Days of struggle and spectacle II

In which I discover the comfort that lies beyond our biggest challenges

Hello friends,

I sent out Part One of this essay last month (you can read it here); this is the conclusion. Not that I fully conclude anything. I’ve been trying for quite a while to reframe my relationship with cycling, as I’ve come to realise that the old formula, of picking a challenge and then fighting my way through it until I win or succeed, no longer serves me. (I’ve won everything I needed to, and succeeded at enough tasks that I no longer feel the urge to prove myself.)

I’m never going to give up cycling – it is by now inextricably woven into my body and soul – but I still need to find some sort of schema along which to plot it; a sense of purpose that reaches beyond my mere self, and a story to tell about what I’m doing that carries the motivation to keep on doing it.

So this is my latest attempt.

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I finished last time by remarking, as I very often do, on how profoundly cycling has shaped my life, professionally, socially, creatively, physically and emotionally.

A further, subtler gain I realised last summer, was the sheer detail in which riding has enabled me to get to know the world. I often marvel, when I ride through yet another pretty little village in the UK, at how lucky I am to get to see these places, which are miles off the beaten track, and so objectively unremarkable that it would be difficult to find out about their existence without having someone to visit there, or stumbling across them after taking a wrong turn on the way to somewhere else. If I had spent the last 17 years driving from place to place, I’d know a lot more about motorway service stations, but a lot less about the good views you can get from a certain tiny lane in the Welsh borders, or the particularly tasty millionaire shortbread sold by a village shop near Lake Vyrnwy, or a shortcut through south London whereby a tired courier can avoid all the hills, on her way home.

It struck me that day last summer, as I backtracked down the Stelvio and rerouted to Passo del Fuorn, which I had crossed in the opposite direction during the Transcontinental six years previously, that this psychogeography now extended to Europe. When I set off on my first big tour in 2011, my geographical awareness was embarrassingly sparse. I knew where France and Germany were, but not how their borders intersected with those of Switzerland and Italy, and when it came to the Balkans, I couldn’t have listed the countries there, much less told you what was north or south of what. I visited Slovenia for the first time on that trip, because it was on the way to Croatia, and because the parents of a German-Slovene friend had invited me to stay with them when I got there, and all I knew about it in advance was that it wasn’t Slovakia.

Since then I’ve cycled across Europe several times – more than I can think of offhand, though I’d say it’s about five. I’ve got to the stage where I not only know where all the countries are; I will also, as soon as you speak to me about riding from one to the other, have a sense of what landscapes will be around you as you do so, what the weather might be doing, and which border crossings will be available to you. I looked at the blurb on the back of a bike-touring book the other night, which described the author riding through the Alps and south via the Balkans, and noticed that rather than imagining these places on the map, as I might have previously, I was now picturing what it would be like to cycle through them.

I’ve got into the habit of spending a chunk of every spring riding around France, to recce Tour de France stages routes in preparation for Le Loop, and that’s different every year, so I’ve gradually filled in more and more areas of my mental map of that particular country, animating them into visual memories. Indeed, that was what I was rushing across Switzerland to do – the following morning I would set off to ride the route of Stage 9 (Aigle to Châtel), and now when I see Gruyère cheese in the supermarket, I think about the rolling green countryside north-east of Lac Léman, where I learned that it is made.

Crossing Passo Fuorn, a few hours before I set up my camping spot near St Moritz, had provoked all sorts of memories, and I spent a few minutes at the top, carefully arranging my bike against the col sign so that I could take a photo that exactly replicated the one I had taken six years previously (see below), when I crossed in the other direction, during the Transcontinental.