A Cyclist's Diary

By: Janet Underwood
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:25:38
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On the coach travelling endlessly through a hot, green French countryside, two women and twenty three men on a 26 hour journey to Haute Alpes. Tired and fidgety after a four hour sleep in a cramped ferry cabin, I think about what lies ahead and why on earth I have decided to do this.

The bikes are in a trailer on the back of the coach displayed on rather fabulous bike racks. I have my best Rapha cycle kit, my new SPD shoes and my Omega bike is shiny and freshly serviced. Ready for anything, ready for the Alps, probably more ready than I am.

Keyed up, adrenaline buzzing we set off in the cool dawn light, jostling for position, slowing then speeding as the 9,000 cyclists set about this mammoth task. Friends and well-wishers snap the final souvenir photos as we pick up speed and it’s everyone for themselves.

Surrounded by cyclists I feel terribly alone with my hopes, fears and strategies. I carry 2.5 litres of fluid; seven energy bars and one pitta bread with cheese fill the rear pockets of my jersey, I must remember to eat, not easy when racing between 16 and 37 miles an hour for mile after mile. My heart rate monitor reads 166 I need to slow down but dare not. Small peletons of male racers pass me and I struggle to attach myself to their slipstream. A long open road with a persistent head wind forces me into the masses for shelter and finally the first refreshment stop. It is logjammed with bikes, riders, plastic bottles and local people desperately trying to stem the tide of rubbish piling up outside their cottages. An ambulance forces it’s way through the desperate mass, siren piping importantly. I catch my breath, fill my bottles, nod to some of my compatriots from the coach and prepare myself for the mountains, now only a stones throw away.

The beginnings of the climb fool us with it’s gently ascending road through a beautiful gorge of tunnels and rushing rapids. Sheer drops to oblivion drift us to the centre of the road and then we are climbing out of the tree line into a plateau of sizzling heat, a village ahead is all I see. My peripheral vision catches the hairpins stretching above it into the horizon with miniature cyclists forever toiling along it’s flanks. I see myself in my pink Rapha cycle jersey, riding up that hot mountain road. Cicadas sound like tinnitus in my ears and whenever I hear them I see myself on that endless journey, riding to whatever it was I was looking for.

Water in my bottle is hot and tastes of plastic, my legs turn slowly, the clicking gears and heavy breathing of the cyclists surrounding me. We don’t have to be here, we have chosen this, this is what we have spent nine months of our lives training for.

This is what we have curtailed our social lives, examined our diets, spent small fortunes in cycle shops for. To be together on this mountainside, unable to eat, speak or think. Taken to our limits just to say we did it, we suffered, we tested ourselves and our machines. Life disappears at times like this. One becomes a lone individual in a mass of lone individuals kept going just by the forward movement and the thought of the long, cool freedom of descending eventually.

Janet loves cycling and lives in London. She works as a Reflexologist, internet marketer and property investor. http://www.SportingEdge.biz

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