the big one

mercredi 20 juillet

Andy Schleck says Alpe d’Huez is mythic. The Tourmalet is a giant. What word can possibly describe the magnificent monster, the beautiful beast that is the Galibier?

From the north it’s a 34km ascent in two parts: the 12kms of the Col du Télégraphe and the 18kms to a bleak point on a ridge that is the Galibier. In between the road descends gently for four kms into Valloire.

Not all of the 16 of us attempt it; not all who attempt it make it. This is the climb I have wanted to test myself against for as long as I've been cycling seriously.

Rain falls all night. I have an aching tooth. My back hurts, and I feel generally crap. I slither out of the top bunk like a slug. Will we ride today? The prospect of the Galibier in sleety rain or snow is hellish.

We drive to the start point at St Michel de Maurienne (90 minutes). The wipers swish rain off the windscreen all the way. The cloud is low; it tells us nothing. Each individual will decide whether or not to ride. We extract the bikes from the van and assemble, grease and tweak them at the base of the climb to the Télégraphe.

Expectancy and apprehension mount. Riders don slickers as a shower hits. We depart. The treed road to the Télégraphe twists its way at a consistent grade on a good surface. It’s hard in its own right, and a fine warm-up for the big grind to come. And what a grind it is.

I begrudge evey metre lost on the four km descent to the ski resort of Valloire. Finding the road through towns is often a mystery. Only the stream of bikes guides me out of Valloire. The valley of the Valloirette River is shallow and easy going, until it isn’t, about three clicks up the valley.

No tree breaks the rock ramparts, the scree slopes or the alpine pasture above Valloire. Above Plan Lachat the climb gets serious: steep, switchbacked, without guardrails, vertiginous drops. Each cyclist must find a way to overcome this climb. The aloneness is serious, and profoundly personal.

The weather clears and we climb in 18-degree sun, sweating and grunting, each pedal-stroke propelling us a metre or so closer to the Holy Grail. Postcard peaks clad in sunlit snow surround us, pilgrims on a sacred mission; upward and upward,stroke by stroke, inch by inch up the final gruelling kilometre.

It might be midsummer but snow lines the road and chills the wind whistling off the Grand Galibier at 3229 metres. The we aspire to is at 2645 metres. Tomorrow it will witness the highest ever stage finish in the history of the Tour de France.

The temperature at the top is seven degrees. My fingers freeze in the breeze before I get back on the bike after the obligatory photo under the Galibier sign.

The descent is perilous, the road lumpy, your safety entirely in your own hands. Hulk stops every kilometre because he can’t grip the bars. I descend alone, just as I climbed alone.

The final descent from the Télégraphe is a fabulous blast on a wide clear road with sweeping curves and tight hairpins and only a taxi in front of me prevents me getting to the bottom faster.

What a day!

[73.16kms @ 15.6kph. Montage 2297m, Max alt 2660m, max climb 15%]

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.

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?”