What Goes Up…
Seething. Absolutely seething. Had to walk in parts. Bike filthy. Scratched. Bloody disaster. Effing and blinding all the way down. Minutes…hours… Fell twice. Hate this bike, hate this path, hate this mountain, hate my life. All the gear, no idea. Sliding downhill at high speed, on my heels, not wheels. Shame no one was there to laugh. Actually, probably for the best: shockingly foul-mouthed. Surprised myself, even. I could picture the newspaper article already: ‘Swexit: Potty-mouthed Brit curses REGA pilots with dying breath. Bill remains unpaid.’
It all started to go wrong when I crested a pass near Piz Saluver…on my road bike. Tough guy. The old, “because it can be done, it must be done” mentality. St. Moritz sucks for road riding, that much was clear to me the previous two days already, but no, let’s make it road friendly, said I, and decided to ride up kilometres of gravel path on skinny race tyres. Let’s ignore where I am, how it feels, pretend I’m somewhere else, doing something else, and do it all through gritted teeth. Sound familiar? For me at least, it’s something of a habit.
Of course, I didn’t want to admit I was just a tit on a road bike riding up an unpaved mountain until I absolutely had to. But of course nowhere do the laws of nature hold more true than, well, in nature. What goes up, must come down. Water, stones, bikes, people, and even egos. I crested the summit. Elation, the obligatory photo for all the countless people who couldn’t give a rat’s arse about what I did at 17:58 on a Tuesday evening, but no need to think about that, just keep filling the balloon with hot air.
As puffed as the Grand Old Duke himself, I was ready to go down again. Quick glance at the view - not bad, seen better, climbed higher, been faster - and off I went. Better give the brakes a little test. Fuuu…crunch. I was down. Just 500m later, I was down again. And so began the long and painful descent. Not so much physically - I had a lot of overweening pride to lick, not to mention time to burn, as I clickety-clacked my way down the steepest sections in racing cleats, cursing the world from its molten core to Voyager 1.
Then I started to laugh. Proper belly-heaving shakes that did nothing to help the fine balance between me, my disc brakes, my 28mm front tyre, and having my face in the gravel a third time. What had I been thinking? What were all these fantasies of…was it triumph, or attainment? And why did they keep compelling me to act? What itch was I trying to scratch? Why had I yet again found myself (literally this time) going uphill, against the grain, battling friction on the way up and gravity on the way down in some topsy-turvy reinvention of the world around me? Where on earth was my flow, man?! Yoga teacher, ha! Honestly. I made myself laugh. But the battle was real, so I had to put a lid on it until I was back on tarmac again, and focus.
Then it dawned on me. This whole escapade was like a rugged metaphor for my life. The path before me, and all that. I began to ask myself: why am I riding on this rough, energy-sapping road, tight and winding and claustrophobic, having to stare at the ground and anxiously take in every miserable, dusty, stony centimetre? I don’t like looking at the little stones, or going at a snail’s pace. And why should I? I like tarmac, I like carbon fibre, I like slick tyres inflated to 105 psi. That way the machine carrying my experience around can fly at the fastest possible speed, I can look at the big stones, the mountains, the passes, and the sky above, and dream of what could be beyond that, now and forever, and feel the real freedom of the open road with a stable base beneath me, everything functioning smoothly, efficiently, comfortably, because not just I, but countless generations have toiled to make this possible, all the joy and energy I gain from heights and speeds that the Romans - who laid the first roads - could never dream of. Yet here I was, knuckles white, teeth gritted, backside clenched. And not in a fun way.
The crunching subsided into the reassuring hum of tarmac. Sometimes you have to take the rough to appreciate the smooth. I looked down at my bike computer; still a few k’s to go. I clicked up to the big ring. There’s no time like the present, and no place like home.