Crash Course in German Kulture

My view of RTE[1] is that it is most definitely part of the problem. They serve a very specific function.  Say, we the plain people of Ireland are not sure what the story is about something, let us say we are a bit deaf to the message that is being sent out by the State, then RTE fit the role of the ear trumpet.  On the other end of that Ear trumpet is all sorts of messages being poured in.  The state is Iago pouring in the poison and we are there at the other end letting it seep right into our cerebrum.

About the only thing that was true that I heard on RTE in the last few years was Enda Kenny’s line ‘Let me say this, you are not responsible for this crisis’. After that, everything else is questionable and might be said with a reason.

Therefore, I thought it was interesting that the two films which they choose to screen for our entertainment over this festive season were.

On Christmas Day we had The Baader Meinhof Komplex, the cinematic story of the Red Army Fracktion which was a bit of a sex & drugs and revolutionary bank jobs job at a film.  The message is this is what crazy ultra left wing groups can be like, lead by a sociopath.  The message is that this is what crazy young ideologues of the left are like and it will all end in tears.

St. Stephen’s day our exploration of German cinema on RTE brought us ‘Downfall’ – the story of Hitler’s last days in der bunker.  The message could be, cheer up at least it’s only Angela Merkel that we are under and the Frankfurt group and not this bunch of mental fascist gangsters.

RTE must wish to give us a crash course in some German history of the 20^th century.  Goodbye Lenin – a film about a young man’s attempt to keep Capitalism out of his sick mother’s perfect world of the GDR.  I guess that this hasn’t been shown yet because there is no lesson to be learned here except that it’s not possible to keep Capitalism at bay.  Sure it’s the only way out of this mess created by the markets which are the hound dogs of ………..Capitalism.

So put your back into it, stop being a Hardy Buck, and starting thinking about making a buck.  Let us turn the FAS offices into Leprechaun museums.  Oh wait, that’s been done already.  Think of something else.

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[1] The State Broadcaster Radio Telefís Eireann or phonetically speaking ‘ARRR Tee Eee’ – as they all sign off with on their news reports, listen out for it,  This is Kieran Mullooley up to his neck in water near Ballynaheglish, for Arr Tee Eee.

From dreams to ditches – Tour de France week 1

The Tour de France has reached the first rest day, yesterday.  For Johnny Hoogerland, the Dutch cyclist who found himself lying in a barbed wire fence yesterday lacerated to bits (33 stitches required), thanks to the most idiotic driving I’ve ever seen on a tour, it couldn’t come at a better time.  Johnny is an aggressive rider, he was in the breakaway attempting to win the requisite points so that he could end up back in the King of the Mountains Jersey.  He along with Juan-Antonio Flecha – the sky rider who gets hit by the car first, both managed to finish the stage which is astounding when you see the aftermath of the crash.  Johnny said to Flecha before he was carted off for multiple stitches, ‘At least we are still alive.’

Wouter Weylandt died on the 9^th May in this year’s Giro D’Italia and that remains fresh in all the riders’ minds.

The Tour this year has seen multiple crashes.   The guardian has a gallery that focuses on the first week of crashes in this year’s tour.  We have seen the exit of the following riders from this year’s tour.

Vinokorov – Broken hip and femur

Brakovich – concussion / head wound

Wiggins – Broken collar bone

Zabriskie – broken wrist

Van der Broecke – broken shoulder

Boonen – Shoulder injury

Horner – Broken Nose

That list is just one from memory and is not a complete one.  Luck is going to play a massive part as it always does in deciding who wears yellow in Paris. The race organizer, Monsieur Christian Prudhomme decided to make this year an interesting race.  So we had a team time trial, instead of a prologue. We have no time gains (called bonifications)  for winning a stage and instead of the usual pan flat early sprint fests, we had numerous hilly routes and uphill finishes.  All this has lead to a tightly fought race with only 5.01mins separating the top twenty riders before we head into the mountains where time gaps can be significant and gains can be made.

The uncertainty, the rain, the tightness at the top of the general classification, has added to a nervousness which has pervaded the bunch. The other thing is that the Tour has grown to become a huge media circus increasing the number of cars following the race.  The Skoda ad for this year’s tour is cool.  But seeing cyclists being carted off the road in stretchers is not.

As a fan of road racing I grow tired of people asking me questions like ‘How many of them are on drugs?’  I can’t answer that question.  What I can say is that the clean men have my utmost admiration for attempting to win a race which is 3430.5km’s long over 21 stages, and I do believe that many of them are attempting to do this without recourse to drugs.  They build towards it; the entire season is aimed at winning either a stage or being on the podium.  What we don’t see is the thousands of training kilometers in abject weather that goes into preparing for this three week gladiatorial contest. Then along comes an idiot in a car who ends up putting you in the ditch.  Or the guy in front of you goes down, you pull the breaks, go over the top, put out your arm and your collar bone snaps.  In a few seconds the Tour dream is over for another year.

Like many sports the buzzing language of  TV, revenue streams and sponsors are all over the Tour De France.  It is understandable – this is how sport operates in the 21^st century.  In many ways live sport for many has become the new opium.  But along the way the riders, the men who give us these magnificent tales of glory, pain and sacrifice have been relegated to bit players.  Without the cyclists, without these ‘convicts of the road‘, there is no Tour.  Without the cyclists all you have is empty roads winding through spectacular countryside.  The only crowd that will gather is hill walkers.

As Nicolas Roche said presciently last Thursday in his tour diary “The Riders are just the show, when the show is over, the riders become nothing again.”  The tour may well be the hottest ticket amongst the bourgeois for these weeks in July, but for the rest of us it is the cyclists who make the tour; they’re the ones who need to be protected and looked after.  The tour organisers need to remember this.  The Rider’s are the men who could be kings, the ones who bring to life this epic drama. Sure they need luck and they need courage.  They need to be allowed to do battle on the road.

The cyclists are the stars.  Let’s remember that.  We come to see them. Some of them end up in a ditch with their bike as broken as the dream of Tour glory, but the resiliance to overcome this is what makes the Tour the epic quest it is.

Vive Le Tour! Vive Le Courer!

 

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The link  above – ‘A Convict of the Road‘ is to a great radio documentary about the legendary Kerry man Mick Murhpy and his quest to win the Rás.

 

 

Going like blazes – Bike Go(l)d

I noted something on a  bike locked outside a psychiatric hospital the other evening.  There were two things that struck me about this bike.

1. It was not parked in the bicycle shed but locked to a lamp post as close to the entrance as possible on a small green area, showing a healthy disregard for the rules.
2. It had on it one of these air horns.

I had one of these as a child on one of my bikes.  I think there is an element to the bicycle which is inherently comedic.   It’s probably best illustrated by Jacques Tati here.  I have a vague memory of doing a good impression of Tati’s drunken postman a Triumph twenty outside a Dublin nightclub in the full view of a gallery of bouncers.   I brought the house down as I fell three times in the space of ten meters.

Putting an air horn on a bike is like putting on a red clown nose on a face.  You are accentuating what is already comedy.  I suppose there is the memory of Harpo Marx that is forever linked with the air horn.

Flann O’Brien wrote “Why would anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle?”.  There was a man who saw the funny side of bikes, but there is also something alluring about it, it offers the possibility of adventure, giving oneself over to it, as one would yield to a lover.

Samuel Beckett wrote about the almost irresistible urge to steal a bike in ‘More Pricks than Kicks’ in the story Fingal.

They followed the grass margin of a ploughed field till they came

to where a bicycle was lying, half-hidden in the rank grass.

Belacqua, who could on no account resist a bicycle, thought what

an extraordinary place to come across one.

The story ‘Fingal’ is where this same Belacqua is ‘walking out’ with Winnie to visit an asylum out in Portrane.  He steals the bike and never reappears for the rendezvous with Winnie.  He’s last reported to be ‘going like flames’ on the stolen bicycle towards pints in a pub in Swords.  The protagonist has made his choice.  He could not resist.

When I first saw ‘Waiting for Godot’ – I was struck by how much comedy there was in this tragic-comedy in two acts.  I think that the followers of Beckett tend to skip past the comedy to get to the highly serious stuff, the awful vista of a man writing a play after the horrific vision of the full extent of the holocaust has been revealed to the world.

Anyway it turns out that cycling may be the link to the name chosen for the man they await.

From a review by Matt Seaton of Tim Hilton’s  ‘ One more kilometre and we’re in the showers’,

“One Roger Godeau was a track ace at Paris’s Vélodrome d’hiver after the war – this when the Vél d’hiv was still haunted by the fact that it had been used as a transit camp for 12,000 Jews, shamefully rounded up during the occupation by the French police. From that detention, they were transported to Drancy and thence to Auschwitz. In the late 40s, some of the boys who hung around the stadium for a sight of their cycling heroes told Beckett one day: ” On attend Godeau.”

On a day like today, when the sun blazes down upon us all, if I wasn’t going to be on my own trusted commuter soon, and if I came across a bicycle unlocked, I too would probably ‘on no account resist’ it, because there is not better place to be feeling the sun on the back of your neck with a wide  open road winding out in front of the wheel.

Gimmer Shelter: Mick Byrne 2011

Last night I heard a poet, Madera Woods  talk about people who think they were dead, it’s called the Coutard delusion. He named his latest book after it calling it The Coutard Dimension.  On Sunday I thought I was dead.  We will come to that.

The Mick Byrne Randonee 2011 was organised by Sorrento Cycling club in honour of their former club man.  At 8am, I found myself along with less than 20 other riders setting off on Sunny but cold morning in front of a man with a Tri-colour for the grand depart.  The old man with the national flag joked with us that he tried to convince the organisers to let us go the other way, the flat lands to the North!  Instead we faced a profile which is like a sharks set of teeth and which had over 2790 meters of climbing entailed into it.   I’d done this before back in 2009 when the beautiful sunshine made me feel like I could pretend I was in the Milan –San Remo.  Today, the wind was going to have gusts of up to 67kmph and for the majority of the day it was going to be in and around 44kmph.  It was mostly against us for the way out.

On top of all this, I’d raced out of the house in the morning without my water bottle and the old green machine is equipped with only one water cage.  So now I had to plead with the organisers for the loan of one.  I had the bottle but no water in it when I saw the old man drop the flag and the bunch cycled off up the road.  After getting it filled I was off to chase down the bunch and get myself into a group to take some shelter from the wind.  It never happened.  I caught and passed a couple of riders but never did I get myself ensconced in the centre of a pack so that I could do a bit at the front, or form an echelon across the road.  It just developed into a complete battle to survive.  Going up Djouce there was a gap in the trees which lead to a blast of wind which nearly put me in the neighbouring bog side ditch.   Pretty much all the way down through Wicklow was dealing with a wall of wind into your face.

I turned around and came back when only 11kms from Gorey (that’s in Wexford people) and back I came.  Now the wind was helping but the damage had been done in terms of the exhaustion I felt.  My arms and the tops of my shoulders were sore from having a cold wind blowing into and over them all morning.  There was more climbing to come – and it was Slieve Mann with the wind helping, then the descent in the rain, which was scary and then a vicious lumpy route back towards Laragh.  I had this song going through my head all day which starts with one of the greatest guitar riff intros that you’re ever likely to hear.

Oh, a storm is threat’ning
My very life today
If I don’t get some shelter
Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away

Finally a warm cup of tea in Laragh and an abandoned couch which I collapsed into, face first.  I looked in the window of the adjoining hall and there was a ‘tea dance’ in full flow.  This was my Coutard delusional moment.  Perhaps I’d died and this was what the afterlife was, a lot of elderly couples dancing to accordion waltzes in a hall, with me looking in through a door.    No, I still had a the climb to Sally Gap to come and then finally and finish in more sunshine in Dalkey.  Why do I do this?  To survive.  I didn’t take a photo of myself at the end, but I spoke to Mark and he looked a little like this great photo of Greg LeMonde back in 1991.

Important Jobs….

The Queen shall soon leave this land and then we shall just get back to dealing with the substantive issue, an issue best illustrated thus….

Gives you an idea of what awaits us – but Morgan Kelly gives you details and real figures here.

In the meantime Martial Law has been declared in Dublin so as to keep Liz Windsor safe from the informal public, or the brazen republicans.   This has lead to the scenes of lots of Gardaí lifting manhole covers, checking for bombs, sealing off phone boxes, and generally being highly visible in the largest security operation the State has ever seen.

On Saturday – after many posters for the Anarchist bookfair disappearing, obviously they were removed as they were considered an eyesore or threat to the queen – I went up to O’Connell street to put up a few more – and was allowed to do so on newspaper kiosk of a sympathizer.

A garda stood behind me as I put up the posters with a comrade.  I then jokingly asked him if he was going to pop down to Liberty hall to it.

Firstly the young Guard said “What’s that?” doing a very good job of pretending he could not read.

Then he responded with the pompous remark “No, I’ve got a real job to do today”.

An elderly woman was passing and witnessed this exchange.  Then she turned to me and said

“What’s that? Searching down manholes for the queen” and went off laughing up the street towards the spire.

Dark Depths of the Wheel

Tragedy is the twin brother of heroism.  There is something heroic in surviving let alone winning a three week tour like the Giro.  There is something truly awe-inspiring when a rider has been all over the peninsula like Italy, from the valleys in the North, to the islands in the south, and back again to the Dolomites.  Or the rider who races the 298kms in a one day classic like Milan San-Remo.  These feats require all the power, bravery, and courage that go into them is what draws people into this sport.  It is what makes legends.

You can only truly appreciate the efforts if you’ve been on a bike in those situations.  You can appreciate the thrills and inherent dangers of this sport, as you descend from a mountain that you’ve climbed on a tyre that is only 23mm wide.   Your capacity to appreciate what it takes to race grows with your experience of what it entails for the professionals to do as they do.

Yesterday, I was listening to the commentary from the Giro when I heard that there’d been a serious crash.  It hits you in solar plexus of your soul.  Immediately you hope that no one is seriously injured.  But then the news filtered through on race radio that there was a young rider on the road surrounded by blood and doctors administering cardiac massage and your fears begin to crystallise to ice.   Woutler Weyland died on the road on the descent of the Passo Del Bocco in the third stage of the Giro d’Italia yesterday afternoon.  He was a young rider who was only starting to fulfil this promise and now we will never find out how good he could’ve been.    Woulter lived his short life like a dream for most of us, progressing up the ranks to becoming a professional cyclist (the dream of many a young Belgian) and joining the new team of stars based around the Schleck brothers; Leopard Trek.

Perspective is something we should never lose but often do.  In sport the focus is so on the present, that you do not focus   A tragedy like this reminds us of the heroics that pro-cyclists do every day in their beloved sport.  Sure it is a sport that has been blighted by drugs, but essentially it is the race that captures the imagination, because it is made up of endurance, strength, speed, daring, and courage.   All these components make it the spectacular spectacle that we see flashing past us in a blur of colourful Lycra, all of it adds to the story that makes legends of these road men.  Woulter knew that because he wanted to be one.

The Wheel that Boethius spoke off comes to mind on dark days like these.  It is the worst of times; it is the point so far away from the sop step of a podium.  We rise up on the spokes but we know that the depths await us, like yesterday.

RIP to Woulter Weyland – and to his family, his girlfriend Sophie, his team and his friends.

Giro Time baby – Time to look pretty in Pink

With the innocence of a child I spoke of my excitement at the prospect of the Giro d’Italia starting tomorrow to a guest in our house.  I was surprised to find that our guest was not as enamoured with the idea of being stuck into the story of the first three week tour of this 2011 season.  Since then she’s said that she is leaving us.  Was it the prospect of the Giro that drove her out of my house?

This year’s Giro promises to be a real cracker with I think a wide open field to choose from.  I know that Contador is favoured to win – but I think that the Vincenzo Nibali should push the little Spaniard all the way.

I think, if I was pushed to express a preference, I would say that this is my favoured Grand Tour.  It has Italy as the backdrop to the most amazing race.  Whilst  Italy has produced some legendary cyclists like Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi, along with some modest men  like Mario Cipollini  (who says he would’ve been a porn star if he hadn’t grown up to be a sprinter) and lets us not forget the grinning greased up National Champion that is Bippo Pozatto, it has also always brought its own sense of style to the bike and to the sport. The Italians love their tour and the Tiffosi gather in their hundreds of thousands to cheer on their boys on their flying bicycles.  Witness this at the top of Zoncolan last year as they cheered on Basso to victory (he is concentrating on the Tour De France).  This year on the 15^th May sees the peloton attempt the climb up Mount Etna in Sicily, twice.   That threatens to be a great day of drama on the edge of an active volcano.

Like all great races, the Giro is steeped in tradition and it is good to look back on the days when the gregario (s soldier of the roman legions) would raid bars for drinks for their team leaders.  You can see a bit of that going on here (2mins-4.50mins) in the 1973 Giro.   I think that the excitement comes from celebrating this great race by following it closely for three weeks as the drama is played out in front of you.  It almost makes me feel Italian and it might explain my love for wearing pink.

Blue Bible for Cyclists – Maydays like these !

Thanks to Padraic who has supplied me with the indispensible wisdom of Mr. Harold Moore, Author of ‘The Complete Cyclist’, or what shall be referred to from now on as the Blue Bible in this blog.

Firstly, one has to inform you that this trip through time brings us to a time; a time described in numbers as 1935, but is better described in pictures.  So let us start with the author, and here is the man himself pictured on Chesil beech.   Mr. Harold Moore is, or more likely was a ‘Life member of the Cyclists’ Touring Club’.  This edition of the book is the fourth, which brings us up to the year 1952 but I do not get the impression that there was extensive revisions to it.

The man starts with this line about what cycling is

‘It is an adventure, just such an adventure as modern conditions should tempt, if not drive, a robust and liberty-loving people to attempt.’

By gad sir, sign me up for that adventure for I be one of them ‘liberty-loving people.  This May day – I was on the open road, dressed in black, and getting acquainted with my new brooks saddle.

Mr. Moore is firmly against the ‘racing cycle’ as it contains ‘a hard narrow uncomfortable saddle, and a handlebar with marked droop – and none of these accessories is likely to suit the average rider.’  He is far more from the touring school of thought and so recommends a Brooks saddle which looks different to my recently acquired one, and has more springs than you’d find in the average clown car.

So we shall return to the wisdom of Mr. Moore from time to time, and the Blue Bible shall be used from time

A comfortable Springy saddle

to time to tell us what’s what in the world of cycling.  It is  hard not to take this young pipe smoking man in his shorts seriously.

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Mayday saw me on the bike, dressed in black as I was off down to Naas to a funeral.  I am not one to wear black all the time – because it’s cool or to be like the infamous Black Riders ((Cyclists who worked with Dr. Ferrari (EPO expert) and would train in dark kit in Northern Italy)) but it appeared appropriate as I was cycling down for a funeral.  It was unexpected and tragic and heartbreaking to hear the news that a friend of mine’s wife died at the age of 38.  I wanted to put in an appearance.  I also want to cycle – so I dressed in black and rode down to my old hometown.  Had a shower and went to the packed funeral mass, and then back to Dublin on the bike.

I clocked up 85 km’s in a windy day.  On the road back into Dublin it was mostly into a headwind all the way which makes you look like the weak amateur that you are.

Then I went to go drinking with my lefty comrades.  We were all bemoaning the fact that the May day march was held at 11am in the morning, rather like having an early mass so that you could go and do something else for the day.  The custodians, the Trade Unions or the Dublin Council of Trade Unions are not interested in making this a focal point of the day.  Talk about organising for failure!  What are we going to be faced with next year, a march at 8.00am in the morning, assembling at the end Pigeon house road.   Next year we should organise a funeral for the Trade Union movement – bring along a black coffin and have a stake going through it or a cross with ‘Croke Park’ written on it.

Then it was off to visit my mother who was standing up for her rights and attempting to argue for her freedom from the health care facility she finds herself in.

I came home with a bag of laundry from that visit.

Nobody told me there’d be May Day’s like these, most peculiar mama.

From this Mayday I remember the feeling off being on the open road, and I  stopped to take photographs of these cattle grazing in the sun.  I breathed in the counry air, felt the heat of the sun on the back of my neck, and it felt good to be alive.  That sounds like something that came out of the blue bible.

Beauty is the bike

Emo Phillips said “When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.”  It is a coming of age story.  We all quest for these things, these items of beauty and work out how to acquire them.  I never had a racer when I was a child.  I wanted one but my first proper bike was an old post-office bike which was too big for me and I ended up cycling with my leg under the crossbar, hanging from one side or the other for a good year before I stretched (grew) enough to mount the machine properly.  My father took the same attitude to bikes as he did to shoes ; “he’ll grow into’em.”

Now I am a middle aged man and I have enough money to indulge myself and the items I desire.  The story has already been covered here before of my love affair with the green machine.  I walked into Humphries cycles  and it was love at first sight as I saw the acid green frame with chrome fork glinting at me.   We were destined to be together.

Cycling has more than a few overtones of sex to it all.  There is a lot of sweat and grunting that goes on, there is the various fluids that secrete from you, there are the creams you apply to yourself to protect your ass, and on top of all that there is the frequent cleaning and lubing of the bike itself.  Here you can see an 8 minute dirty video of just this deed which contains the line,  ‘With your pinkies pink again it’s time for lubing’.  Let us not even go to the early furore there was about women riding bicycles and even having to wear trousers (heaven forbid it) to do so.

Thankfully we’ve moved on and cycling chic is very much with us.  There I found myself gently applying an ointment onto my new leather saddle from Brooks and thinking how pervy this whole sport is when I described myself as the straight Oscar Wilde on a bike.  Leaving aside the sexual orientation reference (a Freudian thing to say to your wife I now realise) what I was driving at was that I was an aesthete on a bike and about the bike.    As Oscar Wilde said of “Beauty is a form of genius–is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.”   It was a contemporary of Wilde, one John Boultbee Brooks, a man who had brought this beauty to the world going way back to 1866.

The story goes like this.  In 1878, the unfortunate death of Mr Brooks’ horse led to a stroke of inspiration.

Unable to afford another horse, he borrowed a bicycle in order to commute to work.

But he found the seat so uncomfortable that he vowed to do something about it.

On 28 October 1882, Mr Brooks filed his first saddle patent.

On Wednesday this arrived into work.

Brooks Swallow Saddle

Accompanied by the beautiful Overview of the heritage that I was buying into when I bought this saddle was the bumph, but even that is beautiful.  A Brooks’s saddle also features in this film by Robert Penn who travelled around the world to get the components that constitute the perfect bike.  What a great job, the lucky sod.  The Campagnolo boys (Group set = chain, brakes, gears et al) in the factory refused to let him inside with the cameras afraid that their artisan secrets would be revealed.   So slowly I am building my own version of beauty, my bicycle will become art, it will be a reflection of me.

My choice of saddle is highlighted

Over this coming weekend my arse and the new saddle are going to become more acquainted with each other.  As the leather moulds to the contours of my arse I want you all to know that I am creating art.

Survival of the Crampist – Tour De Foothills 2011

Being on a bike is seasonal, and spring sees the classics. Spring is that classic time to get back on your bike after abandoning it in the spare room propped up beside light switch.  I start to tune in Eurosport to see everyone in pro-bike racing attempt to defeat the powerhouse that is Fabian Cancellara.   On the dusty roads and the many cobbled sections between Paris and Roubaix he attempted to break the rest of the bunch sitting on his tail, by frequently upping the pace and going through his gears.  But Thor (real name and current world Champion) sat on his rear wheel and Cancellara realized he wasn’t going to shake him off.  On that basis he was not prepared to drag Thor back to the breakaway and thus rob Van Summeren of his well earned victory.  Even so, Fabian decided to finish second, just to show us what he is capable off.  There is much love for Fabian from anyone who rides a bike.

After witnessing that classic it usually leads me upstairs to dust off the Green-machine, wipe it down, make the chrome sparkle, and replace the handlebar tape.   Then it is off out to the park to do laps and to run that commentary in my head about my heroics.   Spring is here, the daffodils are dancing in the breeze and the doe-eyed deer’s look on puzzled at the sight of this muttering plump man pretending he is racing up the Mur de Hey when he is pedalling slowly up the Kyber Road.

Recently pictured near the pope's cross

For a man approaching 43 faster than he can pedal over a railway bridge, there are no classics for me.  But what there is the great invention of the Sportive.  This is a set course which you get to cover at your own pace.  Some treat it like a race and good luck to them, I never see them after we leave the departure point.  Others content themselves to survive and get around the route before darkness descends.  I am in that  latter category, especially after a winter where my flabby arse has seen a saddle, and where the word SLEEP was written on the Green-Machine’s on board cateye speedometer..  The first Sportive in my calendar is usually the Tour De Foothills.  It departs from my old GAA club, it usually is fortunate to have good weather, raises some money for good charity, and it’s not that punishing.  “I can do 100km – even with this little training”  I said to myself when I learned that it was on.  That was a weekend before the event.

The day was indeed splendid and in a way the first sportive of the season is like that day back to school where you meet all your mates again after the break.  There was plenty of the boardies (Boards.ie cycling crew) and plenty from my cycling club.  The Start had us all lined up in glorious sunshine and we got to have that rate thing, a controlled mass start with the help of the Gardaí and the motorbike marshals.   This, for a boy like me, is a dream come true.  It’s like being in a real race.  I was talking to a few friends on the way out.  These are the good times, another winter over and another spring beginning and stretching out in front of you are bikes whizzing along with the great sound that comes from well cleans chains in motion.

Once we left Naas the route is out to Blessington and over the Bridge between the lakes.  Then we turned off right, towards Valleymount.  This is all up and down and the whole thing saps the legs.  Then when we came out we turned left if you were on the 100km and right if you wished to cop out and take the 50km.  I never take the easy option and I’d been sponsored to the tune of €150 for the longer route.  There is a steady amount of climbing up to the top of Hollywood and then a fairly fast descent down into the village.  Then we were off up some of the worst roads on the way to Donard.   It is a little like having your own version of the Paris Roubaix, but instead of having cobbles we just have terrible winters, deterioration of already poor roads, huge potholes develop, and nothing and nobody to fills them in.   I made the comparison to Paris Roubaix in the bunch I was cycling at the time, and me and another cyclist started taking about our love for Cancellara.   (I told you there was much love out there for him).

Donard Church was the food stop and I got myself a lovely cup of tea and a chicken sandwich and a banana there.  The Tax Man (TTM) showed up there, but by this stage the sandwiches had ran out so he had to content himself with some fruit and a cup of tea.  We filled the water bottles and were off.  TTM is a man who raced in the 80’s and is the type of fellow who does well on hills.  I don’t do well on hills, it takes me a while to drag my arse up them, but then I tend to go well on the flat.  Just before Donord the road turned up to the left and we were up a hill towards the Glen of Imaal.   My fellow convict of the road disappeared off up the climb and I turned the pedals attempting to keep TTM in sight.  It took me this climb and about 4 km’s of a descent to catch up with him.  This pattern was kept for the rest of the ride.  Me falling out the ‘back door’ as Sean Kelly calls it, and then riding back up on the flat.   I started to flag badly on the run into Naas.  The Tax Man kindly bridged a gap back to a group just as we were coming into the outskirts of the town.  I sat in there for a brief while, feeling good, and then in a mad impulsive moment where I thought I was someone else, i.e. a true athlete, I decided to fly off the front of the bunch and close down a lone rider who was about 250 meters up the road.  Madness! Complete and utter foolishness which I realised after I saw my speed top 46kmph and then felt cramps come into four distinct places across my two legs;  In both calf muscles and in both the quadriceps so that but a rapid halt to my gallop.  Inevitably,  I was passed by the bunch which had kept a steady rhythm whilst they’d seen this idiot in a pink jersey go shooting up the road like he was escaping a fire.   I kept turning my legs because to stop would’ve made it impossible to start again.  After about 500 meters the cramps went away and I trundled home over the line doing about 16kmph and being happy to make it.  I write this as much to ensure that I don’t go shooting out of a bunch that I’ve had trouble getting back into in the first place.

Thanks to The Tax Man for this comradeship on the road.

And I can’t wait to get on the road again.
On the road again -
Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway
We’re the best of friends.
Insisting that the world keep turning our way