I’m reading a book called ‘The Discovery of France’ by Graham Robb. He makes a number of interesting points. For instance the original Tour de France was the circuit made by the apprentices and journeymen of the various craft guilds as they honed their skills as bakers or stonemasons. He also details the mapping of France started by Cassini under Louis XV and carried on by his descendants. The virtue of Mr. Robbs’s book is that he is familiar with the terrain of the ‘Pays’ of France having made a number of cycle tours over many years. He sympathises with the travails of the surveyors as they erect their triangulation points across the unmeasured land to establish the baseline for their cartography. This struck a chord with me as I have been wondering recently what impact my wanderings have made upon the maps of my mind.
My first organised cycle rides were charity mass participation events, I remember doing the London Cambridge in the 1980s. I then did some very informal time-trialling around Harefield on the very edges of London. Moving back to Lancashire, I got a bit more serious about riding against the clock, doing 10 mile, 25 mile, 50 mile. 100 mile and 12 hour time trials. These rides tell you very little about the areas you ride through and a lot about your own strength, resolve and condition. What they told me was that I wasn’t any good, but that being fit made me feel better.
Training for long time trials consists of riding a long way as quickly as possible, there are people who can do this on their own, talk to them and you soon find that there are reasons why they are content with their own company. Most people respond best to a little structure and the littlest structure you can find is probably Audax. A date is set for a pre-determined ride of from as little as 30 miles to over 750 miles. You turn up at a village hall, sometimes before dawn, and then follow a routesheet between checkpoints to prove you’ve been round the course. Do enough of these and you will build up a baseline map in your mind of most of Britain and a very particular part of Western France.
Paris-Brest-Paris is the peak of this style of Audax riding known as ‘Randonee’, a 750 mile ride through Normandy and Brittany. When you first ride an ‘Audax’ there is a sense in which a distant mountain range appears on the horizon, you remark to a fellow rider that 200km is a long way to ride in a day and reference is made to having to ride almost twice as far, every day for nearly 4 days. You don’t really take this in as you have no mental landscape in which to orientate this new vision of applied wanderlust.
As you progress in hardening your mind and body to enable you to ride 300km 400km and 600km a web of incidents builds up like a sort of cycle borne Cleudo ‘Riding towards Bridlington, with John Radford, in a Hailstorm’ or ‘Into a headwind, under the banks of the Trent with Ian Hennessey’. If you are strong enough, young enough and tough enough, these vignettes mean little, you can power your way through 750 rainy and windy miles without much thought. But get a bit older, have a few setbacks and you find yourself drawing on your own inner world of pain, elation, hope, despair, resignation and Ibuprofen.
I used to be blessed, or was I cursed, with almost total recall, with memories as detailed as a GPS readout, with pictures, in three dimensions, but they tell a poor sort of story. Best to let time, the fourth dimension, do some editing, let those memories compete, let the strong ones drive out the weak and then look back to see if it meant anything.
The journey is a common motif in writing, from the Canterbury Tales to the works of Michael Palin, travel provides a framework which we can cover in tales of our glory. In cycling the great narrative thread of the Tour de France, snaking its way across thousands of miles of road, is constructed purely to be written about. Those great acts of endurance were procured by the newspaper ‘L Equipe,’ as a kind of heroism to order. The Tour is almost a freak show to most observers, they can’t comprehend more than 100 miles in a day on a bicycle, it’s worthy of distant admiration, but we are unlikely to know anyone capable of such an act. So when you appear in the pub to tell your mates of your first 200km i.e. 125 miles ride, they find it hard to believe, you’ve probably got a photocopied page of a road atlas, which you used as a navigational backup with the route outlined in red felt pen, you put that on the table, and for a moment you’re Eddy Merckx or Lance Armstrong. What next they ask? If the journey is a metaphor for life, then you are now at a crossroads. You can do another 200km in less time in imitation of the heroes of the Tour, or you can let slip that there are longer rides, 300s 400s and the like. It’s a pivotal moment, take the former path and you are like a Hamster in a wheel, condemned to hours in a cold garage strapped to a turbo trainer, opt for the latter and you are trapped on an escalator which leads to one goal. Paris Brest Paris.
The steps which lead to Paris are very simple. You have to ride qualifying distances of 200km 300km 400km and 600km before the end of June in order to ride the 1,200km of PBP as it is known, held at the time of the full moon closest to the end of August in a four year cycle which notionally stretches back to 1891. Back then the bicycle was an infant, and a journalist, Pierre Giffard, organised PBP as an open event, without time limits, to show what that infant might become. His success was observed by one Henri Desgranges who organised a second, more competitive PBP in 1901. It was felt that no professional cyclist would train for such a long event more than once in his career, so ten years would be a decent interval. The railway and the telegraph enabled Desranges’ paper ‘L’Auto Velo’ to cover the event as it unwound, like a Cricket Test Match on wheels. One of the stranger aspects of the PBP to this day, is reading reports in newspapers covering something you are still struggling to complete. Desgranges saw the power in this and invented a serial version, in daily instalments, so that a cast of heroes and villains could be followed on a Tour of France, instigated in 1903. PBP continued to be run and from 1931 a section was organised for amateurs by the ‘Audax Club Parisien’, the current organisers of what is now a completely amateur event.
PBP, then, is a ride concocted to be written about, to capture the imagination and to amaze with the sheer audacity required to present yourself at the start, stating your bold intentions and staring down the possibility of failure. Google ‘Paris Brest Paris’ and the results peter out after 57 pages. It’s all too easy to imagine yourself on the starting line with those wise words from the web whispering in your ear, guiding your legs towards the undiscovered land of the return journey. You may have noticed that the longest qualifier is only half of the story that you hope to tell. Today I can sit at my screen and call up words, pictures and videos from around the globe, in 1999 I was guided by a few articles in a club magazine called ‘Arrivee’, and so was my partner Heather, the spirit of derring-do had seeped into our household and spread like an infection. There were now two of us set on the ‘Road to Paris’, at least there’d be two of us sharing the expenses, but what might be the other costs?
‘It’s about time’. A useful phrase, succinct, to the point, pithy you might say. You can use it as answer to any number of questions. ‘Why are you riding so fast?’ ‘Why don’t you just lie down and sleep?’ ‘Why are you bolting down that meal,? ‘Why are you out in this snowstorm /hailstorm / pavement cracking heat ?’ Or you can employ it as an expression of relief at a control after 100 miles into a wall of wind. Add a note of exasperation and it serves to sum up the feelings of a relative, friend or significant other, when you finally appear at the end of a ride and normal life can resume.
There’s a metronome in your legs, a clock in your heart and a calendar in your head as you qualify for PBP. The timetable it imposes takes familiar rides and dumps them up to a month earlier in the year. In Provence, Andalucia and the Italian Riviera this is fine, but in Manchester, London and Edinburgh, it is all cold hands, sweat condensing on the inside of a waterproof jacket, frozen starts, dark finishes and the clammy feel of neoprene overshoes. March is often a fairly dry month in England, I recall March 1999 in fair detail because I was doing some memorable work, real life had intruded with a bump on my preparations, that work had benefits and costs, I’ll tell you about it, but first I have a confession to make.
My name is Damon and I’m a deadline junkie. For some people a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I’m only too happy to take that step, but I want a contract in my hand with a finish date, clear specifications and an indication of what the involvement of other parties might be, preferably none. I’d been contacted in mid-January, could I look at a motorway plantation thinning job between Shap and Carlisle, we’ll send you the milepost numbers, take a look at the job and give us a price.
A week later, Steve and I were making a start, 100 miles from home. Over the next 10 weeks I was nursing a wood chipper with a weeping head gasket, maintaining 4 chainsaws, employing up to 10 workers, organising the closure of lane one of the M6 and visiting the casualty department of Carlisle General Hospital (Just a nick, didn’t even need stitches), In the evening I’d take the chipper blades to be sharpened at our local 24 hour tool grinding service, (engineering is a mainstay of the local economy). Every morning I’d wake early with my pillows soaked in sweat after another restless night.
In the middle of all this we squeezed in our first qualifier, I limped round the Chirk 200 in a most unimpressive time. My work needs a fair amount of strength but little aerobic fitness, my condition was ebbing away and the only thing keeping me going was two hours a week of gym-based circuit training. Heather was doing alright, she was still slower than me, but faster than the previous year.
By the end of March we were celebrating in the bar of the Pooley Bridge Inn at the head of Ullswater in the Lake District, we’d finished on time and I was in just the right frame of mind, time-focussed and mentally prepared to tough it out to the end. I was also the least fit I had been at the beginning of April for four years, so obviously we went skiing.
