Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

Up above Bousiéyas, I was climbing through the high sheep pastures. Around the Camp des Fourches lay meadows full of tiny beautiful wildflowers. Purple and white saxifrage, yellow primroses, moss campion, peacock-eye pinks and orchids, and giant thistles that the sheep shun. On the slopes underneath a Second World War bunker, a sprinkling of white daisies looking from afar like the last remnants of snow. Higher up there is glacier crowfoot, glacier buttercup, alpine bellflowers and barberry, a peculiar and tenacious rosette-like plant with furry leaves and a delicate white flower. High-altitude flora these, because now we were very high and each breath was hard won. The trees had gone, the grass, disappeared – I must have been near where Bahamontes saw his name in the snow – and I was surrounded by grey flysch, a crumbling, dark, slipping, sliding rock. The Tinée river was now a tiny ribbon, or several tiny ribbons joining to make one. Here in the cirque beneath the Cime was its source, where it bubbled up, and I pondered the minor miracle of water, which can only descend and is nowhere seen to go up, appearing at the top of a mountain. So easily, it seemed, while I was labouring and so short of breath.

  Periodically good feelings returned, but mainly it was the beauty of it, the opening out to a world of light and sky and an uninterrupted view across a sea of peaks, that carried me through, the infinitely unfolding world shifting infinitesimally with every pedal stroke. The pain that comes and goes is part of this lesson in relativity. I am small, this mountain is big. The storm is terrible when I’m in it, but while the sun is shining and on me and those clouds are distant they are but a picturesque ornament to the mountainside. I am here. Soon I will be there. Even the mountain is not permanent, but compared to the barracks below … the road, the paint on the walls, this sunshine, my discomfort. This too shall pass.

  ‘They rode on the moon,’ L’Équipe wrote in 1993, about the Bonette Tour stage. My riding companions were waiting for me at the top in the lunar barrens, stamping their feet, jackets on, to keep warm. A passing cyclist offered to take our photo together, but we did not hang around for that ritual. I thought of John-Lee Augustyn as we descended through the corner where he took his fall. ‘I was scared that I was going to fall to Hell but luckily it was just a slide. You don’t know what’s waiting on the other side,’ he told the Daily Mail, describing his relief at finding himself on a slope and not in a crevasse. ‘Yes, people will remember me being first over the Bonette but I think they will remember me falling off it more.’

  A quick hamburger pit stop at the gîte in Bousiéyas and we dove back down, snaking through the turns, overtaking camper vans, hunched tightly down onto the handlebars, knees knocked in, for all the pleasure of gravity’s free speed. And then we were in the valley again, howling into the headwind on the false flat. Riding in a tight group of three, taking turns to push it on the front and peeling off to recover in the windbreak at the back. Push, breathe, rest, breathe, repeat. Soon we were back on the bike path down the Var, and then we hit the coast. Finally, just before six, we were back at the beach where we started, busy now with summer crowds, and we jumped in the sea in our bib shorts, to replace salt sweat with salt sea and wash off the dust of the highest road in Europe.

  Oh yeah, and I left the pebble at the top, next to the memorial inscription at the highest point. Because all stones dream of flying, right?

  Chapter 5

  HOW KoMs CONQUERED THE WORLD

  Or, the mountains of King George and pushing the envelope in search of up

  It is a few days before one of the major World Tour races, and Joe Dombrowski and his flatmate Larry Warbasse (who is also an American pro cyclist) have convened a barbecue for their friends, some of whom will be racing too. There aren’t too many carbs on view, but we eat delicious chicken and sausages and salad on the terrace, and at some point the conversation shifts round to the Col de la Madone.

  You might have heard of the Madone. It was made famous by Lance Armstrong in his book It’s Not About the Bike (now found filed under ‘fiction’ not ‘autobiography’) and he recounts how it was where he went to test his form, his watts-per-kilo and all that kind of thing, sometimes with the notorious and disgraced Dr Michele Ferrari. Armstrong frequented the Madone when he lived in Nice. It starts very close to the promenade in the seaside town of Menton, around 35 kilometres away, and then winds up into the mountains, reaching a height of precisely 927 metres in around 13 kilometres. That ‘around’ is important, as you’ll see. It’s a small road with very little traffic, and therefore a good spot to do a 30-minute all-out training effort. Before the 1999 Tour Armstrong vowed to take his time below 31 minutes. ‘If I went to the Madone two weeks before the Tour and went as hard as I could, I knew if I was going to win the Tour or not,’ Cycling Weekly has quoted him as saying. He did get under that magic 31-minute goal just before the 1999 race and duly went on to win … and the rest, all the rest, is, as they say, history. The Madone has, thanks to Lance, become something of a celebrity climb. The Trek Madone bike range was named after it, and when roadies come to the area to cycle it’s one of the first to tick off the list.

  However, the Madone had pedigree before Armstrong. It was Tony Rominger, a Swiss pro who won the Giro and three Vueltas in the 1990s, who first used it as a training ramp when he moved to Monaco. It has pedigree after Armstrong too, because there is still intense interest in the Madone from local pros. Just a week or two before the barbecue it was reported in the cycling press that Richie Porte had beaten Chris Froome’s Madone time, and Porte was now the acknowledged King of the Madone among pros. Both of their times were significantly quicker than Lance’s, but I confess to the assembled barbecue-munchers that I’m unsure how comparable any of the times are because there is – in the non pro-cycling fraternity, at least – some confusion about where all these guys were starting their stopwatches. Confusion, in part, because a sub-50-minute time is hugely respectable for an amateur, and that gap of 20 minutes – 20 minutes – makes you feel they might as well be riding another hill altogether. Around the table it is quickly agreed that the Team Sky start is at a certain bus stop, while most people think that Lance began at the Menton-with-a-slash-through-it city limits sign a little further down. There’s even a moment where it looks like someone might text Lance to find out.

  But I don’t really mind if we get to the bottom of it or not. I like the legend, and I like it that it’s still a real live thing that inspires passion. That even when they’re off duty the pros’ competitive instincts still stand all aquiver about a certain climb that has never featured in a real race, and that there is a circle of friends and rivals where it carries significant meaning.

  Tony Rominger 31'30''

  Lance Armstrong  30'47"

  Tom Danielson 30'24"

  Chris Froome 30'09"

  Richie Porte 29'40"

  That said, the Madone is not one of Joe’s favourites. The ride along the coast to the start is a bit hectic, and the Madone’s surface is too patchy and its gradient too irregular to make it a must-ride destination for training intervals. He confesses he’s never done a proper effort up it: ‘I mean, it’s a good ride, especially in the wintertime because it’s south facing and it’s close to the coast,’ he says, ‘But, I think, part of what I like about riding in the mountains is being “out”, and on the Madone I don’t really feel like I’m out, you know.’ He continues: ‘There are lot of pros who are kind of too cool for Strava but are into the Madone. I mean, I don’t care if I have Strava KoMs or not – Strava’s fun and I like to show people what I’m doing. But there are certainly a lot of pros who are not into [Strava], and it’s interesting that the Madone is more or less the same thing – except it’s done by word of mouth, and I would say it carries a lot more weight. It really is a thing. Like, to the point that Chris and Richie will go up there with full race kit and race wheels and see how fast they can go.’

  You’ll notice that Joe used the ‘S’ word there, a word without which no discussion of the modern art and science of riding up mountains would b
e complete. Strava: a website and smartphone app for recording your rides – distances, routes, speeds – and sharing your achievements with an online community, which has over the past few years become something of a phenomenon, with millions of enthusiastic users around the world. Perhaps its most addictive feature is the King of the Mountain and Queen of the Mountain (KoM and QoM) leaderboards. Search for the Madone on Strava and there will be at least one user-defined ‘segment’ marking the start and the end of the climb, probably plus a few segments for key bits – the first half, say, or the last kilometre.fn1 And each segment will have a leaderboard showing the fastest times recorded on it. Strava allows cyclists to record, compare, congratulate and boast, providing inspiration, motivation and validation in different quantities depending on the individual user, but for Michael Horvath, one of the founders, the most important thing is the ‘friendly competition’, and the connection to people who are passionate about the same activity.

  Strava – the name means ‘strive’ in Swedish – was created by Michael (who is of Swedish extraction) and his friend Mark Gainey. They had been on the Harvard rowing crew together, but after graduating found themselves no longer at the heart of a group of buddies who pushed each other to train harder and get better at their sport, and so they began to train less. ‘What was missing in our lives was that sense of team that we had at Harvard,’ Michael says. ‘And we thought, what if we build a virtual locker room?’ However, this was in the mid-1990s, and the internet was not ready for it: people did not put personal data online, websites were nowhere near dynamic or sophisticated enough to handle it, and GPS tracking was only accurate to around 50 metres. They shelved it and did other things, including launching an unrelated tech start-up. When they thought about it again, in the mid-2000s, technology was catching up with their ideas. They began to create the virtual locker room – the social aspect that would later chime with millions of users. But the KoMs and QoMs that are the hyper-addictive hook came from the work of a software engineer called Davis Kitchel.

  Kitchel was the third original member of the Strava team. He had also been an elite rower and he was working on rowing technology ideas for Dartmouth College, but in his spare time he was tinkering with algorithms that would let him take two different GPS tracks of him cycling up a hill (one that happened to be near Mont Ventoux in France) and compare them. The emerging program would, he realised, also have to consistently recognise the starts and finishes of uphill stretches of road – i.e. know what a ‘climb’ actually was – and then categorise them in Tour de France-style numbers, so that cyclists would know how hard it would be.

  The ur-segment was being born.

  ‘To me it intuitively made sense to create this thing that is now “segments”,’ Davis says. ‘It was born out of the idea that there are these really important stretches of road which are a big part of the reason people are on their bike in the first place. It’s a piece of geography that’s always there. There are sprints and other things that are important and also exciting, but they can happen anywhere. The climbs, they’re there forever, and their story is constantly being written by people riding them.’ He continues: ‘There’s a clarity, a purity of what climbs mean to cyclists. Everything else falls away when you’re on a climb,’

  Gainey was on the west coast of the States; Michael was with Davis out east. Davis says the first segment ridden by anyone other than him alone was likely on the east coast, where he and his friends had a Wednesday group ride. Then Gainey recruited five people in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Davis and Michael five people near them, and it grew from there. The first version of Strava was green, not its now-ubiquitous orange, and it consisted of just a leaderboard, where the small group of friends who’d been invited to join were ranked.

  People liked it. They went riding more often. Soon, some began calling in sick to work so they could ride their bike and take back a lost position on the leaderboard. The team had hit upon something. Michael takes up the story: ‘At the end of summer we took stock and realised that people were really motivated about this idea of comparing themselves against others going uphill. We said, “This is it, the killer proposition.” It resonated with the audience we had and it was all built around the uphill experience.’

  When the site launched publicly in 2009, the leaderboard and the KoM were there (the QoM would follow in 2010). But – of course – Strava did not invent competition, friendly or otherwise. It had simply tapped into cyclists’ pre-existing thoughts and desires. Hotels in Alpine resorts, for example, used to keep books to record times on the local climbs, but the urge to compete – and to climb – goes back much further than that. ‘I don’t think it would have worked otherwise,’ Davis says. ‘It’s difficult to put things in people’s heads that aren’t already there.’ Adds Michael (I talked to them separately, but their stories nicely interweave): ‘It ties into the tradition that the hills are the biggest challenges you can do on the bike, they’re naturally places where you want to keep a record. Some people think it’s really important to be competitive, others think it’s just fun; some people just want to measure their own slow decline, like I’m doing right now!’

  With Strava the difference is that these measurements are not just written in a book, and it’s not just the inner circle who know that Richie Porte is fastest on the Madone.fn2 The whole world can now see that Kenny Elissonde (a Frenchman formerly of La Française des Jeux now riding for Team Sky) has the Strava Madone KoM, and that Ian Boswell of Team Sky has the KoM for the first half. At least, those stats were correct around the time of that barbecue – Boswell had just swiped his one, to his delight, so some poor rider out there was getting the dreaded Strava email: ‘Uh-oh, someone has just taken your KoM on …’ However, with a peloton of pros on their heels, I would bet that those Madone KoMs have swapped hands more than a few times since then.

  OK, so you’re an average guy with a full-time job and you like beer and pizza a little too much to count yourself as a dedicated athlete. On your favourite Strava segment you’re probably up against whippet-thin 19-year-old headbangers at the very least, not to mention the possibility of elite racers and professional cyclists and triathletes. You’re never going to be in the top 100, let alone the top 10, on Box Hill or Mount Baldy or the Madone. But what if you segment the results by weight? And by age? (What one Strava employee has called ‘dad filters’.) Or look at your own performance over time and train to beat your personal record? It’s enough to make any and all of us reach for the skinsuit and the race wheels on every little training spin.

  This phenomenon is known as social facilitation.fn3 It was observed and named in the 19th century by a psychologist at Indiana University called Norman Triplett. He dug through the records of the Racing Board of the League of American Wheelmen and realised that cyclists who raced against competitors were faster than cyclists who raced alone. It may seem self-evident to us now, but other people – ‘friendly competition’ – help us push ourselves and get better.

  And we all want to be better, right?

  It was thanks to Strava that Everesting became a thing. To recap: in the early 1990s a certain George Mallory, South African-born but resident in Melbourne, Australia, had been offered a place on an expedition following in his grandfather’s footsteps climbing Mount Everest via the North Ridge. And while the 30-something Mallory was an experienced climber (given his grandfather’s renown, George Mallory II is reluctant to talk up his own climbing skills), he had a full-time job, and the idea of training for Everest was daunting. ‘I was really invited on that trip because of my grandfather’s good name, not mine!’ he tells me. The first time he went to the Himalaya he had, ‘through misadventure’, spent a night outside at 6,000 metres up: ‘No sleeping bags, no down jackets, very little. To substantially understate the story, we got very cold but managed to survive. No frostbite or anything, but desperately cold,’ he says. ‘As you can imagine, I didn’t ever want to do that again. And so when I got invited to climb Moun
t Everest I was resolute there was no bloody way in the wide world I was going to run out of energy on the mountain and not get back to a tent … Which is why I started hitting Donna Buang as hard as I did. And it worked.’

  Mount Donna Buang is in the Victorian Alps about an hour away from Melbourne. It is quiet and pretty, surrounded by forests and wildlife, and the road up it rises 1,100 metres in total. Figuring that no preparation could be too gruelling for an Everest ascent, George devised what he then thought of as the ultimate bike challenge. He took his inspiration from a rock-climbing exploit he’d read about called the ‘El Cap day’. In wintertime, the legendary El Capitan rock face in the Yosemite National Park is out of bounds to climbers because of the weather. So in the 1970s a group of climbers known as the Stonemasters, which included the legendary free-solo (that is, on your own, without ropes) climber John Bachar, used to scale multiple separate routes around Joshua Tree until they had totalled the same height – 3,000 feet – in a day. It was a technical challenge, a training exercise, even a bit of a game. In a similar vein, Mallory and a friend climbed five separate routes on the south wall of Blouberg (a famous South African climbing spot) in 24 hours, including two by torchlight, which sounds to this non-climber like no mean feat. And then, having emigrated to a new country, and with Mount Everest looming on his metaphorical horizon, George decided to cycle eight times up Donna Buang, 8,800 metres of up: it would be the El Cap day on a bike.

  ‘In all earnest, in the Himalaya even too much stamina is not enough, if you want to be safe,’ he says.

  On his first attempt at what he came to call ‘Mount Everest in a Day’, he had barely started his second rep before his quads shouted at him to dismount. On the second attempt (on New Year’s Day), he got to the top of the second rep before quitting. Undeterred, he went and bought a better bike and continued training. The next session saw him get to four, almost the equivalent of the height of Mont Blanc. By autumn of that year he had achieved six. Feeling winter’s cold breath chilling the back of his neck, he planned an attempt for the big one, more aware than ever about how far away he was from achieving it. He wrote, rather gracefully, in an account at the time: