The View From Benambra

It wasn’t a win, or even a podium, but it’s still the best race result I’ve gotten so far – fourth out of about 58 riders in a handicap race, and a $60 prize to boot!

The course was one I rather like, the Kyneton-Sutton Grange out-and-back. There’s not much traffic – no, they don’t close the road for our races – there’s no single-lane bits or nasty wooden bridges, and it’s one of the hillier loops we do. As a smaller rider, hills suit me a lot better than windy flat sections do.

Anyway, I was in the “18 minute” bunch – that is, I started 18 minutes before the scratch riders, putting me usually with older men and, on this occasion, two women who I’ve seen at the St Kilda crits fairly regularly, Alison and Eliza. One thing I’d learned is they tend to look like they’re struggling at the start of the race, before powering on towards the end of it; I was keen to work with the bunch, but this time around I was keen to make sure that everybody in our bunch either took a turn at the front or got dropped.

In any case, we set off at a cracking pace; in retrospect, probably a tad too fast; my average heart rate for the first half of the race, a bit over an hour, was 166 beats per minute. On the way north towards Sutton Grange, however, there are a couple of descents where you can get your breath back. Everybody was doing their “rolling turns” quite well, though one guy in particular seemed to be not slowing down when he hit the front, to the chagrin of the people trying to pull past him to take their turn. At this point, I thought he was way stronger than the rest of us. But we continued fair hurtling along towards the turnaround point, where the rewards of our effort became clear. A large gaggle of riders were just turning around not more than a couple of hundred metres ahead of us; judging from the size it was clear that we’d just about caught the frontmarkers by the half-way point.

We quickly got turned around and heading up the hill, where we caught the bunch and things got messy for a while. Some of the riders tried to work with us, but most weren’t, and either the backmarkers would catch us or some lazy/smart frontmarker would wheelsuck off us all the way to the finish and beat us in a sprint. I thought an attack might come, and it was Alison and Eliza who went off the front, using the crosswind. I took advantage of one of the other eighteen minute riders to drag me up to them, and after that little attack we’d disposed of some of the group, leaving about a dozen if memory serves me correctly.

There was one more climb to come, with roughly a 500 metre section of 8-9 percent (which is moderately steep), the steepest of the entire race. If there was to be another group going off the front, it was going to happen there, and the bunch was climbing pretty slowly at that point…so rather than get caught out I moved my way to the front of the pack and started pacesetting at a pretty hard but sustainable pace for me. I got to the top, looked around…and aside from one other guy we’d disposed of the rest of the groups and were left with six riders, pretty much the bunch we’d started with. Interestingly, we’d gotten rid of the guy who’d looked the strongest of the lot.

From there, I thought we had roughly about 15 kilometres to the finish, but I wasn’t sure exactly where the finish line was. But as we didn’t know where the scratch riders were, we had to keep working hard together all the way to the line. And we did. While I wouldn’t say our rolling turns were exactly ProTour standard, as the kilometres rolled on we started to get pretty smooth as we became gradually hopeful, then increasingly confident that we might actually hang on all the way.

We don’t even have a “1km to go” sign, so the first we knew of the finish line was the sight of cars…and somebody holding what appeared to be the checkered flag. I made the obvious comment that “I guess that’s the finish line”…and a few seconds later Allison and Eliza took off. I thought they’d sprinted too early, but my awful sprinting ability again ensured that I missed Eliza’s wheel, while another guy who’d looked strong all day blasted past all of us to take the win.

Still, I was bloody happy with fourth, and we all congratulated each other as we rolled to a gradual halt.

Talking to the guy who won, he reckoned that if the group got to the front he was always confident of the win, and he was right. But I don’t think I could have done much, except been more attentive at the jump; I might have got a podium spot and a dicky little trophy.

But still, I got my petrol money home and the likelihood of a tougher handicap next race.

I almost outsmarted myself today when it comes to post-conference amusements.

I’m on Jeju Island, Korea, with a couple of days to explore the place after the software engineering conference I attended was completed. I can say that the Western food is lousy and overpriced (no surprise there) but the local stuff is great, provided you can figure out which establishments are actually restaurants, convince them to serve you, and manage to figure out how to express an order. Yep, the language barrier is higher here than anywhere else I’ve visited, including China. Taxis are cheap, but almost useless because of the combination of the language problem, the weird address system, and the fact that Koreans (according to the guidebook) rarely use maps, so pointing to the location you want to go on a map doesn’t help either!

But there is one universal language, and I got a dose of that at Jeju Love Land. No, it’s not the local red-light district, it’s the weirdest tourist attraction I think I’ve ever seen. It’s mainly a sculpture garden, and has a diorama in one building in the middle. But, of course, with a name like that it’s no surprise that the sculptures all depict sexual acts of one sort or another.

See below the fold for some example photos (possibly not safe for work) and further discussion…
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First off, obviously it’s great that Tim Holding was found safe and well.

But there was one element of this story (unrelated to Holding himself) that’s a bit strange:

A private aircraft, not related to the search, spotted Mr Holding last night while he was wearing a headlamp given to him by his partner for his birthday last month.

Deputy Comissioner Kieran Walshe said he could not discuss the use of the aircraft because of security reasons.

The plane had spied a possible camp site overnight, narrowing the search area this morning.

A Victoria Police spokeswoman said the plane used was not a police plane but she could not comment further on the aircraft.

A mysterious “private aircraft” that spotted Holding’s campsite but can’t be discussed further for “security reasons”? WTF?

If it was an Australian private aircraft, what possible “security reasons” would there be for not discussing it?

One possibilities that come to mind is that one law enforcement agency or another has aerial surveillance capabilities that they don’t want to publicize too widely. Another is that it was an Australian Army helicopter on SAS training operations; it’s not beyond the realms of plausibility that the SAS conducts training missions on Feathertop (where else are they going to practice working in snow?)

Still, it’s more than a little odd; perhaps the Victoria police might have done better to not mention it at all.

First-up – Christine Milne on the natural gas deal

But Greens Senator Christine Milne says the deal should have been higher.

“These deals have been shown time and time again to have been done in a way that is very, very cheap, and in the long-term not in the best interests of the country,” she said.

Christine, perhaps you haven’t noticed, but there’s a glut of natural gas, and multiple studies suggest that Australia – including south-eastern Australia, has no shortage off the stuff.  We’re going to have to stop burning it because of the greenhouse implications well before we run out.

Next up, Paul Howes advocating nuclear power; as a low-greenhouse option.  I’ve got no problem with that, but if we listened to his views on greenhouse we’d never get a carbon price that makes nuclear anywhere near competitive.

I pay a coach some money to write a training program for my cycling. It costs a bit – roughly $20 per week – but compared to the cost of everything else relating to cycling it’s a bargain if it works. One of the things he has me do is a weights program at the gym, which for the first few months I resisted doing. But after a few reminders I’ve decided to give it a go. It’s not outrageous; two half-hour weight sessions a week.

Anyway, there’s a road up the Studley Park Hill I use as a training test. As far as I know, it’s the most substantial climb in the inner suburbs. As a strength exercise, I ride up it in about third or fourth gear, turning the pedals over really slowly. I used to not be able to do this, having to get out of the seat and push, or change down into the lowest gear. But – while I wouldn’t call it easy, it’s now quite possible to sit in the seat and slow-pedal up the hill, without even putting in maximum effort. And I used to do this with just the bike – I now do this exercise with my backpack on with a couple of kilograms of extra gear in it.

Chalk one up for weight training, and the coach!

The United States of Tara, currently screening on ABC television, is if nothing else a showpiece for the acting talents of Toni Collette. We all know that talented actors are chameleons, able to transform themselves into the character the script demands, but rarely do we get it shoved in our face quite as blatantly as Collette’s incarnations of Tara, a reassuringly normal artist who loves her husband and children dearly, and the alternate personalities Tara inhabits – a teenage girl, a 50’s housewife sexpot, and a male “Vietnam vet” trucker. The characters deliberately verge on caricature, but Collette not only apes the gross characteristics of the stereotypes, but nails the small ones, too. And while it’s not as showy, the performances by the supporting cast, including John Corbett as Tara’s husband, and various young unknowns as her children, are pretty damn good too.

But, for all the joy of the performances and the clever scripting, the show has a problematic premise – a suburban mother, with a job and a loving family, who manages to function at some level while suffering what these days is known as “dissociative identity disorder” but rose to public attention as multiple personality disorder. I’m given to understand that, while the disease itself remains controversial, that the people who are diagnosed with it have usually had severe trauma at some point in their past, and tend to be ve disturbed in ways that would make the kind of functioning household portrayed in this show highly unlikely. In a nutshell, it’s hard to view Tara and her “alters” as anything other than a fantastic creation; a flight of fancy by creator Diablo Cody whose purported illness serves the demands of the narrative rather than a close connection to reality. It’s Buffy the Vampier Slayer, except that the fantastic element is a devastating disease transformed into narrative fodder.

And though the show is highly entertaining, I’m pretty uncomfortable with that.

I’m one of the “hoons” op-ed writer Geoff Strong is complaining about a in trollish piece in today’s Age.

It rambles from shock and horror that people like to ride quickly on Beach Road, his cycling experiences in Japan, where everybody dawdles along on their bikes (true), the difficulty of purchasing a “sensible” bicycle with the choice between road bikes and mountain bikes (complete BS – there are untold numbers of fixies and commuter bikes available) and complaining about an impatient bunch of roadies who wanted to pass stalled traffic that he, as a motorcyclist, thought wasn’t safe, with the implication from that anybody who wants to travel at training speeds on Beach Road must be an irresponsible dill with too much testosterone who needs to take a chill pill.

There are irresponsible dills with too much testosterone on Beach Road. There are irresponsible dills on fixies on Swanston Street. And there are ample quantities of dills in cars everywhere. But it doesn’t make everyone who wants to ride at speed along Beach Road an irresponsible dill.

If I happen to enjoy a vigorous workout at 40 km/h down to Mordialloc, I’m not stopping his 15 km/h maunder along bike paths. Can’t we just accept different people want different things out of cycling?

I really must note this stuff down before the memories fade! I forgot to mention that on the way up the Tourmalet, the cyclist who passed me on the way up came screaming down again well before I reached the summit, which was kind of humbling.

It was rather a long wait on the summit of the Tourmalet for Damian and Bucks; I was actually a little worried that I was going to get cold. Luckily, though, it was pleasantly warm, particularly out of the breeze. I had plenty of time to have a chat to people, but few spoke any English. There weren’t any other cyclists, either, surprisingly enough, though it was a weekday. The view from the top was sensational, though because you’re in a saddle point on the ridge it’s not really a 360 degree view like a summit would be. But there’s a great view of the narrow valley down to Luz-Saint-Seveur. The road to the Pic du Midi was off to the right; I had been given to understand that it had been sealed, but when I looked it was very much a bumpy old gravel road. Oh well, next time I’ll take a mountain bike

Finally, about 20 minutes later, Damian and Bucks rolled on in. I was a bit surprised how much longer they’d taken, but then I wasn’t intending to climb another hill for quite a while and they still had a couple of thousand kilometres of riding to do! After we’d taken photos and had some food, Marieke rolled in – hardly the fastest ascent of the Tourmalet ever achieved, but one of the gutsier ones given that her leg was still strapped up!

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Sainte Marie de Campan is another “quaint little village” in a rather isolated part of the Pyrenees. Aside from the sheep and cattle wandering around on the mountain slopes, during the summer its major business is supporting the tourists coming through on their Sunday drives. There’s a few shops, including a bakery, with a little sign out the front advertising “pain”. So, after a bit of a nibble and a refill of the drinkbottles, I convinced the Crusaders to temporarily move the sign to a more convenient location to preserve the moment. I was somewhat amused, when watching the actual Tour on Sunday night, to see that the TV cameraperson had a similar idea with the bakery in La Monngie…but that’s getting ahead of myself.

As agreed previously, I was going to have a fair-dinkum crack at the Tourmalet. I figured that I could do it fresh in about an hour and a hallf, but given the two days of heavy riding I’d inflicted upon myself, several very sore body parts, and so on, I had only proclaimed a goal to beat two hours. My best guess was somewhere splitting the difference, at around an hour and three quarters. The top pros, you ask? Going fulll bore? Something under 50 minutes. In any case, it was time to find out, so I left Damian, Bucks, and Marieke at the bottom of the climb, got down in the drops (down on the lower section of the handlebars, where you position yourself when trying to go fast), and started pedalling away, glancing at my heartrate monitor to pace myself.

Which soon revealed a pulse rate of 0 beats per minute…clearly, I was dead, and it was my ghost attacking the initial slopes of the climb, which were false flats through paddocks and the occasional shop. Or, alternatively, the bloody heart rate sensor was playing up. On the one time I was really going to be curious…but I had money to extract from people with this exercise so I stayed dead the entire way up the mountain.

From what I recall, the Tourmalet really starts as the road leaves the fields and enters the woods. Instead of a 3% doddle, the climb kicks up to 8 or 9 percent, and the average speed goes right down. At roughly 10 km/h, the slog begins. At this steepness, it’s not impossible to turn the pedals over, particularly given the grannyish gearing I choose to run. But it’s enough to have me alternating between stretches sitting on the bike, where suddenly the saddle sores have become a lot less noticeable, and bits out of the seat, wobbling from side to side. Progress was slow, and hard, but it continued, through the forest, interrupted every so often by a car whizzing past or the sound of some of the gorgeous waterfalls that so abound in the Pyrenees.

Despite the decent weather, the profusion of bikes on the Col de Aspin had disappeared. Only the Crusaders were silly enough to tackle the Tourmalet, it seemed. I do seem to recall one old bloke on a mountain bke making his way up at one point, in no difficulty whatsoever, his gearing allowing him to climb quite comfortably at half my speed.

The road was good. While it may be consistently quite steep, it’s wide; much wider than the road over the Aspin, making it easy for cars to get past. And the view gets better and better as I became less and less inclined to appreciate it. There’s no way round it – hill climbing on a bicycle, particularly when you’re trying to gain time, is just hard, hard grind. Particularly the Tourmalet. It never gets ridiculously steep, but it’s just kilometre after kilometre of tough. At least the forest is lovely, and the waterfalls are really pretty.

About half way up, John caught up to me in the Crusadermobile for a fresh water bottle. It’s a measure of how much better I was feeling by the third day that, despite being half-way up the hardest climb I’ve ever tackled, I grabbed the bottle off him and kept going as soon as I could. I felt well ahead of schedule, but it’s always hard to calculate how well you’re going on a hill the first time you ride it.

The trees end when you reach the first of several tunnels – more concrete shelters at the edge of the slope than true tunnels actually. These represented the steepest bits of the whole slope, according to the gradient meter on my computer. Normally, a short stretch of 11% isn’t too bad. But on the Tourmalet, there isn’t anywhere to rest; the relief from the stretch of 11% was…another stretch of 10%. It’s that kind of a hill. At least the end of the trees means that the end is getting closer.

But I still couldn’t even see La Mongie, the ski village near the top, as I continued to crawl up the narrow valley. The creek roars to your right, and I go through another tunnel – though, for some reason, the tunnel only covers half the road and I chose to go round. Finally, the gradient eases off to a positively cruisy 8% as La Mongie comes into view.

It’d be nice to be able to report La Mongie as a beautiful alpine village, but the first building you can see is a fugly concrete block, and it doesn’t improve much from there as you get. Falls Creek is a marvel of modern architecture by comparison, and has the fringe benefit of not having sheep, and their droppings, in the way. It steepens back up again through the town, back to 10%. But I was feeling pretty good; I’d paced myself up, and despite not being able to maintain as high a cadence as I would like, I’d maintained a higher average speed than I’d been predicting. And surely most of the climb was done now?

The most depressing part of the entire climb is once you pass La Mongie and the summit isn’t even in sight. The resort drags on and on, the road narrows, and you still can’t see the bloody summit. It’s not getting any easier, either. While I couldn’t notice any effect of the altitude (which wasn’t outrageously high, at around 1600 metres at the point), the marginal reduction in steepness is matched by rising fatigue. But a shot of cyclo-food – a strawberry gel – works wonders.

As I slowly made my way up the barren, rugged slopes of the High Pyrenees, another cyclist flies past – and I mean flew. I never found out whether he was a pro or not, but it was pretty humbling, if a temporary distraction.

The slope gradually eased a bit, and the bike computer was suggesting that the top wasn’t too far away, but the Tourmalet’s top is pretty well hidden around a series of hairpins, between the craggy peaks. I was wondering where the hell the end was. If this was Donna Buang, I’d have been finished 20 minutes ago…

And, suddenly, it did. A gap cut in the mountain, a final steep ramp, and I’m there, next to the statue of Henri Desgrange and a random cyclist. The road to the Pic du Midi teases to the right. The valley on the other side is goreous, and it was pleasantly warm. And an hour, 34 minutes and 30 seconds after I started, the Tourmalet was done.

The Col de Aspin, in retrospect, a bit of a miniature version of its longer, more famous companion, the Tourmalet. It started off very easy for the first few kilometres through the woods, and got harder as we went. For this day, I’d decided I’d like to set my own pace up the cilmb, as travelling at too slow a pace up a climb, particularly when you lack really low granny gears, can actually be harder than a faster climb. And, in any case, unlike Damian, Bucks and Marieke I didn’t have to worry about how I was going to feel at the end of the day. So, as soon as the road started to pitch up a little bit, I left the others behind to make their own way up.

It was another warm day, but not nearly as oppressive as the first day out of Barcelona. I was getting used to the sports drink we had, too – I think it was Damian who suggested it tasted like the purgative you drink before a colonscopy. Regardless of the pretty awful taste, I was going to stick with it – calories and electrolytes are bloody important on a bike, and while the strawberry gels we had (another sponsor product) were pretty good, they’re not at their best at body temperature after sitting in your back pocket for a few hours.

The D918 was a bit of a cattle track, reminding me a bit of the Jarvis Creek Road near my parents’ place where I ride when I visit them. It’s narrow, largely unfenced on either side. It was, however, beautifully surfaced at this point. Clearly, if you’re a farmer and you want your road maintained in France, you get the Tour de France to come by! I can’t imagine how the road copes with the thousands of cars that accompany the Tour, though.

After a few kilometres of climbing, I emerged above the trees, and the road started to steepen up again. While it’s a Cat 1, the Aspin didn’t feel particularly intimidating – partly because you never really get a view of the top, and the surroundings don’t look as foreign as the really high passes like the Port D’Envalira, or the upcoming Tourmalet did…but enough of that. It was still reasonably hard work, but aside from the views back down into the valley in places, there was another distraction – another cyclist to chase! He wasn’t exactly Marco Pantani, maintaining a steady pace, so I gradually reeled him in. Unfortunately, he didn’t speak any English, so aside from the fact that he was a local and I was from Australia (which surprised him a bit) we didn’t learn much.

A little whle later, we hit the hardest stretch this side of the Aspin has to offer – a stretch of 8-9% slope. If I was at home, I’d really get out of the saddle and attack it, but given what was coming I forced myself to calm down and maintain a consistent effort level, according to the heart rate monitor. But that’s a bit of a nuisance, because in my lowest gear, on this slope, at that effort level, I could only maintain a cadence of 70 rpm or so, which isn’t exactly optimal. After a few minutes of this, sure enough, the other bloke came back past, spinning away happily with his triple front chainring. Note to self – if I ever do anything like this again, I’m fitting a triple!

In any case, the Aspin continued its long, mostly straight grind upwards, and I felt pretty good as I approached the top, hoping there was a decent view. And there was – more cows, a van selling the local cheese, a pile of bushwalkers on their way to explore the ridge, and a variety of cyclists coming up the other side of the Aspin, many accompanied with support vans of their own.

Damian, Bucks and Marieke arrived a few minutes later, in similarly good spirits, and we took the opportunity to have some lunch and admire the ridge of considerably higher mountains to the north and west, and say hello to the cows grazing up there, complete with cowbells, of course. Damian’s mate Jase pulled out his SLR to take photos of the cows, only to get a nasty head-butt from one of them! Another group of British cyclists were riding up the other side of the Aspin…we joined in the applause as the last of the group reached the summit. Amazingly enough, one of them turned out to also have Crohn’s disease!

One of them mentioned that they’d been over the Tourmalet the previous day, and so we pumped them for information about it. They mentioned that the road on the far side (where we would descend) was in woeful condition, as we’d heard, but it was still passable. They also mentioned a mate of theirs had done the climb in 50 minutes, to incredulity from me…until they mentioned that their mate was 54 kilograms!

But, as always, I was getting antsy…I had a real mountain waiting for me. So it was down the (much steeper) other side of the Col, past the cows and through the cow dung, to the little town of Saint Marie de Campan, where the Col du Tourmalet starts.