b2c3

It’s an age-old adage in cycling circles that big boys can’t climb hills. If you’re riding in France, you might substitute cols for hills; hence, big boys can’t climb cols.

One day years ago outside Boronia Station I’m approached by three strapping, swaggering lads. I brace myself for trouble. Imagine my relief when one of them looks me over and inquires affably, “Ow’s it goin’, big boy?”

I don’t see myself as a big boy but apparently others do. I’m a mere five foot ten in the old money, or 178 centimetres in the new currency. I’d be a rover in AFL if they hadn’t morphed into amorphous mid-fielders, or mids. I’m rover size but robust: big bones, sturdy legs, a more than adequate torso. And big boys can’t climb cols.

This thought is plastered to my forehead as I stand on the pedals and heave my trunk and branches up Straws Lane to Mount Macedon. I sit down again because when I do stand my back wheel spins on the wet road surface.

A sign at the bottom where the lane comes off the Woodend-Lancefield Road indicates a 10 per cent gradient for two kilometres and it’s right on the mark, with some eight percent sections compensated by some at 12. Any way you dice it, it’s a grunt.

Straws Lane turns left into the Mount Macedon Road proper and another sign warns of more 10 per cent climbing. This one isn’t accurate: the grade never gets above seven. But by now I’m in the cloud and it’s cool and moist. I eschew the chance to punish myself for an extra four kilometres at the turn-off to the memorial cairn. I’m already 908 metres above sea level and I have a train to catch.

I descend the front of the mountain under brakes but still crack 79kph. I pedal through the leafy Macedon township to the old Calder Highway, now Black Forest Drive, and climb in dribs and drabs up to Woodend. Will I wait here for the train or risk beating it to Kyneton where I started my ride into a stiff southerly?

With a less stiff southerly behind me I power out of town, zigging left along the Carlsruhe Central Road and zagging north onto the Kyneton-Trentham Road. I’ll catch the 11:38 easily.

The station mistress does nice things to my libido, a most unusual characteristic for a railway employee. I alight at 12:22 and I’m home at 12:25 with 66.11kms under the belt at 24.5kph.

Big boys can climb hills; they just can’t do it quickly.

gearing down

Riding up Buller something other than my legs starts to grate, to grind, to click, to clack. Not good sounds from my bottom bracket. I don’t need my triple, my 30-tooth, but I couldn’t use it anyway. It skates big time. Something has to be done before France—replace the drive-train, run the new one in, get used to the feel, the practice of it. Something has to be done now.

I do a little web search. Both the legendary Sheldon Brown and Bike Noob have something to say on alternatives to triples. Sheldon likes my dying Shimano Dura Ace triple but says it has serious shortcomings. The bolt holes are unique and difficult, which I discovered when making a middle ring changeover two months ago.

Bike Noob introduces the SRAM Apex—50 x 34 at the front and 11 to 32 at the back. Packs as much grunt as a triple and has more useable gears, like all 20, compared to the triple’s 27 possibilities but only 16 useful gears. Mick can do the job for $770 plus labour.

I drop the bike in Saturday arvo after the Baw Baw Challenge ride. Mick’s busy fitting a customer; hands me the box of components to inspect: brakes, callipers and shifters, rear set of sprockets, and ... I save the magic chainrings till last. And read the unmagic figures 53-39.

Mick says they often get it wrong. He’ll call them first thing Monday and hope he can get the part for the job for me by Tuesday afternoon when I come down to Croydon. 

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.

back spasm

Were there a God, back spasm would be his bounteous gift to unbelievers like me, his way of making me scream his name.

I perch on the edge of a chair as I write, unable to sit any other way, and probably unable to stand when I finish writing. Back spasm—the agonising grab as the back muscles resist almost any movement, especially straightening the back.

Seeking medical rather than numinous explanation, I ask Dr Google what causes back spasm, but his explanations don’t match the half a dozen causes of my personal experience: tying a shoelace, picking up a bath mat, reaching for the toilet paper, vacuum cleaning, and masturbating.

The sixth was the first and it happened in 1976 during the final minutes of the penultimate game of the season between Newstead and Campbells Creek when an opponent knocked me off balance as I executed a handpass. My hand missed the ball. I was pinged for a throw and pinged my back in the process.

My first and most excruciating experience of back spasm and the only cause I regard as legitimate. How can reaching for toilet paper warrant being rendered helpless for several days? Back spasm is the single most debilitating insult (injury is not the right word) to a person’s physical and mental well-being.      

I ask Dr Google about treatment but he doesn’t have a definitive answer to that either. Years ago I asked a physiotherapist treating my broken shoulder what to do for back spasm. She showed me some exercises.

So I clamber with tremendous trepidation from the unlofty height of my own 178cms, bent at 45 degrees from the waist, to the floor, where I lie groaning: “Oh God, oh God …”

On the floor I lie flat on my back on a purple exercise mat, compose myself, then lift my legs alternately into the air. Not far into the air. Five on each leg. Then I lift and cross each leg over the other. Five on each leg. I curl into a ball.

I roll over gingerly onto my front and repeat the leg-lifting. Then it’s onto my back again and curl into a ball. Finally I stretch full length and ‘walk’ my buttocks away from my torso.

Gradually these exercises restore me to myself. One day soon I will be able to get from the floor to an upright position without the aid of table legs or door frames; I will be able to wipe my arse without sweating fearfully; I will be able to turn over in bed in less then five minutes; and I will be able to throw a leg over the bike.

My training program already in tatters and now this.   

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.