The last ride #9 Imagine for a moment that there was only one moreA single day, a final chapter, a last ride. Of all the miles covered and all the roads ridden, which would draw you back to experience them one more time?CHASING THE PERFECT CORNERMountain-biker & Photographer // @mattwragg
One last ride? It's a great sharpener for the mind. After all, if we've got a lifetime of riding left, why does it matter which one we do now? But just one more... it's a great chance to think about what you really love about riding. Is it the adventure, the freedom, the fitness? For me it's far simpler than that: I love riding bikes. What I mean is that I love the very act of riding a bike.
I'm not a graceful man. I stumble through this world an awkward, clumsy man with heavy hands and a treacherous sense of balance. Yet on the bike I can rise above it all. There are delicate, fleeting moments of grace. Times when I can make the bicycle dance beneath me, when I feel like I can make it do whatever I want, however I want. And if I can only do it once more, that's all I want.
I have always been a mountain biker at heart, it always was and will always be my first love, so it's only right things end there too. The where doesn't matter, the when hardly does either. But the ground, the dirt, is so important and if there is one thing more precious to a mountain biker like me than anything else, it is loam. Soft, deep soil that gently sprays across your shins as you ride. That feeling is about as close to the pure, white joy of childhood as you will ever find this side of puberty. It is the one thing I miss more than anything else living in the South of France - we just don't have enough dirt.
There was a time, maybe a decade ago now, when the locals started kicking in what they called drift tracks at Chicksands, a small riding spot an hour or so north of London in the UK. The soil there was always incredible - deep, soft and sandy. The tracks were nothing really. Off the back of the bike park we'd head off into the forest to find some secluded slope and kick in some corners between the bushes. And that was all it took: good dirt, a few corners and a group of friends.
Part of the beauty was the lack of consequences. The soil was so soft and forgiving that you could crash your brains out and come up laughing. We could push and push and push until we went well over the limit and landed in a heap. It was everything I love about cycling in one place - there was no destination or goal, just the simple of act of trying to corner fast and deeper, to get the bar right down to the ground as you turned, to play with the entry and the exit, trying different lines, all the while chasing that ever-elusive feeling of the perfect corner. Whether we ever found that perfect corner never mattered. It was never about speed, time or any other measure; just the simple feeling of turning a bicycle in the dirt as the loam gently brushes against your shins. That and laughing like hell when someone got it wrong and ended up in a bush or on their head.
So for my last ride I just want a group of good friends and a hillside with rich, deep soil. I would spend my last hours on a bike chasing after the perfect corner, laughing at each other as we go flying off into the bushes, chatting shit and riding until the sun sets and we have to walk back to the cars in the twilight.UNFINISHED BUSINESSTech Writer at CYCLING WEEKLY // @PaulNorman
I’ve got unfinished business with the Passo Giau. It may not have the mystique of Alpe d’Huez, but it does have more hairpins – 29 of them – and its summit is over 400 metres higher at 2236m. When brands invite journalists to launches, they usually choose impressive locations or those steeped in cycling mythology. There can be few which encompass both as completely as the Dolomites. The scene of the final showdown in the 1973 Giro d’Italia, the Passo Giau features in the classic film of that race, The Stars and the Water Carriers. In those days it was still unpaved, with Merckx and Gimondi battling it out over the gravel with an angry swarm of Spanish climbers.
Most recently – now tarmacked – it’s featured in the 2016 Giro, with the Maglia Rosa of Andrey Amador distanced and lost on the climb and handed to almost-winner Steven Kruijswijk. The Giro commentary on the stage ominously described the climb as “il terribile Passo Giau”.
So when I was invited to the launch of a new bike by a famous Italian brand, the lure of the Giau over the horizon was irresistible. After breakfast, I made my excuses not to join the short launch ride and headed off on my own towards the pass. There’s no such thing as a flat road in the Dolomites, so I had a good thousand metres and a few hours’ riding in my legs before hitting the Giau, with its signs warning of those 29 hairpins ahead of me. With images of 1973 in my mind, I forged on up the lower slopes. It took me until bend 10 before a few facts quickly came to me: I was not Merckx, my legs hurt, I was hungry and running out of water. And there were another 19 hairpins to go. The organised ride that I’d forsaken had other benefits. It ended at a café where food and drink had been laid on. Realising that I had no energy bars with me, I’d grabbed a few bread rolls from the hotel buffet before setting out.
I’d munched a couple before reaching the Giau, I now reached into my pocket to find that the last of these had fallen out on the road somewhere on my approach. So there was nothing for it but to keep heading up, in search of civilisation. Bend followed bend, with the sun beating down on the airless valley and the climb seemingly stiffer and longer between each turn and each hairpin sharper and steeper than the last. There was no sign of life before bend 21, where at the end of an empty car park there was a ski lift with a restaurant at its base.
A large plate of pasta, a bottle of water and a slice of apfelstrudel later and I felt rather more human. I was ready to carry on. Despite the considerable extra weight I’d taken on, those final eight bends seemed remarkably easily covered and the road was all downhill from then on.Looking at my Strava file when I got in, it was impressive just how slowly I’d climbed the Giau, especially with the hour’s lunch break in the middle.
So my last ride would be up the Passo Giau, but this time with a following car to hand me up gels and bottles and to shout encouragement when I started to wilt. And it would be on an e-bike, so I would climb the Giau a bit faster on my last ride and maybe experience just a little of what it’s like to climb like Merckx.
07/11
