Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  But back to Pinot, whose ride up the Rettenbachferner exemplified the current thinking about the most efficient way to ride up mountains: no explosive efforts, ride your own pace, let the attackers burn their matches to no avail. It was riding and using your brain.

  There are other ways to be clever when climbing. For example: drafting on climbs (something that amateur cyclists surely never think about). Joe again: ‘I make this mistake frequently,’ he says. ‘We’ll be on, say, a 5 or 6 per cent climb and so we’re climbing at 27 km/h, and me, I have a lot of drag because I’m so tall, so not being on the wheel at that speed, even though it’s not super fast, makes a pretty big difference.’ So you have to stay on the wheel. But what if it all kicks off? ‘A lot of times when there’s a lot of accelerations my tendency is to want to ride more steady. I could follow, but it’s costly’ – here he means that pushing into the red too much can leave you unable to dig deep to follow the big moves later – ‘so there’s that moment’s hesitation where I say to myself, “I’m gonna ride my own pace.” Then all of a sudden, that group of guys moves up the road together and you’re the only one not in it and they’re all benefiting from each other’s draft and you’re pushing watts in the wind by yourself.’

  Maybe that’s using your head too much.

  He continues: ‘Or you have these fast climbs with a little bit of headwind, and they wait and jump around the switchback where it turns to tailwind. You don’t jump, and then you make the next switchback, turn and it’s headwind, and there’s five guys rotating up there and then you’re just riding by yourself in the headwind, so then you’re screwed.’

  Does he mean that, using your head can – paradoxically – sometimes mean losing it?

  ‘Yeah. In some instances you have to ride like Pinot and use your head, and stay within yourself and time trial it, and other times you have to kind of ride without a brain. Even for just a minute or two.’

  And here we’re back, full circle, to pain. When it gets too much, when you really have to climb well, you just have to grit your teeth and get on with it. ‘You have to be training good and eating good, the power has to be there, your weight can’t be too high, but then when it comes to actually performing on the day, for the most part climbing well is about just turning your brain off,’ Joe says. ‘Like, sometimes I think I could be a better bike racer if I was a bit dumber. A lot of great bike riders are kinda stupid. You know, have nothing going on up there, just primal instinct.’

  Of his big results, Joe has had a couple of contrasting wins. The brainer, if we can call it that, was at the Tour of Utah in 2015. The race had started disastrously when Tom Danielson, their designated GC rider, disappeared from team dinner the night before the first stage to take a phone call and didn’t come back to finish his burrito. It was the US Anti-Doping Agency informing him he’d tested positive for testosterone (he has denied taking it deliberately, blaming contaminated supplements), and so he was forced to withdraw. The team was in disarray and morale was low. But in the first stage Cannondale’s Alex Howes took second place in the sprint, the mood lightened and the team began to work towards placing Joe at the top of the GC.

  Stage 6, the penultimate stage, finished on a 15-kilometre climb up Cottonwood Canyon to the Snowbird ski resort. They made a plan the night before: teammate Ben King would get in the break and Joe would attack and join him at around 5 kilometres to go. The next day King did in fact get in the break, and near the bottom of the climb Joe made his move to bridge over. ‘I go across to him, he does a suicide pullfn3 and we just smash everyone on the final climb,’ Joe says. Plan: executed. Jersey: taken. The final stage included two categorised climbs. The first, Wolf Creek, was quiet; the second, the 2,726-metre Empire Pass, saw Joe stick to Michael Woods, his jersey challenger, and endure a fast descent to the line where the two men finished in the group just behind the break – with Woods unable to make up any of the 50 seconds Joe had gained the day before. ‘I’d say I come into the races now with bit more depth, and I’m a bit more calm under pressure. You know guys are going to attack you, you know guys are going to try to take the jersey on the last day, whatever, but just being confident: I was good yesterday, so I’m sure I’ll be good today. I don’t need to panic over anything,’ Joe told me.

  The other win – let’s call it the no-brainer – was in that Baby Giro stage on the legendary Gavia, the same side of the climb that made Andy Hampsten famous. It had been a crazy race, and not untypical of the chaos of Italian amateur racing – ‘There’s really no team in control the whole time, there’s loads of crashes, everyone’s yelling, but the Baby Giro is a cool race,’ Joe says. Despite a runaway dog almost unseating him in the early time trial, Joe took the leader’s jersey. But he then punctured on the strade bianche, the white gravel roads of Tuscany, and lost a lot of time waiting for a team car to appear out of the dust.

  You must have been frantic, I say.

  ‘Yeah, I had no teammates there,’ he replies. ‘Like, shit, I’m losing this race now, just standing on the side of the road. I was two minutes down because of that, and [the Russian rider Ilnur] Zakarin took the jersey.’

  The second-to-last stage was a killer: two first-category and three HC climbs, finishing on the Gavia. ‘We did 5,200 metres of climbing in 160 kilometres, in just under six hours,’ Joe says. ‘It was literally just up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down …’ He counts the ups and the downs in his head, and finishes: ‘Up.’ At the top of the penultimate climb, he reached into his pocket to find the energy gels he could have sworn he still had were no longer there (he’d later find them stuffed between his pinned-on race number and the pocket). He descended, but at the bottom of the Gavia, he had neither teammates nor a team car (the car had suffered a flat tyre). And no water. ‘So I was like, I have no food, no bottles, and there’s still a 20-kilometre finishing climb to go. I’m gonna bonk for sure. I’m rooting around, nothing.’

  Nothing to do but turn off the brain, and hope.

  Joe continues: ‘I went from the bottom of the Gavia, just full bore, so I was all by myself for like probably 45 minutes. With about 5 kilometres to go, the team car came up. But it wasn’t ours, it was the Dutch national team car, with Marcello Albasini, our director, in the back seat. He said, “Hey man, you’re gonna win, keep going, you’re going to win!” I was like, “Can I get a bottle?!” but it was too late, I had to keep going.

  ‘I was super focused so I didn’t think about it, but when I got to the finish I was completely fucked. Another few kilometres I would have run out of juice, I would have lost 10 minutes. I was literally cross-eyed when I got to the finish line.’

  ‘Why am I doing this?’

  When it gets tough the pros ask themselves that question too. Pain and pain management are in the job description, and that must be a difficult thing to reconcile yourself with. And aside from the suffering of making an effort or hanging on while a rival turns the screw, there is the psychological pain, the affront to the ego, of being dropped. The only resolution to the impossible situation is the impossible situation. If I took any one thing from that (tuna) Niçoise conversation with Joe, it was that mountains are an opportunity for a rider like him to control and manage suffering – to deal with his own and make life insufferable for those around him. This makes the mountains – in addition to being a beautiful backdrop for this battle for control – an external manifestation of this largely internalised struggle of muscles and wills. A darkness visible. (Whether or not the spectator’s voyeurism is healthy is another question.) It’s what causes Joe to say, as we sit in the sun and talk about glorious, sunny five-hour training rides on deserted switchback climbs, ‘That’s when I can’t believe I get paid to do this!’ And then, in the next breath: ‘The thing is, there’s other times when I’d say, I would pay anything not to do this.’

  Without the incentives of racing, let alone professional sport, what do we amateurs get out of cycling up a mountain that mitigates this? Succeeding in a challenge; feeli
ng the achievement of reaching the top; being relieved of our effort in a place in which we are allowed not to pedal any more … certainly all of that. But part of it, I’m sure, is in the complicated relationship between pleasure and pain itself.

  Some ‘normal’ people (i.e. non-cyclists) can have a very limiting attitude towards pain. Regularly – not all that often, but regularly – I crash when I’m riding my bike. Thankfully I’ve never had a bad one, but maybe once a year it gives me something to think about. I remember an old friend wincing, once, when he saw my bloodied fingernails and palms, and gravel and twig scrapes all up my arm, that had been caused by a tangle of handlebars and a rather graceless high-speed bellyflop into a great big muddy puddle. He could not imagine willingly participating in an activity in which physical pain was at some point and on some fundamental level inevitable. Or not any more: I remember him, us, as seven-year-olds, covered in grazes from exploring, or football or whatever, when our bruises were the visible proof of the fun we’d had. Even now, I cannot see a world without those highs and lows. That physical pain (and I often think this even when I hear of greater hurt, of friends badly injured descending or in traffic accidents), weighed against the pleasure cycling provides, seems a small price to pay. That muddy-puddle day, my friends said that all they could see, as I flew headfirst off the bike, was me smiling.

  In 1899, an American psychologist and philosopher of the emotions, William James, wrote: ‘I cannot believe that our muscular vigour will ever be a superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which it will not be needed for fighting the old heavy battles against Nature, it will always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humoured and easy of approach.’ It’s pretty certain he wasn’t talking about bike riding, but I think his point stretches: the peaks are good at keeping us on the level.

  I’m not claiming that my thoughts on pleasure and pain are typical, and only the weirdest masochists must actually like crashing, but my position, refined through numerous scrapes, is probably somewhere on a spectrum which has, at its far end, incidents like Tyler Hamilton winning solo in the Pyrenees, after an 80-kilometre breakaway, with a broken collarbone (he rode more than 3,000 kilometres in the 2003 Tour de France with said injury, finishing fourth).fn4 Somewhere also on the spectrum is the more usual ‘no pain no gain’ training mentality, and still elsewhere is the suffering of riding up a mountain. These are qualitatively different from the other real pains in life – the heartaches and deceptions, the illnesses and goodbyes – in that they are mainly a product of our own will and are therefore entirely optional. And given that climbing a mountain is optional, it’s worth asking why we choose it. In other words, asking what this pain means. ‘Pain is a march by protesters who’ve forgotten to paint their signs,’ wrote Tim Krabbé in The Rider – a great way of expressing the idea that, when cycling, it is a signal whose meaning we determine, and that we can choose our attitude towards it. Jens Voigt, for a long time many cycling fans’ favourite hard man, called pain ‘my favourite enemy’ and ‘my old friend’. For him, it had a multiplicity of meanings. When he felt it in training, it meant he was training well; when he was racing, it was an indicator that he was doing his job (and even that it might be time to attack, because he knew that if he was hurting others would be too); when he was injured, it was proof that he was still alive and all the relevant bits were still attached.

  For non-racers, there’s probably something of the last one – that enlivening feeling – in the pain of climbing a mountain. Plus the aforementioned knowledge that we’re pushing ourselves, achieving something … and in that there is, maybe, a promise of happiness to come. Because, much more than in the muddy-puddle scrapes, pain on a mountain is not simply the by-product of pleasure but in some way necessary for it. There’s something to make you smile in it. Tim Hilton, a British club cyclist, writes in his memoir, One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers:

  Suddenly I was a bird: uncatchable, self-contained, soaring and zooming towards the horizon, free from human worry and therefore happy. Cycling is about physical pleasure and happiness … Pleasure is more or less our goal and daily bread; and at some point in a good ride pleasure and suffering are one and the same thing.

  It is a complex alchemy that turns pain into pleasure. We come back, again and again, climb the same hill 10 times in a row to teach our bodies to endure the suffering. For all the pleasures training brings, it is also a way of discovering pain. By training we understand and extend how much pain we can inflict upon ourselves. Pain becomes our currency and our goal. It is something to rely on, to control and to harness. To relish. ‘It never gets easier,’ Greg LeMond, three-times winner of the Tour de France, is supposed to have said. ‘You just get faster.’

  Some of this became clearer to me one June day in 2009, somewhere near the top of the Col du Galibier; certain things came sharply into focus just as everything else disintegrated. The Galibier and its precursor, the much smaller Col de Télégraphe, are two of the most legendary Alpine climbs, first crossed by the Tour de France in 1911, and very often ridden in tandem. They rise a total of 1,900 vertical metres over 35 kilometres, from lowland to ski resort to a desolate, barren theatre of high peaks. That day, about halfway up the Galibier, after 120 mountainous kilometres in the saddle, I realised I was running on empty and that, with no possibility of going back, stopping or finding any food, the only option was to keep on going … and that consequently I was pretty much done for. I was at Plan Lachat, the point in the climb where the road reaches the head of a valley and crosses the beautiful chattering stream you’ve been riding next to, takes a zigzag up the steep valley side into a hostile, less earthly place. Increasingly lightheaded, I climbed higher and higher, and as the world grew bigger around me, my sense of self diminished. I toiled interminably, past the last ruined livestock shacks and growing pockets of snow and ice, as the wind chilled and a gathering storm blocked out the sun above the steep road ahead. And then to a soundtrack of Pharoah Sanders in my headphones, a spectacular implosion like a supernova becoming a black hole, and a deconstruction began. My vision darkened around the edges and the world collapsed in on itself, folding like an empty cardboard box into two dimensions and, trapped between a rock and the infinite sky and dwarfed by the vast indifference of the mountains, as hail fell from clouds dark as bruises all around me, something in my mind cracked and two beams of sunlight, God’s fingers, reached diagonally down into the valley below. And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?

  It was my best day on a bike ever.

  Sometimes, days when the thinking stops are the most pleasurable. Often I go out into the hills on my bike with the intention of puzzling through some problem, or a writer’s block; and once the kit is on and the pedals turning, what happens is … nothing. Sweet respite from the everyday cares. Things that pass through instead:

  What’s the difference between a seed and a nut?

  My stupid brother

  A ham-and-cheese sandwich

  That girl (the girls) I should have kissed at school but didn’t

  What age that guy who just passed was when he bought that car he’s driving

  Hub airports and the Airbus A380

  Bunkers

  74 divided by 16

  Where do flies go when there’s a storm?

  Everything and nothing, in other words, interspersed with long periods of glorious blankness. And then, in the shower afterwards, the thoughts start flowing and the door unlocks and the breakthrough comes.

  Sure, that’s a bit different to the sort of nothing you get from climbing a mountain. That requires total concentration and commitment, of the sort you can lose yourself in: if you’re doing it right, you can only think of one thing – up. And, in a fragmented world of WhatsApp and Facebook and cat GIFs, and jobs that steal our time but not our a
ttention, to have a single, all-consuming purpose is a release. It is so satisfying and so outside normal experience that it might only be interpreted as happiness. Up, up, up. One thought … and simultaneously none. We are conscious animals – half ape, half angel, said Benjamin Disraeli – but every now and then, we want to forget, even for a brief moment. When I’m climbing well, through pure effort I ride away from thought and leave my conscious being struggling a hairpin or two behind. I drop myself. Zeno’s paradox: what is in motion is neither in the space where it is nor in the space where it isn’t. And then total exhaustion, alone in a hailstorm on the roof of the Alps is, perhaps, another step further down the road towards the old sublime notions of ecstasy and oblivion.