Fire!

I've always thought that people who complain about their bottoms during/after cycling to be a bit, well, hopeless. Lightweight, dissolute, moaning minnies.  I now realise I've been totally unfair, and in fact there's really nothing very fun about having to spend 8 hours sitting on what feels like a medium-sized garden bonfire. 

I'm not really sure why it happened to me during Cent Cols ("a hundred cols" - a Col being a pass between two mountains). It certainly didn't in 2009 when I cycled Land's End to John O'Groats.  But in those days I was a regular cyclist, winter and everything, whereas now I'm not only a fair weather one, but a fair weather one only in France.  So maybe the 25 hours or so of road riding that I'd done before my trip down to the Pyrenees wasn't enough to harden up my nether regions.

Other afflictions during our 10 days of cycling up and down mountains all day included:

• Dehydration headaches
• Leg cramps
• Horsefly bites 
• Bruised palms
• Sunburned nose
• Uncomfortably chapped lips
• Struggling to peel contact lenses off eyeballs after hot days
• Being horsingly drunk after consuming just three Grimbergen beers in 40 minutes after one ride
• Insomnia
• ...and that general constant feeling of exhaustion - "how the hell am I going to do that again tomorrow?"

Looking back at that list it occurs to me that it's not that different to one a summer music festival goer might come up with, flaming bottom aside - and with the state of some festivals' lavatorial facilities, who knows, perhaps that one too.

But ask a festival goer whether it was all worth it, and the majority - I assume - would say "hell, yeah."  And the same was true of our merry band of 14 riders.  Five New Zealanders, three Englishmen, a Scot, and Aussie, a Belgian, and American, a Canadian, and a German woman pedalled their way through the Pyrenean mountains until we could pedal no more.  What made it worth it?

• Er, the Pyrenees. Varied, gorgeous, challenging, fabulous. If you haven't been, you should go.
• The comradeship. It was too tough to be competitive. It wouldn't be true to say lifelong friendships are formed - the nature of these trips is that a group of strangers comes together, they're mutually supportive, and then go their separate ways at the end. We might end up with a couple of extra Facebook friends, but that's it. On the road, however, we look out for each other.
• Going down hills very fast.  It's basic, it's (arguably) childish, but there's something about descending 15-20km of mountain on 2 square centimetres of rubber at speeds of up to 90kmh that's totally exhilarating. The 15 odd km mean that it's not just a momentary high, but one that can last up to half an hour at a time (and there's no cold turkey or hangover when it stops). It's like skiing but without the cold, expense and idiots.
• NOT the challenge. But it's reassuring to know you're still fairly resilient.

So there we are. It's a simple story really; we suffered, but we had fun.  Many thanks to my superb chum Mendip Rouleur for encouraging me to go after I tore my hamstring doing a marathon earlier in the year, for enlightening me and others regularly with obscure and arcane facts and knowledge, and being a more-or-less tolerable roomie (much less snoring this year. 👍. Or maybe deeper sleep on my part) and dinner date. 

Finally, some of the final-night-of-the-tour conversation revolved around the best moments of the trip. Apart from the undoubted and unexpected treat of seeing Mendip Rouleur's saddle sores when he bent over to inspect them in a wardrobe mirror, for me it was the moment when we arrived at the top of the 2200m Col du Tourmalet, for me the definitive Pyrenean climb), decided as a group to get some lunch, and so ate steak and drank beer 7000 feet up in the air and out in the sunshine, knowing we'd already worked off the calories many times over and there was nothing to follow but 18km of downhill to a hot shower. Here's the evidence (of the event anyway, steak yet to arrive):