Here in Berlightie we’ve been suffering an extended heatwave, and it’s made me do my cycling early in the morning so that I’m back inside during the heat of the day, and for that reason I have been following all of the Tour de France. The scenery is as fascinating as the race, with the helicopters making it a point of honour to spot every Château possible without drifting too far off the roads to not be able to get shots of what’s going on as the race goes up and down and to and fro. I’ve followed the Tour for three or four years now, but previously only the highlights. Seeing it spoke by spoke is showing me just how much more there is to it than just plugging up the climbs. And the castles from the air are wonderful. Scenery is to me what makes the rides worthwhile, I don’t just do it for the breeze.
I’ve been cycling almost every day, and have been going for longer and longer hills as my leg muscles and technique have started coming back to me. I gave myself a rest day when we took the cheap excursion train to Weymouth, and then noticed the next morning as I began to climb the four hundred feet towards the nearest town that part of me didn’t want to do it. It’s only about ten minutes of lowest-gear work, but as I neared the foot of the ascent I could feel a part of me trying to whine that it was a bit too much for a first effort after a day off, shouldn’t I have an easier ride and tackle the climb tomorrow? I set myself a bail-out point where I could branch off of and take a side road, and slowly went down through the gears and up through the trees. I reached and passed the first bail-out point and entered the second rise, and once again felt that little inner complaint. I set a second bail-out point and worked slowly towards that, reached it, passed it, and committed to the final third of the ascent. By the time I reached the top and joined the lane there was no further whining.
The next morning, now heading in a different direction, I felt that same whine as I started up towards the ridge to the north, and once again set myself bail-outs which I reached and passed. It’s a luxury I have which the riders in the Tour don’t, although they do have the option of retirement. I wonder what they use to quell their inner whines?
For years I’ve been an avid fan of motorsport, particularly Formula One, but this is likely to be the last year I watch it, or even care about it. Mostly, that’s because all the terrestrial TV channels have now lost the options to even show truncated highlights. If I want to continue to indulge my passion for seeing the same cars going round and round the same scenery for two hours, I’m going to have to pay Sky TV for the pleasure. By contrast, I can watch the Tour de France for several hours free of charge (apart from the TV license fee), see stunning views of the landscape, and watch a sport where team orders don’t seem as unfair as they do in F1. In fact, the more I come to understand what exactly is going on in the bike race, the more I appreciate just how much strategy and planning is going on. Seeing Raikkonen yet again being told to let Vettel cruise past him just makes me want to switch off. Seeing Froome and Thomas working together is by contrast fascinating.
Talking of which, it’s worrying just how partisan some of the spectators are about Froome. A judgement has been reached and accepted by the contestants, but not, it seems, those on the side-lines. The boos aren’t new, I remember Martin Brundle trying to protest to the fans when Vettel was given them, The giant inhaler running alongside Froome in Italy was amusing, but the punches and hurling fluids at him are I think totally unacceptable, and it is a reminder that the world is full of people who sometimes don’t know when to keep their whining inside them. If some of the most vocal detractors of him were to try and ride a bicycle up the same slopes where they are prepared to swing a fist or empty a bottle, I might have a little more sympathy for them, but they won’t, and so I won’t. In “SnowCrash” Neal Stephenson envisaged certain people having “Poor Impulse Control” tattooed on their foreheads as a court-designated sentence. How long before that starts to happen outside the pages of speculative fiction?
The Pedersen can be a slightly tricky thing to get up a steep slope, on some of the worst sections I climb up I have to sometimes lean forwards to prevent the front wheel lifting off the road, but it isn’t possible to stand on the pedals because of the location of the strap to the saddle, it and another part of me make violent and repeated contact if I try the standard cycle trick, so I have to sit it out, literally. The three longest climbs I have to pick from all go up a few hundred feet, and last for between ten and fifteen minutes in the lowest gear. I have however been cheered to see that on the less steep climbs I am now using one or two higher cogs on the rear, and in some cases I can even get up them on the middle chainwheel.
I too have a castle nearby that I can go and visit, though I would have to pay an entrance fee to go close to it, but it lies halfway up a slope, so if I care to ride on dirt tracks I can get my own helicopter view of the ruins caused by a few days in this country’s civil war. There are two other sites of castles I can visit, though both would require dismounting and pushing along muddy footpaths churned up by horses’ hooves. The strange thing about both sites is that neither has a single vestigial stone left, and neither has any sketch, painting, or even plan to show what they looked like. France has taken much better care of their castles than we have, although they were a bit less careful about the heads of their inhabitants.
Just give me the wafers 