Tour de France from the inside

Thanks to the NBC Sports Network and a host of mostly insufferable advertisers, I can watch the Tour de France early in the mornings during July. Since I have always been a recreational cyclist, with no experience at racing, I marvel at the exploits of these young athletes, many of whom are the age of  my grandchildren.

I pay special attention to the brief interviews with these men and am impressed by how genuine they seem, how committed they are to their sport, how skilled they are in combining loyalty to their team with the intense desire to perform well themselves.

It is regrettable that this sport, along with other professional sports, has to deal with the problems of performance enhancing drugs. Even so, the character of professional cyclists strikes me as worthy of commendation to young people today as a good example of athletic endeavor .

Watching the Tour, however, gives only a partial view of what happens on the road and how this intense activity feels to the people actually cycling these long, hard distances. Here I can only depend upon the testimonies of people who actually ride the tour route.

In an earlier posting, I called attention to the group of six women who are riding this year’s course a day ahead of the Tour itself. Heidi Swift from Portland is one of the team and she posts columns nearly every day describing how she and her teammates are faring in this intensely difficult event.

Even with support from their sponsors and from a team of Dutch cyclists who also are cycling the Tour route with them, the ride pushes Heidi and friends close to the point of exhaustion, affecting body and mind. Here are a few lines from a recent post.

“We’re five stages from finishing this thing. Five stages which seems like nothing and also seems like forever. Two mountain stages, one excruciatingly long flat stage, a TT and then the parade to Paris. Tomorrow we must pass over two above category climbs and two category one climbs. It will be a long day on the bike. Probably the longest yet.

“These days do not come without consequences. I’m tired and torn up: saddles sores, cramped feet, permanently numb fingers. That’s just the daily stuff. You ride until it all goes away, replaced by a middle ground of calm and determination. Pain is just a sensation, like love or happiness or anything else. Experience it, ride through it, ride past it.”

Onetime racer, longtime frame builder, and current blogger Dave Moulton also comments on current events in cycling, including the Tour de France. On a recent day, the cyclists were confronted with a serious road hazard, a large number of ugly carpet tacks broadcast on the road. Nearly a third of the cyclists flatted, as did some of the motorcycles that patrol the route and several team cars that support and service the cyclists.

One of the unwritten rules of the road was invoked by Brad Wiggins who was wearing the yellow jersey—the cyclist who at the time was number one in the race. He signaled the peloton, the mass of cyclists riding in a group, who had avoided the hazard, to ease up until the others could get back onto the road and in their place. Here are a few lines from Dave’s blog.

“This unwritten law of fair play was demonstrated in last Sunday’s Tour de France stage. Cadel Evans punctured because some idiot had thrown upholstery tacks on the road. Team Sky, lead by Bradley Wiggins, slowed and essentially neutralized the race while Evans caught up. Soon after the other contender Vincenzo Nibali also flatted.

“Let’s face it, if Evans and Nibali had both lost several minutes the Tour de France would have been over for them and over for the rest of us following the event. The sense of fair play shown by Wiggins and the others, not only neutralized the race but neutralized the affect caused by whoever threw tacks on the road in the first place.

“The fact that this happened without any prompting from officials of the race is pretty amazing in any professional sport, which is why I say cycle racing is unique.”

In a few days this most-watched athletic event in the world will be over for the year, but the examples of overwhelming athleticism and remarkable team spirit will continue to encourage and inspire.

Note: The photo is copied from Swift’s blog on Pelotonmagazine.com. 

Heidi Swift reveals how hard the Tour de France really is

While I’ve never doubted what the TV commentators say—that multi-stage bicycle races like Le Tour du France are the most demanding athletic events of our time—a female cyclist and writer named Heidi Swift conveys a more persuasive interpretation of how hard this extreme sport really is.

With a team of women cyclists, Swift is riding the Tour’s route one day ahead of the race itself and posting frequent reports of how their ride is going. Excerpts from the early stages tell part of the story.

After stage one: “It was a hard stage today. Nothing to dismiss easily. In the final 4k we turned straight up a 17% climb that narrowed and switched here and there through the town. Up, up, up, up. Unrelenting after nearly eight hours in the saddle. I cursed and stood on the pedals and bumped over cobbled roads and then it ended. I thought of the godlike men who will arrive there tomorrow, crushing up the grade in an explosive finale.

“What we do on this course is an exercise in survival. What they do is pure magic and outright athleticism. The crossover of the two is where mortals are able to touch a little bit of that golden light.”

After stage four: “You know how you know when a ride is hard? You’re climbing and blood starts spurting out of your nose. (For the record, I just wrote ‘nose starts spurting out of your blood’ and had to fix it. Which is to say I’m really cashed.)

“The kind (and powerful) Dutch woman who came by me while the blood rolled down my wrist and arm gave me a bit of tissue. I stuffed it shut and kept going – there was still one more climb to do. My advice to you: don’t do threshold efforts while swallowing blood. Unless you’re at 198k of a stage of the Tour de France.” Then you just keep rolling.”

Swift and her teammates have trained rigorously for their tour, and they are sponsored and supported by strong organizations. Furthermore, as Swift’s dispatches indicate, there are other teams on the course with her woman’s team who are ready to provide additional support. Even so, the physical pain and mental stress are building up.

The official teams, of course, have even more support: their team cars, mechanical repairs instantly available, medical support, food and water all along the way. Furthermore, the smooth character of edited TV reports mask some of the stress that riders experience.

Even so, the unbelievable performances shine through. As a non-racing but aggressive cyclist, I have on rare occasions cycled at speeds between 45 and 50 miles an hour. Always down steep grades where gravity provides most of the forward momentum. In the tour, the top cyclists who are charging up hill to the finish line develop that speed by sheer power of muscle and mind (and a little help from their friends).

And they do it day after day!

Heidi Swift, by the way, is a Portland-based writer and cyclist. My previous awareness of her abilities was based on occasional columns she published in the Portland newspaper, The Oregonian. Her personal knowledge of cycling shone through. She affirmed different ways of being a bicyclist, and her writing conveyed feeling as well as information. There was a bite to her columns that I liked.

She and her teammates are sponsored by several bicycle-related businesses, including the magazine Peleton, and that’s where her Le Tour postings are published online. Several online reports detail the team and its Tour effort. To read Jonathan Maus’ account, click here. Her Oregonian essays are good, reading, too. Heidi also blogs and a good introduction to this venture is this interview, also published in the Oregonian. The two photos and the two excerpts from Heidi Swift’s tour accounts are all taken from postings on www.Peletonmagazine.com.

Swift has a hard three weeks in front of her—to ride the Tour’s course to the point of exhaustion every day and to post her regular reports. My bets are that she’ll get it done.