June 17, 2012
Bon courage, les amis! Bon courage!: Jussac - Riom-es-Montagnes
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BON COURAGE! Chapeau! Time and again the encouragement produced an inner smile. It came from cyclists going our way, touching their brakes to gasp a few words. And it came in hurried shouts from those who had completed their climb and were racing back to town. And now and then it was shouted through the open window of a car, for this is France and Frenchmen know how hard it is to ride a bicycle up a mountain. Especially a steep mountain and on loaded bikes.
This is Sunday and the road to the Pas de Peyrol, the col of the Puy Mary, is a carnival of riders on flimsy bikes of morning mist and dreams. They whirl by with fluidity and grace while we plod on bikes made more like camels. The Puy Mary starts on the edge of Aurillac and opens with two dozen or more kilometres of rolling road, all nagging rises and frustrating descents, that get progressively steeper. They serve as a knee-capping before the final 11 kilometres, the real climb. There, the road swings left just as you rather hoped the whole business was finished and a blue panel announces that there are still another two hours to go.
There are two ways to start this climb. The first, and for us the shortest, is the ridge road that joins the main climb about halfway along its run. But that is needlessly hilly and it didn't take long to dismiss the idea in favour of a longer and less demanding ride into Aurillac and the straighter and, to start with, flatter road out of it.
Aurillac is one of the few cities in the world to make a living from making umbrellas. When we were last here, a decade ago, one of the companies had put up hoardings on all the roads out of town. They showed the behinds of three cows, all urinating abundantly. Underneath, in French, was the sales pitch: "When it rains like a pissing cow, you need one of our umbrellas."
I looked for one to show Karen. It wouldn't fail, I knew that. But they weren't there. Instead she was overjoyed to find one of the few roads in France to have a shoulder. A wide one, too.
"Now I really feel at home," she gurgled "It makes me want to order a Big Mac."
I don't think it would have taken much to stop her. But she pronounced it Big Mac rather than Big Mac, and so we were able to ignore her on the grounds that we hadn't understood.
Anyway, if she had had one, she might well not have made it up the Puy Mary. Steph and I had both ridden it before. We'd camped a litle way out of town and joined 13 000 other riders toiling their way to the top, under a burning sun, during the Semaine Fédérale. We were on our touring bikes then as well, but that day they were unloaded. Today, they were heaped for four months on the road across 13 countries. Apprehension, that was the word.
"It's heartbreaking," Steph said of the first two hours. "You spend 25km climbing and then you get to that sign that says you haven't even started on the main part and that there are still 11km to go."
And to climb properly, too, because from here on there are no petty descents, no chances to rest the legs, to resummon the spirit. It is all on and on, uphill. The road averages six per cent all the way to the summit, with stretches of up to nine per cent.
Someone had been that way before us and made our task easier, or at any rate more fractional, by painting the remaining distance on the road every kilometre. And somewhere, someone with less polite concern had painted a broad curving arrow from the crown of the road to a hedgerow at its side and added "VINO OUT", showing where Vinokourov had left the Tour with more abruptness than he'd have wished.
The road rose through trees, then fields again, rarely noisier than the ever-present birdsong. With noon passed, all self-respectting Frenchmen were at home with their lunch, not out on their bikes or in cars. And then suddenly, as the road again swung left, we reached Karen's woo-hoo point, as she'd called it in an e-mail: we were above the tree line.
Our road ran through empty fields of grass lined with brilliant wild flowers. Twice it ran round a ledge beneath a cliff and opposite a vertical drop. It was just for a moment on the very edge of the world.
And then, after another half an hour, our route flattened a little and we bowled almost effortlessly between parked cars to the panel that showed we had conquered the mountain.
We joined those who had ridden up on motorbikes, or come by car and were now shivering in the mountain-top air, and we ate and drank on a terrace that overlooked a near-vertical drop into the valley. The very valley we would take just when we cared. Which, for the moment, wasn't going to be any time soon. Life on the top of that mountain was too good to throw it all away in an instant.
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