riding up the Col du Galibier. It is the point of the training I have stutteringly begun. Graeme Fife has ridden the Galibier and I’ve just read again his account in his book The beautiful machine. The blurb (not attributed) on the cover describes the book as “a Zen-like paean to the joy of cycling”.

Fife, who whacks you over the head with his prose and opinions, would be the first to fall about at this bullshit, although describing his ascent of the Galibier he approaches something that might loosely be described as Zen-like.

It’s 2,645 m and the French call it ‘a sacred monster’, except that sacré can also mean unholy. As Fife says, “The ambiguity is telling: the Galibier is, in the rank of myth and natural wonder, magnificent, sublime, but it can also be a pig.” The Galibier is the epic and heroic quintessence of the Tour, and to ride it, he thinks, might take you to the heart of the mystery of the great bike race.

He arrives in France in 1995 to ride the Alps at age 50. The bike has been his great love and primary transport since he was five. He’s ridden plenty of France before, the flat bits, usually chasing a fuck. Now he’s on an equally serious mission.

On the first day he bags l’Alpe d’Huez, “a hell of an initiation”. He surveys the map and writes, “From the map, the Col du Glandon presents little problem”. And on the second day the Glandon “decided to squash me till I whimpered then toss the bits into a drainage culvert”.

(This makes me feel so good: our Cycleworks tour will ride the Glandon twice: it is our doorstep.)

On the third day Fife rides the Galibier and his ascent deserves its own post. 

holding pattern

Bendigo is in a holding pattern, going round in wet circles, wondering if the rain will ever stop.

I shouldn’t call our weather extreme when in the northern half of the continent people drowned in ‘an inland tsunami’. But I can’t recall a ‘rain event’ like this, with humidity over 90 per cent for six days and unrelenting rain. The JRT belts out for a quick piss and comes in soaked. Bendigo Creek has been in torrent for days, not just for a few hours after a downpour.

The rain doesn’t come inside but the humidity does. The front door, swollen with damp, won’t shut. Clothes washed days ago hang damply on the drying rack. And they stink. The red shorts that swoosh when I walk—the material is so stiff—hang limply off my hips.

No breath of wind for five days relieves the clamminess. Random objects stick to each other. The handle of my cane basket sticks to my fingers when I pick it up to go shopping. As I come out of the air-conditioned supermarket, my glasses fog like they did during the build-up in Darwin.

On any day in this town bikes line café footpaths; they whiz past in bunches, riders chattering like monkeys; singly, in pairs and in big groups, they dominate the early morning roads. Cyclists are crazy bastards, but not crazy enough to be out in this.

The streets are empty. The Red Rocket sits in the hall of my house, biding its time. I walk to work and to the gym. Last night Katie is our Cycle class leader, driving us up steep hills to the summits of our heart rates. I max it at 167 for the session.

Thirty minutes seems barely enough, but it’s a relief to climb off the bike and stretch the legs. A 45-minute session is a lifetime. The intensity of these sessions is all well and good but can’t convince me that I shouldn’t be on the road racking up real kilometres.

The bureau says it’ll stop raining, eventually.

This morning I walk to the gym for Pump, umbrella up and eyes down so I don't submerge myself in something deep. Every concavity, gutter, indentation, or hollow is full.

I pump like my life depends on it and when I step out of the gym an hour later the world has changed. Water still lies everywhere, but suddenly the pewter sky you could bang your head on if you stood on tip-toes has lifted. No sun or blue, but someone has turned on the lights.   

The dark brooding clouds have lifted; the rain has stopped. There will be more, but like a woman weeping after the death of a child, the tears cannot last forever. At some point there can be no tears left to cry, no water left to fall from the sky.

gearing up

I’m doing a job. On myself.

What seemed like a leisurely start on 25 December—six months to get fit, albeit with no slacking and a climb in every ride—has morphed into something altogether more intense, and scientific, since I pulled The Lance Armstrong performance program off the shelf. 

Meanwhile in Bendigo it’s unseasonably not summer. Summer here is three months of cloudless skies and a merciless sun pounding you into the asphalt. Our one day of summer, December 31, was 39 degrees, humidity 12 per cent.

In the past two days my rain gauge has recorded 28mls of gentle and consistent rain. The bureau forecasts four more days of the same. The skies are grey as a dog’s guts, the air sticky as a glazed bun. The humidity is 87 per cent.

So I plonk my bum in a chair and get into the D and M chapters of the Carmichael Training System (CTS)—HRMs, field tests, training zones, Tempo, FastPedal, PowerIntervals and FlatSprints.

Dodging showers I take the Sigma Sport PC 14 heart rate monitor with the dead battery to a jeweller but the fat lady behind the counter won’t sing: replacing the battery is “too fiddly”. No such qualms for the jeweller on the other side of the street where another fat lady does the job for ten bucks. Last time it cost $25+ at Mr Minute in a Melbourne shopping plaza. I was outraged then and now.

HRM taken care of, I duck more showers and roll the back wheel from the old banger into the bike shop. After ten minutes manipulation in the august hands of the senior mechanic it emerges somewhat rounder and back on the banger mounted on the trainer it seems to make consistent contact with the roller.

The rain keeps pattering down in lifeless vertical lines, so it’s cycle class at the gym for this black duck. I push myself way hard in Kirsten’s cycle session, the perspiration streaming off the peak of my Headsweats le Tour de France cap.

The diminutive woman in her 60s on the bike beside me is at her first cycle class, no doubt wondering if she’s safe next to a frothing madman, soaked in sweat, moaning and cursing under his breath as he pushes the resistance lever further than ever before.

During the cycle session my heart rate maxes at 164. According to the age-old formula—220 minus age—I shouldn’t get past 161. Five years ago, field testing on a straight stretch of the Melba Highway out near Yarra Glen, I set my high water mark at 176. But this is not a field test.

That’s my next ride. If the rain stops.

backyard foolery

So for the nonce my time in the saddle is all about improved cardio fitness. No pointless flogging myself for hours on the road. It’s got to be short, sharp, sweaty and all about fighting for breath and recovering as quickly as possible.

In the morning I spend considerable time fooling with the old banger set up on the Tacx stationary trainer. Fooling myself more likely. The back wheel is not making consistent contact with the roller. I remove the ancient 27-inch wheel; the tyre is lumpy and strangely seated. The amount of visible sidewall varies by about three quarters of a centimetre. Taking it off and reseating it in the rim is of no avail.

I clean the six-sprocket cluster instead and decide to take it to the bike shop to see what they advise. My own advice is to replace the 27-inch with a cheap 26-inch rim. The problem will be getting the old cluster onto a new wheel.

Then it rains.

I finally bounce out onto the road in the early evening, covering 44.38kms at 29.3kph average. I choose small gears and keep a high cadence, usually over 80 and often over 90. This keeps me breathing hard; exactly what I want. If not for the crappiest piece of road surface in the county—about four kilometres of it coming into Ascot—I might average above 30.  

I can’t start the seven-week program until I resurrect my heart rate monitor. I got the backing plate of the wristwatch but replacing the battery is a job for a jeweller.

I’m happy with today’s ride. I pushed it hard and it felt good.   

back to basics

In 2002 I rode from Bourke to Bourke Street, over 1000kms in nine days. In 2003 it was Adelaide to Melbourne; same stats.

In 2004, five and six I endured three tough rides around Tasmania, up the east coast, across the central plateau, defying the weather on the west coast, and up Mount Wellington to round things off. Each time over 1000kms in nine days.

In 2007 I went to France and rode the Tourmalet and the d’Aubisque. In 2009 in was the Tourmalet, Peyresourde, Aspin, Agnes and Plateau de Beille.

I trained harder for the earlier rides than for the later ones. Form and fitness kicked in pretty rapidly once I got serious. Which leaves me wondering why I feel so crappy this time.

Yes, I just had a week’s respiratory infection and head cold. Yes, I didn’t keep up the k’s last year. Yes, I’m closing on 60 and maybe it’s just much harder to find form and fitness as the body ages … and, dare it be said, deteriorates.

Perhaps I am not paying enough attention to what’s required. Which is why The Lance Armstrong performance program is no longer on the good bike books shelf but on my bedside table instead.

Lance didn’t write this one; his coach Chris Carmichael is responsible and it’s an emetic  paean to The Boss—Lance does this and Lance does that—and a shameless promotion of the CTS (Carmichael Training System). But … it also has a powerful message for me: it’s back to basics, and in my case that’s “a decent aerobic base”.

The one time I did the training regime—seven weeks to the perfect ride—I bought a heart rate monitor and got into the zone: I worked hard at the cardio stuff before (or while) banging the hell out of my legs with lots of kilometre-based drudgery.

So-o-o-o-o-o … I am determined on a new course of action. Seven weeks with the HRM. This time I start as a Beginner, not an Intermediate. Even before reading the book I wonder about being on a bike in every Cycle class at the gym.

So this morning I’m at Cycle for 45 minutes, spinning and grinding my way up imaginary hills. It makes Pump straight after harder than usual.  

As soon as I get home I wash the old bike I took from behind someone’s shed years ago and set up as a training machine. I harness it to the Tacx trainer and pump up the tyres. I hunt down the HRM paraphernalia. Batteries needed. The HRM and me.    

one-legged king pigeon

Cycling is great for the legs. It’s not bad for the rest of the body—remember Oppy’s fabulously strong thumbs?—but it’s not likely to sculpt an eye-catching torso.

Although the arms are connected to the bike, they, and the back, and the abs, do bugger all. In fact, above the waist, only the brain does anything much. And so it should: it should be abuzz, assessing traffic, and solving all of life’s problems.

Someone asked Lance what he thinks about on long training rides. Pedalling, he replied. Indeed, the brain needs to focus on pedalling.

Anyway, for 18 months I’ve been visiting the gym. I’m not sculpting the upper body so much as firming it up. I do nothing there that I can’t do outside with a dog. I don’t get on a treadmill and watch television when I can walk the dog and look at trees.

I prefer the classes. I tried body balance—an hour of tai chi, Pilates and yoga—but my inflexible body isn’t even on the grid for exercises called Downward-facing Dog and One-legged King Pigeon. Zumba is all the rage but I’m too old for public sexy dance. The pacifist in me can’t deal with classes called Combat or Attack.

Pump is my thing—repetitive exercises using light weights on a barbell that build strength and endurance. Each set of muscles gets a five- to six-minute workout and Katie, Kirsten and Sim, my gym’s lovely instructors, keep me motivated. I would do anything for any of them … but they never ask.

The warm-up is gentle. Next is squats. My cycling legs aren’t sure what to make of the 80 to 100 squats involved. Should I ride before or after Pump, or not at all on gym days?

The tracks I concentrate on are chest, back, triceps and biceps. Lunges are the killer exercise for me, and for most men, Katie tells me, and women hate the biceps routine. I jump on a stationary bike during the shoulder track to honour the motorbike I wrote off—along with my left shoulder—on 3 February 1983. Abs and stretches end the session.

As one of my training aims is weight reduction, I climb onto the scales every Tuesday after pump. Last week I registered 93.8kgs and this morning my weight comes in at 92.2kgs. I don’t feel any difference on the bike, but this new figure is good.

The afternoon becomes evening becomes night becomes dawn and I ride 33kms around the northern fringe of town at 26.9kph. I wash bike clothes, reorganise the laundry, and arrive at work at 9:05.        

distracting myself

Although I get up at six, I mount the vacuum cleaner instead of the bike. Yesterday’s slog makes the Wertheim far more attractive.

Most of my life I’ve distracted myself with things other than those most worthy, most pressing, most germane. Not that there is anything unworthy about vacuuming, or urgent, when a fortnight’s JRT sheddings carpet the polished floorboards.

The vacuuming is distracting me from today's ride, and from walking the dog. During the vacuuming I distract myself with moving furniture, a favourite distraction, doing two loads of washing, sweeping the backyard, and eating breakfast. At ten the vacuuming is not yet half done but I’ve rearranged the kitchen and all the furniture in the front bedroom.

I enjoy housework: have done all my life. This is something no self-respecting male is allowed to admit. I am a self-respecting male but I don’t give a flying fuck. I like a clean and functional house. Some people call me obsessive: I think they’re slipshod and unmindful.

My house is welcoming: my regular house-sitter when I have to travel tells me that everything is exactly where she would expect to find it.

The diurnal rhythms of rising early, unfolding oneself quietly into the day, whatever the weather, walking the dog, cooking porridge, watering pots, sweeping the yard, airing the bedroom, and distracting oneself with domestic minutiae affords more satisfaction than the paid work I do. 

So it’s after four in the afternoon when the Cervélo finally leads me out the door. And what an utterly forgettable ride it is: 42.25kms at an unknown average because I forget to reset the computer. Some days and some rides are hard to describe. This one is simply uphill into the wind, a 30 kph southerly that constantly counters any momentum my legs can generate.

Yes, I’m still not well. And yes, I need inspiration. So I pull The Lance Armstrong performance program off the shelf where the good bike books live. It promises seven weeks to the perfect ride. I’ve read it before, but need to read it again.

Lance always delivers, doesn’t he?

cols and gîtes

Lying on my bed late at night, trying to read between sneezing and nose-blowing. My eyes water. The phone rings—it could only be Serbia calling at this hour.

My good woman wants to be the first person to speak with me in 2011. “What time is it?” I ask, having no visible clock in my office where I’m now lying on the floor. She tells me it is 2pm in Belgrade. Fireworks rend what has otherwise been a silent night in Bendigo.

At 3:22am I wake into a new year and know there will be no more sleep as the contagion rages through my body. I can’t breathe. I wander the house, waiting for the dawn so I can ride. The BoM site says wind from the east so just before six I depart for the Kamarooka circuit.

Riding the undulating Tennyson Road I feel good. On the bike I can breathe, but have to be careful not to start coughing or I’ll have a lung dangling over the handlebars. The pedalling is easy till about 50kms, then the air mass comes from the southwest (easterly, indeed!) and I struggle the 28kms from Raywood back home to Bendigo. The loop is 100 metres short of 80kms at 27.3kph.

During the day I read the Croydon Cycleworks preliminary itinerary for the Tour des Alpes in detail and study maps. The cols of the Pyrénées have such evocative names—Tourmalet, Peyresourde, d’Aubisque, but the Alps are as good, if not better.

Right on our doorstep is the Col de la Croix de Fer—the col of the iron cross. We’ll pedal the Glandon, both ways, the Télégraphe, the Madeleine, the Izoard, the Galibier, and l’Alpe Duez. They are all marked with blue highlighter on a succession of maps spread on my desk.

The Cycleworks tour begins 15 July. I have nine days before I join it. I plan to be in the Massif Central but have forgotten the most obvious thing: le Tour. I check the route and find that stages nine and ten pass through while I’m there.

Into the night I pore over accommodation sites. Choosing the right gîte for a single Aussie eccentric for a week is impossible when the descriptions of what is offered are translated by a machine.

Lodging in small village overhangs river Allier Appartementau in closed garden ombrage (salon of garden) including/understanding small cuisine (minifour) stay, bathroom, large chamber lit of 140, village locates at the throats Allier on the path of …

And so on.