by Max Leonard
It would be impossible to imagine a bunch of football teams staying cheek by jowl in the same hotel to put the finishing touches to their World Cup prep. And, granted, bike training does not take place in the hotel: it is a closed thing, between a rider and his or her power meter or among teammates on a remote road. Nevertheless, all the teams convene in the same building every night, and the sombre green and beige upper corridors of the Parador (which, when empty, have something of the atmosphere of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, only friendlier) begin to resemble a dorm hall. The restaurant does staged dinner times so rivals don’t collide over the buffet, and for posh teams there is even a private dining room available.
The food’s OK, but it’s not as if the Parador kitchen has a magic recipe for success. What is it, then, that packs them in like this?
The pursuit of altitude has been going on since … well, in truth, height has signified something special, and even spiritual or sacred, throughout human existence. The Tibetan name for Everest is Chomolungma or ‘Goddess Mother of the Land’. Tibet’s summits were revered as an abode of the gods, and local people would not, before Westerners came, climb them. The neighbouring Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, meanwhile, is home to Gangkhar Puensum, which is thought to be the highest unclimbed mountain in the world. Gangkhar Puensum is 7,570 metres tall, and no climbing of mountains over 6,000 metres has been allowed in Bhutan since 1994, partly because of the lack of resources to deal with high-altitude emergencies (India has the closest), and partly to respect local customs. Gangkhar Puensum and similar peaks are thought to be the sacred homes of protective gods and spirits. The ancient Greeks believed the much lower Mount Olympus (altitude 2,918 metres) was home to Zeus and his warring family of deities. Mount Sinai in Egypt has a prominent place in the Jewish, Islamic and Christian traditions, and anyone riding through the Alps will be used to seeing chapels and monasteries perched on the highest points around – evidence that the Christian faith continued to associate height with spirituality long after Noah, and Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. The practice of placing a crucifix at the top of prominent peaks or ridges in the Alps dates back to the 13th century at least, and it boomed in the early 20th century, when such crosses would sometimes be adorned with scientific measuring equipment (although given the spots were chosen mainly to advertise God’s magnificence to the maximum number of eyeballs, their scientific relevance was probably limited). Those who worshipped or lived in the numerous chapels and monasteries built in the high mountains shared a celestial vantage point and were, up in the heavens isolated from materiality, in many senses closer to God. Taking refuge from earthly temptations in the great solitary silences, they also showed a self-sacrificing devotion. The crucifix on the peak was a powerful symbol of omniscience, and also of piety, speaking as it did of the backbreaking effort needed to erect the cross. For religious communities on high, constructing the buildings and living up there were simply very difficult things to do.
A couple of hundred years ago these directly religious experiences of the peaks began to fade. Or rather the general population, which was becoming more secular, began to see them in another way, influenced by explorers and travellers, and Romantic poets, writers and artists such as Casper David Friedrich. Think of his painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, from 1818, that famous image of a young gent in a frock coat with his back to the painter and the viewer. He is standing on a rocky crag, left foot forward, as though vanquishing it. His reddish-blond hair is being whipped by a stiff wind, and in his right hand he brandishes a cane as he looks out over the clouds into a glorious expanse of nothingness. Only rocks and a distant mountain meet his view. He is gloriously alone in his contemplation. This is one expression of the feeling of the sublime, that semi-rapturous, dread-tinged feeling of the infinite being of the world and the nothingness of one’s own existence, a shiver of fear and delight mixed into one, that people, from about the mid-18th century onwards, came to associate with mountains. These days we call a lot of things sublime – a tennis stroke, a bit of fancy footwork in a football match, even just a nice afternoon in the sun – but originally it described something extreme, beyond normal experience and perhaps beyond the grasp of human comprehension. Transcendence, the very pinnacle of existence in moral, aesthetic or spiritual terms, or something that is religious in effect though rarely explicitly so in meaning. ‘Delightful horror’, was one way the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke described it. In his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful he said that delightful horror was ‘the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime’. ‘Vastness’ and ‘magnificence’ were two aspects of Burke’s sublime. Magnificence, as in something awe-inspiring, was a quality people increasingly looked for in landscapes, art and music, and, so runs the theory, correspondingly less so in orthodox religion.
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to the sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside.
That’s from The Art of Travel by writer and thinker Alain de Botton. And that book, along with Robert Macfarlane’s excellent Mountains of the Mind, traces in much greater detail how our imagination began to be shaped to seek these experiences in the mountains. This is just a potted history, but enough, I hope, to suggest that the sublime – the tiny individual confronted with the vastness of the world, transcendent nature and of pleasure mixed with terror – is something that those who go cycling in the mountains will recognise. It’s one factor, I think, which leads people to become unexpectedly emotional when cycling up mountains. Sooner or later everybody cries, and that’s OK. It’s OK to cry on a mountain. It is far easier to prepare for the physical hardships than for the unexpected mental journey. For when your thoughts slip into that gap between discomfort and concentration, and roam untethered around the subconscious before alighting, perhaps, on a wound you didn’t know was there, or had forgotten. And then, in that unexpectedly vulnerable place, at the end of your physical resources, you take a look around, and the magnificence and awe of the world floods into that raw spot on your soul.
The other reason to mention the sublime here is to demonstrate that there is nothing innate or ‘natural’ in the attraction we have for these places. People haven’t always striven for the heights, or found mountains beautiful. The art historian Michael Kimmelman wrote that the poet John Donne called them ‘warts’ upon the face of the earth, and that Daniel Defoe wrote about the ‘inhospitable terror’ of the Lake District fells. Victor Hugo, meanwhile, thought that the human brain struggled to deal with the sights of the high mountains, a derangement of the senses that in his opinion led to the Alpine regions being full of mentally deficient people. And even if people of old weren’t repelled by the high peaks, they felt no need to go there. Gods and monsters aside, mountains are cold, wild and capricious environments, and since time immemorial people have avoided them simply because life was tough enough already. They still do. ‘I think mountain climbing is a sign of degeneration in mankind. As long as people have to work hard to earn a living, to keep their houses warm, to work small fields like mountain folk have to, they don’t think about climbing mountains,’ Rheinhold Messner once said in a TV documentary. ‘They’re afraid of the mountains. Of avalanches and of the storms that come down from them and especially of the torrents that tear up the land. My neighbours, farmers in the mountains where I grew up, in Villnöss, still tell me it doesn’t make sense to climb mountains, that it would be much smarter to use my energy for something else, and I’m not sure they’re entirely wrong.’
The story of the modern appreciation of the mountains is generally said to begin with Petrarch, an Italian scholar who walked to the top of one of cycling’s favourite summits, Mont Ventoux, on 26 April 1336. There are older accounts of climbing Ventoux, and Petrarch himself rep
orts meeting a shepherd who claimed to have climbed it many years before, receiving only fatigue, repentance and torn clothing for his troubles (something that might sound familiar to cyclists). But Petrarch’s is the most famous, and most detailed, and his ascent heralded a new way of thinking. He claimed to be the first since ancient times to climb a mountain purely for the pleasure of the view, and in that, his attitudes and motivations are recognisably modern. Petrarch gave us an aesthetics of altitude. These days, our natural impulse, when holidaying in a new city or surrounded by strange countryside, is to find the nearest tall thing, be that a spire, a campanile, a mountain, a cliff or a hill, and see what we can see. Even glancing from the window of a descending aeroplane gives us a scrap of that knowledge and the pleasure it brings.
René Daumal was a French philosopher whose final, unfinished work, Mount Analogue, is a parable of an expedition to find a mythical sacred mountain that rises so high it actually links the world of the divine to the human. In the notes he left towards its completion, he writes: You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
Upon reaching the summit, Petrarch took out his volume of Augustine’s Confessions, which fell open, or so he reports, at these words: ‘People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars. But in themselves they are uninterested.’ This caused Petrarch to look inward, and this introspection, when faced with such awe-inspiring views, massive space and natural beauty, is recognisable too.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, for all its uncanny wonder and characteristic mixture of the internal and external, has become a cliché, and Alpine scenes easily slip into the hackneyed stuff of chocolate boxes, postcards and Instagram. Yet the sublime fascination with picturing mountains is enduring. Two examples, more or less connected to cycling: first, this old postcard of the famous Diables Bleus, here stationed at the Col du Parpaillon in the 1890s or early 1900s. They are at camp, it is supper time, and the mood is one of cheerful relaxation (note the soldier in the wheelbarrow), but twinned with the semi-formal posing for the camera you sometimes see in vintage photos. A kind of awkwardness in which it’s clear that people didn’t quite yet know what to do when a camera appeared, and probably also the product of having to hold still for ages while the shutter clicked and the chemical magic took place. Behind some skeletal trees in the background rises a Fuji-like mountain, almost perfectly echoing the shape of the white canvas bell tents. It should go without saying that no such conical peak exists in the Alps, and especially one that towers so far above a high-altitude camp. It is an invention of the postcard maker, purely, one surmises, to increase the rugged romance of the scene. The reality of the mountains, of life under canvas doing backbreaking work tunnelling under a ridge, was somehow insufficient for a public hooked on the sublime spectacle of the peaks. Not mountainous enough, it needed more mountains. It had to be sexed up and given more mountain appeal.
Second, this picture postcard of the switchbacks of the Col de Braus, a 1,000-metre climb located between the Bonette and the Côte d’Azur. Search for ‘Col de Braus’ online and you will see hundreds of pictures taken mainly by cyclists at this exact spot. The photo op comes after a short section of road where the gradient tips into double figures, and, as the vista opens beneath you to your right, you can forgive yourself for pretending it is solely the marvellous view of the switchbacks scaling the side of the valley, and not the steep slopes that come after almost 10 kilometres of climbing, that compel you to stop to catch your breath. Sorry, I mean take a photo. Because for road cyclists (and drivers and motorcyclists too, though maybe less so), there is nothing that improves a mountain view more than a nice bit of squiggly road going up it. The impulse to record scenes like this is deep rooted. People have been stopping here on Braus as long as the road has existed, just as they have on the Stelvio in Italy (which looks in some aerial photos like a child has taken a biro and scribbled all over a picture of a mountain), on the beautiful cobbled curves of the Gotthardpass in Switzerland and on the tightly bunched switchbacks of the Lacets de Montvernier further north in the French Alps. These roads are all impressive feats of civil engineering, but that’s not why they speak to us – or at least, not why they speak to most of us. There is something in the way the stacked hairpins replay, as we look back, our progress across the landscape; or, if we’re looking up, render visible the task in front of us. Switchbacks like this gather the ascent into a coiled pile, make effort visible. Combine that with something incredibly beautiful, and the achievement is worth recording. You’ll notice that I’m only talking about the up. The impulse to record and, let’s be frank, boast, has become abnormally enlarged in the age of social media, but this postcard, printed in 1905 and widely reproduced, comfortably beats Instagram by at least a hundred years.
Cycling, more than many others, is an aesthetic sport. In Grand Tours, the majestic, rotating helicopter shots of the peloton ascending a pass tantalise from the TV, and the switchbacks dramatise the riders’ exertion. Even down on the flats, where in our own rides there is often less to see, pro bike racing presents us with the hypercolour dash of the peloton and the smooth fluid dynamics as it parts to navigate a roundabout. And for many people when riding a bike there is, I think, a double consciousness: some of the thrill of the ride is a pleasure taken in picturing ourselves passing through these majestic landscapes.
Incidentally, the Col de Braus, you may remember, is where René Vietto’s ashes were scattered, and where he made his winning break in his first road race and in his home stage of the 1934 Tour de France.
Impossible, once you know that, to imagine it happening anywhere other than with those hairpins as backdrop, isn’t it?
As for sport and altitude, that’s a completely different story, one that’s first and foremost about physiology and physics. Physics because of Newton’s law of gravitation and Boyle’s law governing the pressure of gases: as we climb a mountain we move further from the centre of the Earth and the gravitational pull weakens. There is less mass of air pressing down from above and consequently the air is less dense. Oxygen is still present in the air in more or less the same concentration as it is lower down – around 21 per cent – but there are simply fewer oxygen molecules to breathe, which makes oxygen-intensive endurance sports like cycling a whole lot more difficult.fn4 The physiology comes in because in hypoxic (oxygen-poor) environments the body adapts to this lack and begins to produce more red blood cells. The more red cells there are in the blood, the more oxygen can be transported to muscles, improving efficiency, threshold performance and also recovery.
You can work harder, and longer, and then do it again better the next day. Almost like magic, no?
‘If you’re interested in hypoxic training, there’s probably more than one reason it works. The main reason that people do it, you understand, is as a way of legally blood doping.’ That’s Professor Hugh Montgomery, being characteristically forthright. He has come to meet me straight from a night shift on the intensive care wards of University College Hospital in central London, just down the street at the Institute for Sport, Exercise and Health where he is director of research. ‘Sometimes science is the excuse for exploration,’ said George Mallory I in that fateful interview with the New York Times, and Hugh has taken that to heart more than most. He has led several expeditions to Everest and other 8,000-metre peaks to investigate the physiological effects of altitude and hypoxia. Over 25 years he has become a world authority: for one thing, because he is himself a climber and ultra runner, and is deeply interested in the cutting edge of sports science; for anoth
er, because looking at how healthy bodies function in low-oxygen conditions is seriously useful in understanding how to help critically ill patients – including cancer patients or those in intensive care – deal with hypoxia, which can be one of the biggest challenges to their survival they face.
We go to sit in the shiny white kitchen, where he makes tea and rubs his eyes, and we chat. At one point the sound of Daft Punk’s ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’ playing far away floats tinnily through the open door. It seems apt. Endurance performance, Hugh says, is in large part about convective delivery – getting oxygen from the environment to the relevant cells. And everyone’s concentrated on red cell mass because a lot of the other aspects governing convective delivery (what biologists call ‘rate-limiting steps’) are genetic, so you can’t do much about them. For example, says Hugh, ‘if you look at rowers, one of the prime determinants of success is just the size of their chest, because if they’ve got small lungs it’s not ever going to work. You then need a bloody good heart,’ he continues. ‘Look at racehorses, and the classic rate-limiting step is the heart. Because if everything else has been optimised and you’ve got a bigger pump that can maintain a high rate, it just delivers more oxygen and the horse will run faster.’ Moving down the size scale, you need big, healthy blood vessels, and plentiful mitochondria in the muscle cells to suck up the oxygen and put it to use. The final piece in the puzzle of convective delivery is red cell mass. The importance of red cells was overlooked for a long time, Hugh says, because when you measured the concentration of red cells in the blood of a top cyclist it could well be the same as that of a couch potato. Then doctors started measuring red cell mass, and found that elite cyclists and runners have at least a third more by weight: ‘The watery part of the blood goes up by a third as well … so actually trained athletes have got a third more circulating volume of blood in total, delivering a higher total haemoglobin mass.’