45 South-West 2023 Recalled

Time this article was written – 11 am, well slept; Units of alcohol this week – 12, Oh dear; Kilos (with apologies to Bridget Jones) – 85, that’s pretty stable, but might belie a depressing story; Cigarettes – 0 (but then I don’t smoke, not even on occasional work trips to the Caribbean); Number of close shaves on the steed – one, not even on the steed this time, but a Santander bike, unbelievably a van driver who looked me straight in the eye at a junction and airily drove out into my path; Injuries– tingling fingers and toes, chronic ankle problem

The wakeful anguished nights of earlier in the year (described in previous Journal entries), are now banished - angst salved by an adventure, of course - and life has settled into a sedentary phase. I spend my time desk-bound, reading academic papers about the muscles of endurance and about the mindset of endurance. And occasionally I indulge in a little endurance itself, by cycling off to interview someone on the subject.

And yes, the adventure was 45 South-West. I managed to get to Krakow on time, with most of the requisite kit. The race had all the elements of an adventure – forests, mountains and sea views, with waves of physical exhaustion and surges of life-affirming energy, of challenge and commitment… the not knowing what’s to come, and the overcoming of the problems when they do. And the delight, at moments of simple pleasure along the way.

At this point I should say that getting to the start-line was almost as much of a challenge as the race itself… There were all the usual preparatory concerns, a bike fit, a crank fit, an insole fit, with an ‘Oh, just a few hundred pounds, sir’, at every turn… but it all got a bit close for comfort. For all my efforts to be ready three months in advance, it was only about four weeks before departure that I managed to fit my aero-bars. (They look more the like the head of a triceratops than aerobars, really, with two twisted horns protruding from among an array of hoods and some springy, self-raising, arm pads.)

And there was a last minute surprise – a medical fitness certificate, something I hadn’t seen reference to in six months of collecting stuff together… They’re not as easy to come by as you might think for an old knacker, so many thanks to Dr Hugh Coyne of Fulham, who took his courage in his hands and backed me to manage 4300 kilometres with 47,000 metres of climbing…

Except that then, at the very last minute, the organiser Andy Buchs upped the distance - from 4300 kilometres to nearly 4400 kilometres - and he admitted that the climbing had increased probably to something like 50,000… or was it… 55,000… metres?. He is disarmingly nonchalant about these things, which from the outside looks a little hard-headed, but then he’s right, not because his style is hard-headed (he’s quite the opposite), but because that’s his style of race. Once you’re out on the course, the positives speak for themselves, and most of his riders tend to agree with him (as do I. Well, except for one moment).

Nonetheless, this ramped up further the sense of nerves and not knowing, of staring into an abyss, a threatening landscape of obstacles, pitfalls and the whistling wind of what’s now called… jeopardy. What would it be like? How would I cope? Would I, ultimately, manage to finish? Would I die (to be explained later)? Am I too old for this sort of thing? (Plenty of people were happy to assure me yes on that last one.)

But these flippancies are merely the indulgences of an idle mind, as they evaporate the moment you set off, when there are far too many things to be thinking about to waste energy on worry. And too much to enjoy.

We left the main square of Krakow at 4.30 am one morning, just 17 of us, weaving among the revellers from the night before, eventually heading south and west towards the Slovak border. It was the height of summer, so the nights were short and the fields were in harvest. Grapes were gathering on the vine, plums falling to the ground and nectarines ripening as the verges around us turned from green in Slovakia and Slovenia to a parched yellow in Spain, where the Cerberus heatwave was ratcheting down into a lock.

There was nature that we never see from a car, deer skipping away at our silent approach, dragonflies darting in shaded waterways, small mammals sadly crushed by life’s remorseless rubber-driven progress. And insects that hovered... and then for some reason darted across my path at the last moment, often hitting me directly in the face (instead of splodging our windscreens, I guess).

There were the different physical characters of seven European countries: the vast skies of open flatlands of Hungary, rivers to follow and mountains that glared on the horizon in Slovakia and Italy, and at least seven major - Tour-de-France-standard – cols. There were delightful towns and cities – Lubljana, Mantua, Piacenza – lovely walled hilltop towns, gorges, canals and escarpments. There were ice creams in Italy, pain au chocolat in France, and coffee in them all: caffe latte, café au lait and, in Spain, the finest caffeine shot of all, café con leche con hielo, coffee over a block of ice.

Did I make it? Yes, I made it… I took a while, and it became complicated, but I got there, to the sculpture of a tuna that marks Tarifa at the very southern tip of Europe. I was smelly, exhausted, with no sensation remaining in most of my fingers and hands, and a festering backside, and eight kilogrammes lighter, but satisfied… to the core, or possibly to the (spinal) cord, given how basic and physical all this stuff is. Someone described 45 South-West as ‘a handsome challenge, honourably defeated’ - ok, that might have been me - but so it was. And in my case really the only words that fully describe it, with all its complication and endeavour and, after all, advanced age, were … Not Fast, But Far.