The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  This was far from suitable as every knot seemed to come undone and after taking only five or ten minutes to make the incision and take out the harpoon, he spent two hours putting in about twelve stitches. The spacing between the stitches was uneven and, all these years later, the scar is still impressive.

  Before we left the tin hut, my mother had to pay. We’d taken up more than two hours of this man’s time and on Christmas Day. I thought this was going to cost my mother.

  ‘How much will that be?’ she asked.

  ‘Eight hundred shillings,’ he said.

  Wow. That was about six euros.

  We returned home and had a good Christmas lunch that day. Sometimes pain is just what you choose it to be. When you climb a mountain till your legs are jelly, or when you time trial till your lower back aches with pain, you know that it will end. The harpoon barb won’t hold you for ever. No climb, no effort, no diet, no pain is for ever.

  Still, I thought, in future I should stick to cycling.

  Training days often go like this.

  I ride out of Monaco, deserting the odd huddled world of bespoke clothes, expensive apartments and fine cars where I live, and on up to La Turbie, where the Trophée des Alpes was built by the Romans when they conquered the mountains. It still looms massive above the humble steeple of an old church. The outcrop above me is called Tête de Chien (Dog’s Head), a great name. On up to the narrow, lovely streets of La Peille and just time to steal some quick snapshot glances down the mountain at the rocky gorges and the river below.

  The signs warn you of the lacets or bootlaces, which is what the locals call the tight hairpin bends which seem to just lie here as if dropped carelessly from the sky on to the sides of the mountains. This is the old Route du Sel where the mules used to carry salt inland from the Camargue. When I feel bad my heart goes out to those poor mules. Nothing is straight-lined here. No such concept as how the crow flies. Even the long railway tunnel through the mountain from here to Sospel loops around and around in the darkness.

  L’Escarène straddles the river itself and has a beautiful row of viaduct arches supporting the railway bridge. Ride on. Push harder. Off now towards the Col de Saint Roch with its 25 kilometres of mostly gentle climb. Two dips in the middle and then a decent haul to the top. I’m feeling ready now for what is next.

  And what is next? You swing towards the Col de Turini with its crazy hairpin bends all the way up. If you have seen the Monte Carlo rally then you have seen those bends – the petrolheads love driving them. You look out for oncoming thrill-seekers. Keep pushing up with all the staccato rhythms taking it out of your legs.

  We are about three or four hours into the ride now. We have done a few climbs on the way but Turini is a good 20-kilometre drag up to 2,000 feet. This is the meat of the day, the point where the trip is starting to get hard. We go round a hairpin and the road gets even steeper for the last 5 kilometres. If Richie is here we might start half-wheeling each other at this spot. If not, I push my hardest anyway.

  One day Joe Dombrowski, a young American teammate, put Richie and me under pressure at this point. We knew then the kid could climb. A lot to learn still, but the talent was there.

  We reach the heart of things now, looping round towards the Col de Braus. There sits the small tombstone of the beloved French rider René Vietto who, on stage sixteen with the race lead almost in his poche, sacrificed his chance to win the 1934 Tour and filtered back through the descending peloton traffic to give his bike to his team leader, Antonin Magne, who had mechanical problems. Magne won the Tour. Vietto became a hero but he did grumble: ‘I’m not going to play the slave for ever.’ Right on, René.

  (The story goes that in later life when Vietto lost a toe to sepsis before the 1947 Tour – what was the weight advantage there? – he asked that his friend and super domestique Apo Lazaridès have one of his own toes removed to match. Lazaridès, unable to refuse a man who defined the nobility of the domestique, walked with a limp for the rest of his days. Are you getting all this down, Richie?)

  We are in Italy now, riding towards the old port town of Ventimiglia, the first train stop on the other side of the border. The blue waters lap against the brown and grey buildings which have been here for ever. Then it is time to turn for home. Home, back along the coast road through Menton, or a switch up the right towards Col de la Madone.

  Ah, the Madone and her ghosts. Another story.

  I’m waiting for dinner to come at a Team Sky training camp in Tenerife.

  It’s been twenty minutes and my stomach won’t shut up about it. Kosta doesn’t help.

  Kanstantsin Siutsou aka Kosta. He doesn’t know it but I am watching him, studying him like he is in a nature documentary. This is because Kosta doesn’t have a digestive system: he has a full-blown industrial plant, which extracts what it wants from a river of food and incinerates the rest. I know this and I hate him for it.

  He eats more than the rest of us combined but still has the lowest body fat and skinfolds of the whole team. He simply doesn’t do fat – he has never heard of it – and he thinks that we are crazy with our suffering and our abstinence.

  I am watching Kosta digging into the bread basket now. His fingers are lingering on the warm, soft, fragrant bread which the waiter has just placed on our table – a whole basketful of it just to torment us.

  Hardly looking at his work, Kosta finds the most delicious-looking roll in the basket and rips it apart absent-mindedly. A wedge goes into his mouth with one hand while the other hand and his eyes start a casual search for the butter. I watch that first mouthful in slow motion, even though Kosta takes no care – it is just a thick chunk of bread after all; warm-up bread. Now Kosta is chasing down another. This second wedge of loaf is more sinful – he has loaded it with a hefty serving of almond butter and some honey. Mmm. His face greets the taste like an old friend and he chews lovingly as I watch.

  I am a sad and hungry food voyeur. I hate myself for it. Even more than I hate Kosta at this moment.

  Kosta’s eyes are darting about the table now. He has seen the pot of strawberry jam. Why is there even strawberry jam at our table? He reaches out for the jam but I can’t watch any more. My stomach begs me to change channels – anything but watching Kosta eat. Anything.

  I turn to talk to Richie. But he too is watching Kosta now, tracking the movement of the strawberry jam like a wolf watching a spring lamb.

  In the old days on Grand Tours they used to say that it took the Italians the first three or four hours of riding each day just to digest the mountain of pasta they would eat for breakfast. Only then would they be ready to race, which would of course be followed by another mountain of pasta for dinner that evening.

  When I smell bread or I see pasta I am conditioned to the sound of alarm bells in my head. Gluten is taboo. We don’t eat gluten, my brain says. We could try, my stomach says, a little wouldn’t hurt.

  As far as I see it, gluten just complicates everything: it blocks the muscles, retains water and bloats you. Bread and pasta are Trojan horses filled with gluten. We try to stay away from glutens. We just watch Kosta eat them, and we hate him for his industrial plant.

  I try to go very light in terms of diet. In the mornings I limit myself to just the one bowl of porridge, and normally a two-egg omelette, with no hint of extras on the side. No second helpings, no picking, nothing. If there is a big stage ahead that day I’ll try a three-egg omelette, but warily, and I’ll mix a small amount of white rice into the porridge.

  Sometimes on the giant epic rides I think that I am under-fuelled but I can still summon up the Barloworld days and the feeling of heavy bloat I used to get after some of the good old pasta meals. I know it has to be this way.

  On to the desserts, which no longer contain ‘love’ as I like to put it. Instead, I’ll chew a few pieces of fruit or have a pot of yoghurt. I don’t count calories or know the values of most things; I just let my instinct guide me as to what is the right amount to eat. My instinct al
ways says that the right amount is less than I feel like eating. In a previous life I think my instinct lived in a remote monastery.

  I can think of food, see things in terms of food and watch Kosta love his food. But I just can’t eat food. Not like before. It’s a fidelity thing.

  End of argument.

  The sweat du jour, or training efforts.

  Today’s house special is served in three portions, up there on the blackboard.

  The starter is a 20-second sprint served at the bottom of a climb. All in. Balls out. Bang!

  This is followed straight away by a portion of zone-three riding, which is 20 minutes at tempo pace. It is not at threshold but lukewarm; not on the edge but close. So we sprint, then ride at tempo.

  It’s about racing.

  Why sprint at the bottom of a mountain? Usually just to get into position for the upcoming mountain.

  Why so much pain? To teach the body to recover from a blow-out sprint by using tempo pace instead of freewheeling.

  We take the pain now, hoping that others will suffer later.

  The final course varies in texture. It involves a sprint of 30 seconds followed by the same 20 minutes of recovery at tempo. Then there is a 40-second sprint, followed by another 20 minutes at tempo. All this is accompanied with a side serving of mountain.

  I decide to make alterations; I don’t think Tim Kerrison minds, as long as I’m making the effort more challenging. He sends us all a menu of efforts for our session. Everybody uploads the data from their effort and sends it back to him. I sometimes send my data back to him with slightly different or extra information, along with an explanatory note saying that I felt I had to do more.

  Once I feel my form progressing, Tim knows I will add a few touches to make it a little more painful, a little sauce to flavour the suffering. He’ll tell me to stick to the plan, but I’ll do it and explain later. As a rule, the plan changes from day to day anyway. I might stick to the day’s plan when I see it again. Maybe not. But tomorrow’s plan is always fair game for alteration.

  So today instead of just one sprint per 20 minutes of tempo recovery I throw in an extra sprint of the same duration at the halfway point of 10 minutes for each of the three separate efforts.

  So now the pattern is 20 seconds of sprint riding followed by 10 minutes of tempo riding. Then another 20 of sprinting followed by 10 minutes of tempo. I turn round, descend back down to the bottom of the climb and repeat with a 30-second sprint this time. It’s the same method for the final effort but this time a 40-second sprint.

  I’ve sliced the ‘recovery’ period in half in order to add a lactic-generating sprint in the middle. It doesn’t make me feel good but thinking that I could have done more would make me feel worse.

  I have to really struggle to recover from this, which is good. My body definitely remembers when I go really deep and it all gets coded in so that the muscles remember the feeling and become more attuned to it. They adapt.

  Today I think there is benefit for me because the rhythm has been coarsely chopped. My body had 20 minutes to recover, then suddenly just 10 minutes. After more work there was another 10-minute break. And so on. These intervals are designed to teach the body how to dissipate the lactic acid in order to recover from the sprint at the beginning. In a race, the recovery periods won’t come at such nice, regular intervals.

  I pile on these extras like a glutton at the punishment buffet. I rack my brain for ideas on the days when we are instructed just to do some ‘general cycling’. Nine times out of ten I will add my own intervals on top of these rides to reassure myself that I’m in control, and that I’m making the most of my training.

  When it’s time to train, I don’t like being on the bike for no reason and general riding days aren’t really a reason. I want to take something away from each and every ride, so every day I ask the same questions. What do I want to get out of this ride? How am I testing myself? How am I getting stronger?

  I don’t necessarily like pushing my body to the limits the way I do in training. I can feel today that all this isn’t necessarily that healthy for me. I don’t think it’s good for my body to push it this hard, and this often. It can’t be good in terms of health and longevity; I’m sure that the aggregate of all these marginal debts will have to be paid by the body sometime down the road.

  I know for now though that this is what is going to make me stronger, fitter and tougher. It’s what I need to do to be a racer, and what I need to do to be at the front of the next race.

  On days like today I don’t care about anything else.

  Back in Monaco, the Col de la Madone de Gorbio is a fallen woman. Her name is tainted by the sins of her former lover. I live nearby and have to admit there is some dark attraction in her notoriety. Richie and I have spoken about it. The Col de la Madone had poor luck. That’s the only way you can explain it when a mountain falls in with a bad crowd.

  The Col de la Madone was Lance Armstrong’s test mountain. He loved her so much he named a bike after her. He talked about her so much that riders still want to test themselves up her slopes. We know the Col is blameless and beautiful, and today we are at the bottom, Richie and I, ready to take her up on her challenge.

  It wouldn’t be true to say that we have never been here before. We have used the Col de la Madone a lot for doing the 20-minute efforts or 24-minute efforts which Tim Kerrison plans for us. We have ridden up and down it many a time on training rides. We have never respected the mountain properly though. We’ve never gone from bottom to top as fast as we could go. We are here to time trial Col de la Madone. I am riding my mountain time-trial bike.

  Armstrong used to come here to see if he was ‘ready’ for the Tour.Yes, we know now that it was just one of the more natural measures of ‘readiness’ that he was obliged to take but we have to admit, this is a good one, a useful barometer. It’s a nice climb, about 12 kilometres (11.89 kilometres my downloaded file says) from start to finish, with a good consistent gradient of around seven per cent, climbing 808 metres of vertical ascent. There are a few flat stretches for recovery.

  We can’t know where others started exactly, as obviously there is no official starting line for an effort up the Col de la Madone, but traditionally people flick the stopwatch at the bus stop on the left side of the road just past the first switchback in Les Castagnins, right at the bottom of the climb. Nothing grand, just a pole on the side of the road with a few bus numbers and routes on it. That’s our starting point anyway, exactly where the road begins to go uphill.

  Richie sets off before me.

  Richie is an unusual man. He is someone whom I can train very well with. I look at the road and I see little stretches where I can test myself, really push it on, and Richie looks and he sees the same. Finish lines, visible only to us of course, pop up all over our training routes. He’s a competitor. We have a little training rivalry and constant challenges. Race you over the next rise ahead of us?

  When we are on the boring valley roads, we don’t just ride side by side chatting. We start swapping off, 2 minutes each, with each of us trying to do a harder turn at the front than the other one did. Harder, longer, tougher.

  It’s human nature that riders often like to make things easier for each other. Richie and I go the opposite way. We make each other’s lives as hard as possible but as an expression of friendship. This is good for us.

  Occasionally the young Americans in the team moan that they think the training’s too long, and too hard. We’re not good shoulders for them to cry on. When Richie and I ride with them we push on, to see if we can get them out of their comfort zone. We include the steepest climb we can find. We’re just making a point; it’s fun in a perverse sort of way.

  Today, we want to see where we’re at form-wise. So the Madone becomes our mountain time trial. I set off 1 minute after Richie and Tim Kerrison follows me, alone in his car. Richie has flown off quick as a fish at the start. I know what he is thinking: No way does Froomey give me a head start a
nd then catch me.

  It is a strange ride. We will end up in a badlands of stringy roads and mountain goats but we begin where the surface is fine and for the bottom 5 kilometres we are pushing through residential areas, with houses and driveways branching off from the Col. There aren’t any big hairpin bends but the road is always turning left and right as we sweep our way up the climb. The houses look so quiet and serene but we careen past them like we are handling a getaway car.

  After about 6 kilometres we start hitting a couple of hairpins but if you look over the edge of the climb here you have got the city of Menton below and, beyond that, the ocean. Amazingly beautiful. Our heart rates are okay. The scenery is breath-taking but today we pay it no attention.

  About 18 minutes in, and just over halfway, we get to a junction where you can turn off to the town of Sainte-Agnès. To carry on up the Route du Col de la Madone you look to the small maroon sign for instruction and then coast round a very sharp left that doubles back on itself. Next you sprint to get back up to speed again and carry on up. From this point it is about 5 kilometres to the summit. You go through a couple of tunnels before the road flattens out for maybe 500 metres, and then you pass an avenue of trees. Now it kicks up into the last third of the climb, where the road surface is very rough. It’s quite normal to meet goats, which roam up here. Goats and goatherds. That is the most traffic you will find: tourists on bikes and goats.

  The road is narrow. For two cars to pass one needs to stop or pull a little off the road for the other to get through. It becomes less scenic as you come closer to the top and you hit the back of the mountain where you can’t see the ocean any more. Nature just narrows your focus anyway.

  This effort is taking its toll on me. That fresh, zippy feeling I had at the bottom has long since left my legs. I squeeze on. I have to squeeze on. This is where it counts – that stopwatch can easily gather more seconds here if I lose concentration.