things get a whole lot worse

I cough myself inside out. It’s not a persistent cough, nor a gravelly cough, nor a woof, certainly not a hack. It’s a surprise cough that comes out of nowhere. Suddenly something (nothing really) is lodged in your throat and you convulsively turn your throat inside to rid it of the intruder.
Each bout leaves me gasping helplessly, eyes bugging, nose blocked like the emergency exit of an Indian cinema on fire. If I move about things aren’t too bad. So I’m OK when I wheel the Red Rocket onto the 9:02 out of Croydon. On the train my throat threatens constantly to erupt.
How will I MC tomorrow’s forum?
Finally the doors of the 10:15 to Bendigo peel back. Passengers select and occupy seats while I tether the steed in the bike bay. Then the announcement none of us wants to hear. The train will be replaced by buses because a rail is broken near Diggers Rest. Bikes can’t travel on buses.

We stumble and bumble our collective way to the bus bays several blocks away, but no buses, just the passengers from the 9:15, waiting. I about-face and head for home only to discover the vagaries of the new timetable: to wit, mid-morning trains to Lilydale don’t run through the loop.
Three trains later I’m on the Lilydale train using two mobile phones to right the ship. Gifts for speakers; the logo to the admin person making the badges; rearrange the parcel I’m taking to my daughter; contact each speaker for final briefings.
Dan pokes his head over the back fence and recommends an expectorant. My daughter says honey and lemon. Everyone has a suggestion. Everyone has good intentions and advice to offer, but none of it gets you upstairs at the Savoy.
Later my good woman pops in. She’s cruising the eastern suburbs supervising her team of psychologists. She brings goodwill, lavender, cough drops, cherry cake, and makes scalding caramel milk. She’s an angel.
Finally I lie down, but the sickness is upon me good and proper. I cough and spasm under the mohair rug and no sleep comes.
The V-Line website says that trains will run again in the afternoon and evening. I hope to be on the 8:15. I’ll sleep on the floor at my office.
It’s ten to four. Tomorrow afternoon at exactly ten to four I will walk to Bendigo Station and ride the 4:02 back home. The forum will be over. My head will throb, my throat will be raw, but I will have nothing to organise, no deadline, nothing to do but sleep, if I can, and plan Saturday’s ride into the Dandenongs.

germ warfare

Sometimes there’s no hope for it. Whatever’s going on out there is a conspiracy against you that nothing can ameliorate. Right now I’m sick, but I can’t get better. I need to rest, but rest is impossible.
On Friday afternoon in Mildura I have the proverbial splitting headache. I lie on the floor of a borrowed office, then wander the streets in desperation.
Saturday I run a five-hour training session, drive four and a half hours to Bendigo, and hop the last train back to Melbourne and Croydon, walking in the door just before midnight. A big, big day.
Early Sunday afternoon I’m a happy little couch potato, dabbling in the big Saturday broadsheet, alternating with the Blues slapping Brisbane on the box. A sudden irresistible urge to cough catches me. Two hours later after more coughing I’m suspicious.
Late Sunday afternoon my good woman and I confabulate about a movie and sleepover. It’s a long weekend. I warn her that I think things are not quite right with me. Will she risk contamination? To her eternal credit, she does.
I fight this damn thing for three days: scummy throat, bleary eyes, aching back. On Monday I ride, but feel crap less than a kilometre down the road. I baulk at the foot of the Dandenongs and ride a weird 35-kilometre, late-afternoon, up-hill-and-down-dale circuit through Kilsyth, Montrose, Mooroolbark, Chirnside Park, Wonga Park and Warranwood.
I plan to ride Tuesday and don’t feel too bad, but work grabs me and won’t let go. Wednesday I have Donna on my mind. I need to grind up an inexorable ascent. Three Wednesdays from this one I’ll be in Paris en route to the Massif Central, the French Alps and the Pyrénées. I figure the ride up Donna will either kill this bug or kill me.
I can’t sleep. I get up at 3:29 and busy myself around the house. I pack for my commute to Bendigo. I’m running and hosting a forum on Friday. Thirty people are coming from all over the state. So much to do.
I cough and cough and sneeze and blow, and marvel at life’s ability to remind me how insignificant my woes are even in the pantheon of minor events.
And things are about to get a whole lot worse.

baw baw challenge

Mick sends an email to the French travellers. He has a complimentary ticket for the Baw Baw Challenge, a 120km run out of Warragul on Saturday 9 April. I’m straddling the bike at the starting area, but only because the ride doesn't ascend Mt Baw Baw. The title refers to the Shire of. 

We’re away on time, me in the second group of twenty. Up and over the brick arch spanning the station and rail lines, a right and out to Darnum on flat roads. Little surges and knots and the pace settles and riders find groups that suit them.

I haven’t ridden group for so long. About seven kms out, I chase a small group and hang on. No point doing it all alone at the start. Save some energy in the bunch. We find a rhythm on the back road to Trafalgar where we hand a left and head north into the Great Divide.

The road undulates its way to Willow Grove, the ascents short and straightforward. Up to Hill End they get longer, steeper, until two long grunty drags split the groups up toward Fumina South. Over the top we’re into rain forest.

From here to Noojee there are two climbs, the second brutal, but a bag-piper pipes each rider up and over the top. Two rapid descents follow, the second hurtling me down the mountain at 79kph.

A rock-steady climb of five per cent follows on a car-free back road that winds up to Neerim. The legs are seriously wounded now and I’ve ridden on my own for 30 kms since the Hill End refreshment stop, buffeted by a north-westerly bringing in an afternoon weather change.

A final refreshment stop at Neerim Junction. I see fewer riders. Few pull in for cake, lollies, water. I mount up for the undulations back to Warragul, mostly downhill with a tailwind, but with a sad final insult: five kilometres into the breeze to come home.

The organisers say it's a 119 km course. I have it at 124.66kms, which I cover at an average of 26kph and four hours and 48 minutes in the saddle. We climb 1670 metres over the journey and the top gradient is 15 per cent.

It’s a beautiful, tough but fair ride through pasture, woodlands, forested foothills and the rain forest at the top of the range.

I drive back to the city, direct to Mick’s shop in Croydon. This is my last ride on a creaky Dura Ace system. Age seems to be getting the better of it. The SRAM Apex is to have a go.    

up in smoke

My man Carey at Gembrook writes to ask if I’m a puff of smoke. I write like a Dervish for a couple of months, then nothing. Did I fall off the bike, he asks. No, I fell off the wagon.

It all begins on what turns out to be my last day at the gym. I pick up my not-too-heavy barbell and am about to make my way onto the floor for pump class but realise that the rick I felt in my back is not to be trifled with. I don’t risk the rick, but by night I’m a wreck anyway.

My back incapacitates me for weeks. I stop going to the gym. I stop riding. I cease writing about riding and write about my back. It doesn’t respond to the usual remedies; my recovery takes time. My twin concerns are when can I ride and can I lift everything that needs lifting when I move house?

Moving house becomes the issue. It consumes all energy, all effort, all time. I allow five weeks but it hardly seems enough time to organise a household of belongings, to pack it, to stack it, to load it, to drive it 200kms, to unload it, and to clean up after it. And to go to work three days a week and present some semblance of an interested employee.

In fact I do manage some sporadic rides, and some spasmodic writing, But I don’t edit and I don’t post. My one-man business sparks up and I’m training groups of people in Sydney and around country Victoria. I desperately need the money to fund the trip to France I’m no longer training for.

2011 is all about climbing real and metaphorical mountains. Moving house; moving city; moving building and office at work; training; renovating my house; re-educating myself for a job when my current job ends at the end of the year; and 28 days in France riding up the Alps and the Pyrénées smack in the middle of it all.

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?”