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.