Little Victories
by Jo Burt

We're going to go to Hell for this one, or at least suffer interminable headwinds the rest of our cycling days, on a fixed. I could feel the breath of Eddy, Jacques and Fausto on the back of my neck as we unhooked the bikes from the roof of the car and popped front wheels in. I can hear them tutting as we tighten shoes and pull on gloves and when we point our bikes towards the sunset and down the hill I'm sure they hold their heads in their hands, sobbing. We wait for a motorcycle to pass, but the rider turns in the road, pulls a long, smooth power-wheelie and thottles down the hill, an obvious sign that the road ahead was a sweet one. We follow. Kicking decades of cycling tradition, grit, effort and basically the whole rule book into the gutter by just riding down the hill, from the car. We're stuck in the middle of a dream of the road, born of the road, sired a ways back while struggling up a 1:3 in a blatantly overloaded Nissan Micra. A dream of ignoring the boring bits and attacking the Big Hills on our road irons, attacking them hard and fast. A long list of lumpy yellow roads was chewed by the concertina of time and it was whittled down to a warm-up ride in The Peaks to be followed the next day by something Epic in The Lakes.

We met in Castleton, right in the middle of The High Peak in the dark shadow of Winnats Pass, the first hill on the list. There's no option in getting over this one, the softer route off to the right slipped down the hill, so now it's just the Pass that has to suffer the crunching of gearboxes and knees, the burning of clutches and lungs. I like roads that you can see give you no choice, the inevitability of the Immediate Future. Winnats Pass has this in spades. It's a great jagged rip in the curves of The Peaks, all rough edges and rock rips, and that's where you go, entering the Earths' bowels, while it turns yours. The climb is one of those sine-curve gradients where it's too easy to go youthful at the start and suffer the consequences half-way. It all starts proper from the car-park cattle-grid where it's "I can just about stay seated" climbing until the steepness ratchet clicks another notch and you're trying to dance on the pedals like you've seen them do on The Tour, but you're pedalling squares with lumps of potatoes in your calves. By the green grit hopper on the left of the road all pretence has gone and it's an ugly struggle against a hill that's getting impeceptively steeper. Just for laughs it kicks a nuance at the end to put pay to any final burst that you may be saving and you're over the cattled-grid at the top that robs your speed and vibrates the leg muscles enough to start up a cramp. A recovering spin to the junction at the top makes it just over a mile and just over eight minutes. Not the fastest in the world, but then we aren't entering into any competitions and vomitting at the top is poor etiquette.

Breath back we negotiate the short climb through the cleft in Mam Tor and drop into Edale. Because it was Spring we ride under perfect skies, whereas two days before the whole area had been shut due to snow. Remnants of winter's last cough still cling to the lee of hedges and walls, the tops of the hills and in random drifts. From the top of the climb we face The Peaks in their picture postcard beauty, a moment that smooths the heart for fractions of a second and you realise why you ride a bike, why there really is no need to ever leave this country in search of better places, or yourself, and why people write poetry. Big fluffy thoughts to get in the way of staying on the bike on these Northern descents, especially when snow is encroaching on the road and streams of snow-melt compromise your traction down the hill into Edale. Steep and beautifully twisty enough to provoke under-the-breath curses as the corners tighten or a lump of snow intrudes on what you thought was your line. For someone who lives in the flatlands Andy does a good job on the descents, maybe following in the tradtion of Rooks and Zoetemelk, Dutch pros who were frighteningly swift in the hills, up and down. I pretend that I've been soaking in the view.

Spinning along the valley floor with the sudden ease of adrenalin that comes from a sharp right at the bottom it's all daffodils and lambs and quiet. We realise that this is one of the last days before the caravans start to swarm and destroy what they have come to enjoy. We make the most of it, enjoying the beauty of road without the threat of cars and their latent anger, putting just enough effort in to elevate the speed above 'cruising' - clicking along in the reasonable twenties, the bikes feeling strangely sticky, despite the rolling road and slight tailwind. Into Hope, an apt place for a tea-shop. We join tea-pots with a couple of other cyclists also enjoying the first proper sunshine of the season. Despite different ages, miles ridden, reasons for being there, reasons for riding and pretty much everything else we were soon bantering across the tea-cups like we'd know each other for, er, if not years, then at least a couple of weeks. We asked them about the climbs on our list and if they were regular cycling killing grounds. They mentioned that some did have a go at them, fools that they are, for every hill in the country has a reputation and a history among its cyclists with little tallies of unseen battles between friends and enemies, just like every sprint for the '30' sign. Never shown on television no less important. There's no laboured point about 'The Common Bond of Cycling' here, that would be like saying everyone who drove a red Escort was the best of friends. Not going to happen. Today the sun was out and different types of rider got on for a few minutes. Hope indeed.

We scrabble back into the car, head west of The Peaks, rush the M6 and up to The Lakes for a big day of hill cherrypicking. Heading towards Macclesfield we join the line behind the wagons climbing up to Shining Tor, reaching the Cat and Fiddle pub at the top a muse kicks us in the chamois that there's enough daylight left to ride down the hill, while we're here. The car swerves into the lay-by, bikes unload and years and untold miles of cycling tradition are basically spat on. We had driven to the top of a hill, just to ride down it. For fun. No warm up, no hours of effort to get to this point, no nothing. We're going to ride down the hill for pure enjoyment, get back in the car at the bottom and travel on to the next hill.

Strange that I should feel guilty about having fun on my road bike, it doesn't seem to fit the image. When was the last time you saw a roadie smile, really give a smile that wasn't actually a grimace? Of course there is fun to be had, but it seems to be sandwiched between thick slices of pain and effort. Why should I go all Catholic about just riding the downhill? Other sports are all about descending. Snowboarding, skiing, street luge, parachuting, sky-surfing, and so on and so on, and none of them worry about how they get to the top to come down. Even our bastard cousin, downhill moutainbiking, has built a large part of its image around taking the ski-lift or truck or Shanks's pony to the top, pedalling back to the start is an instant black-balling offence. Road-biking is built around a totally different set of ideals, a large part of the mystique of it based around The Climb. No-one really pays to much interest in The Tour until it reaches the mountains and when the riders get there where are they worshipped? There's no-one on the other side hoping to see them fall off a mountain at 50 mph. Strange, as with most other wheeled sports that's what everyone is waiting for, the moment of ineptitude when it all starts to crash. We watch roadies climb to see the effort, see our heroes suffer the same pain as we do, albeit faster. Are we wrong celebrating the pain of ability, when everyone else is worshiping the pain of humility in a crash? We'd got away with it on Winnats Pass, almost got the yin/yang, 'earn your descent' thing right. We'd plummeted down the hill once and enjoyed it so much that we cadged a lift back up the top, just to do it again, and because Andy thought he could squeeze a 50 out of it now he knew you didn't really have to brake for the long left-hander towards the bottom. It had been a hard climb, so we thought we deserved two descents. Justify, justify. The Karma Gods ensured that it wasn't to be with a soft-topped BMW with flat cap and driving gloves tottering round that potentially fast bend throwing everything off line. He was panicking because we might scratch his paintwork, we were panicking because we might lose our lives. Priorities eh?

Back at the Cat and Fiddle, a large pack of nagging unease tucked under the saddle we pedal into the sunset. Not steep, but beautifully curvy, of the kind you see in car adverts. Six miles(ish) down. Ah, we don't get stuff like this down South. The ability to hold up cars because the road is too twisty and you're too fast, or so you think, until a motorbike blats past. Fantastic. We reach the bottom tired and exhilerated, fitness and fun hormones tussling round the body. Eddy, Jacques and Fausto still at the top, praying for our souls. Next days standard issue B&B breakfast didn't touch the sides going down, but was now making a fair attempt at clawing its way up. A hundred yards round the one way system in Ambleside before we hit the 1:3 is not really a fair warm up. We were heading up the old Kirkstone road to the head of the Pass, only doing this route because we saw that it had "The Struggle" marked alongside it on the map. Red rag to a bull. And the promise of a cafe in Patterdale on the other side.

Hard. It started hard and didn't get much better, the hill equivalent of a bad hangover. Old men with dogs walking down the hill gave us pitifull looks, wondering why we were making such a meal of it when they could cruise up it on their old black one-speeds, and had been doing so since they were seven. Looking at the view trying to get inspired wasn't helping, it just reminded us that we had to get over it, somehow. Determination over strength saw me to a flatter section where Andy had stopped to soak in the surroundings and look very small in them. A few minutes ceasefire for awe and we stagger on to the reason for this climb. "Struggle" is about right, more mental than physical. This last couple of hundred yards in the whole two miles actually doesn't look that terrible, although the legs would argue in the pub all night over that one, it was only when our arses were over the backs of the saddle as we rode back down that we would realise how bad it was. The promise of the cleft in the hill and the top of the pass keeps my legs fighting through, it isn't ballet, but we make it.

We switch from walls of pain to those of stone to hit on the descent into Patterdale, and rocks, cars and the odd sheep. Once again Andy shoots off ahead of me, confident in himself and his bike, while I am completely the opposite, not enough time spent on either. We speed into the village courtesy of momentum and the wind on our backs, ready for the much lauded tea-shop, which didn't exist. We carried on to Glenridding, have an unenthusiastically indifferent coffee (oh to live in Italy, home of bikes and coffee) and head back to conquer the pass the other way. With the huge lumps of hills ahead of us things start to look familiar. A bit of an epic mountainbike ride over The Lakes that went horribly and quickly wrong and ended up with us stumbling down this hill in the pitch dark, a bit scared for our lives. Those ghosts chased me up the long, long climb.

We jump back in the car to shrink the distance (a million cycle tourists turn in their grave) to the bottom of the real zenith of this jolly, Hard Knott and Wrynose Passes. An East-west road from Ambleside to the sea with the two passes back to back taking up no more than 8 or 9 miles and both nudging under 1300 feet.

On the map they look terrible, more little black arrows than Custer's Last Stand and my memory of them isn't much sweeter, having to shift that little Micra into first to winch it over a rise. For the first time in my life I am quite prepared to walk parts of a road climb. Not the best motivation for getting myself to the top, but it had a certain 'nothing to lose' quality about it. I am however prepared for it to hurt and for bits of my bike to bend under the effort. Andy and I spin along the valley floor for all of the half a mile that it's mostly flat and immerse ourselves in denial as the road points up Wrynose by chatting about the scenery. Far too soon we're in 'that gear' already and conversation stops, each of us retreating inside to deal with the evil ahead. I hold on to the image of that little Micra making it over that steep section and vow at least to force myself to survive up till then, then I would allow myself to give in. For the moment the climb is only as hard as anything I've ever done. Andy's a wheel ahead of me, but prefering to tack across the tarmac to lessen the grade. I opt for the straight up route, just because it's shorter. Little mind games. Why do we do this to ourselves? This torture?

We weren't doing it for the adoration of others, a point smacked home by the couple in their white Peugeot parked by the side of the road, indifferent to the view, head in sandwiches and thermos tea, oblivious to me ripping myself apart slowly past them. Others, when told of what we did just said 'Why?'. Why put ourselves through this self-hurt? It can't be for the view at the top, because you can get to the top of any mountain in any manner of easier ways. It can't be for the sheer joy of cycling because you can get that from the flat bits at the bottom. It can't be for the glory, for there's no-one at the top with beer and medals. Why all the self-pain? There is the smug knowledge that 99.9% of the population wouldn't even consider walking up the hill we were riding. But this can always be countered by the thought of the remaining 0.1% who could big-ring dance past our grovelling souls.

Self. It's got nothing to do with anything outside. The hills don't care that they've been conquered because they'll still be here when we're gone. No-one else cares that we made it up a hill, except maybe a select few of our peers, and that's just thinly disguised jealousy, or the quiet knowledge that they could do it quicker. It's the something inside. That little bit that stops you from crawling off when it gets a little difficult, that pushes you beyond what you're used to, up to your limit, and then straight on past. The constant re-definition of The Self. Not content to stick with what you're used to. The need to go faster, stronger, steeper and longer.

Strange, as road biking in the hills is arguably the toughest sport in the world, that it's never going to enter the ranks of those "Hardcore" sports, some would say thankfully. All those sports, the snowboarding, the whatever, all look good. They are all sold on image, sold on the t-shirt. They don't show the training and hard work and sacrifice that the top guys in any sport have to put themselves through to get to where they are, the real hardcore and commitment that comes from the inside, and that's never going to come across on TV. They just sell the image, because effort and hard work doesn't sell nowadays. Climbing on the road has no image, all you can see is the training, commitment and hard work, the blood and spittle and sacrifice. Hence no funky t-shirts or car stickers.

I pivot over the step that I remember coaxing that little car over and I've completed my mission, everthing else is a bonus now and even the false summit can't discourage me. Andy is already there, striking an heroic pose, wiping away a nosebled that could come from the stress of it all or from the unfamiliar altitude. We must have done something to our bodies because I too was to suffer sudden sporadic nosebleeds for the next few weeks. I join him looking down the plateau between the two passes in quiet appreciation of the beauty around us and the pain inside. Try it.

We drop into the basin, enjoy the calm before the next storm and trade climbing stories. Just as I mention to Andy that my memory tells me the next climb, Hard Knott, shouldn't be as tough, the road unfolds itself in front of us and claws its way over the hill, meandering like a length of spaghetti thrown against a wall. Ouch. It starts with a brutal ultra-steep short section, a really, really unpleasant way to start a climb, and enough to see me putting all my might through the pedals yet stay standing still. A flatter (it's all relative) section leads us to the tiers of hatefull switchbacks that are strangely easier to deal with than the overall straightness of the previous Pass. Mind games. Break the climb down into sections, just get round this corner, just get to the next bend, just this bit, just... make... it... round. I'm pulling so hard on the bars, and sometimes pushing, to stop the front end from popping wheelies that I'm gettting a blister on my left hand and I'm wearing bald patches in the palms of my gloves. I'm sure that I can feel my shoe-plate bolts unscrewing. There's all sorts of noises ripping the air as muscle pulls against tendon, pulls against bone, pulls against cartilage, pulls against leather and plactic, pulls against alloy, pulls against steel, pulls against rubber against tarmac. Fitness doesn't seem to come into the equation, it's just down to brute force, ignorance, and that bloody-minded need to get to the top. We're not out of breath, or it doesn't take us much time to recover at the top, it's more down to mental fitness, the ability to concentrate and keep the bike down on the tarmac and keep the legs churning round.

Standing on top of Hard Knott Pass, recovering, absorbing, relieved, looking towards the sea and Andy is off ahead of me. He's negotiated the obscene bends at the top, with their braking bumps, swathes of tyre rubber and almost vertical inside corners that the odd Transit van has trouble getting up and is swooping through the fast bends towards the foot of the valley. In the cathederal quiet, where not even the wind dares speak to break the reverance of the hills I can hear his bike and the road speak to each other. A almost ski-like shoosh as his tyres hiss against the tarmac interupted by a soft grating as he carves a turn. Sporadic chatter and skip echoes up the slope when he hits a bump and it ripples through the frame and into the chain and back again. The sound of speed. No more than fifteen seconds of beauty, worth every second of pain just to hear. Maybe this is why.

As is our way we get a lift to the top of both passes, just to ride down the other sides, although Andy rides up the short side of Wrynose, and by the looks of things wishes he hadn't. It didn't feel that steep in the car. Falling off Wrynose towards the East is one of the most frightening things I've ever done, and I've had my heart in my mouth a fair few times, it's almost a hobby of mine. It would be stupid just to teeter down the other side, descents have to be attacked with the same gusto as the climbs, but the pain has to be replaced with fear. Sheer terror, because I know that if anything goes wrong it's going to hurt. Fast and a lot.

Without warning the road just drops away and the bike disappears from underneath me with that acceleration of gravity. Freefall. So that's why it felt so steep on the way up. Trying to stay on a crappy bumpy road, desperately torn between the need to just hold onto the bars to control the bike that has suddenly turned into a bucking bronco beneath your pedals and the lust to let go the vice grip with just a couple of brake fingers so you can slow down. Only later do we start to think about the tiny little footprint of rubber that sticks you to the road, the inch long fingers of black that you trust to stop you, the gossamer thin cables you stretch to near snapping, and just how exactly are brake cable nipples held in place?

We're so stupid to feel smug as we struggle to keep our exhausted bodies awake back from the pub. We had just done a day of the MTV, Generation X version of road biking; proper cyclists do what we have done today as part of a 100 mile ride. And they keep quiet about it. There's no need to shout about the little victories inside, because there are just as many defeats. Something about enlightenment. As we headed home we spotted a cyclist, well past double my age, nicely loaded with a chunky saddlebag and a set of tidy panniers, rise out of the saddle to honk up a hill. He was riding a single-speed road bike, could've been fixed. Baggy ex-army shorts, wooly top, no t-shirt with an Attitude Logo, no tattoos. Point taken.

© Jo Burt
Cycling Plus

other stories by J Burt

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