Leonard - Higher calling: road cyclings obsession with the mountains

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Epub ISBN: 9781473524156

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Yellow Jersey Press

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London SW1V 2SA

Yellow Jersey Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright Max Leonard 2017

Max Leonard has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Yellow Jersey Press in 2017

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Great things are done when Men & Mountains meet;

This is not Done by Jostling in the Street.

William Blake

I suppose we really amounted to nothing more significant than a gang of overgrown children delighting in the conquest of altitude by the force of our own muscles. Yet to see a companion arrive for the first time on a sunlit crest, his eyes full of happiness, seemed in itself an adequate recompense. Tomorrow he might return to the valley and be swallowed up by all the mediocrity of life, but for one day at least he had looked full at the sky.

Conquistadors of the Useless , Lionel Terray

Stop me if youve heard this one, but I want to tell you about a man called George Mallory. George Mallory loves climbing mountains. Hes good at it. His grandfather used to love climbing mountains too, but unlike his grandfather (who was also very good at it and was also called George Mallory) our George prefers to do it on a bicycle.

Oh, you thought I meant that George Mallory. Sorry.

George Christopher Leigh Mallory (the grandson) is the inventor of the concept of Everesting. Everesting is diabolically simple: pick a hill, any hill, and ride your bike up and down it until the cumulative elevation gain equals or surpasses the height of Mount Everest itself (8,848 metres, or 29,028 feet, above sea level). George Christopher Leigh Mallory completed the first known Everesting in 1994 by riding eight times up a 1,100-metre road climb on a peak called Mount Donna Buang near Melbourne. He was training for an expedition to the summit of the real Everest via the mountains North Ridge, and his cycling feat, only achieved after several unsuccessful attempts, seemed to exist in a dialogue with his ancestor. George Herbert Leigh Mallory was, of course, the dashing, brave British mountaineer who was tragically lost on Mount Everest in 1924, as he attempted to become the first man to reach the top. Before that expedition, the New York Times interviewed him and asked: Why did you want to climb Everest?

Because its there, he famously replied.

Whereas a more appropriate answer for those wishing to Everest on a bicycle (who are therefore contemplating scaling a mountain that exists only in their head) might be: because its not there.

Without the internet, George Mallory IIs cycling achievement might have remained undiscovered by the wider world, and he would have continued life as just another cyclist who loved riding uphill. (In mountaineering circles, on the great scroll of people who have climbed Mount Everest, hes known as George Mallory II, and, as a way of distinguishing between the two Mallories in writing, it works for me.) But the internet came, Everesting became a thing and we would be destined to meet. Not before, however, the internet convinces me to give Everesting a try, and I find myself on top of a hill in Sussex slightly before dawn, pulling my bike out of the back of the car as a weak sun struggles to rise through the sea mist. As is helpful with any foolish and borderline unhealthy activity, I have an enabler. Jimmy is a guy I have met thanks to Strava, the online community for cyclists, and he will pedal the day next to me. We have met once before, at a cycling event, and now are planning to ride a stretch of asphalt that is 1.3 kilometres long and a 10 per cent average gradient 68 times.

Not long into our ordeal, a couple of Jimmys friends arrive as moral support, to share the road with us for a short while before they go to work. On about their second ascent, one of them says something along the lines of, You must be mad, mate. Why are you doing this?

And Jimmy just looks right back at him and says: You know why.

That why is really the question of this whole book: why do we have this obsession with cycling up mountains?

As kids, we all love going down things. First on a slide, perhaps, or in a buggy, and then for many of us on a bike. When were adults, bicycles return us to the freedom we had as children the freedom seemingly to go anywhere and do anything, to whizz downhill with our feet off the pedals sticking straight out in the air, almost like flying. But for a few of us, when we take up road cycling, some kind of switch flicks in our heads and we start to love going uphill instead. Its not a straight swap: I still like the downhills too, but the reward of the downhill (which lots of non-cyclists assume to be the point of all that uphill) never factors into my thinking about why I want to ride in the mountains. This a book more about going up, not down. Why do we choose there, and choose that? If the downhill is not the point, what is? Why do we love doing something thats so hard?

As a cyclist, its always been about the mountains for me. Im naturally a skinny person, so as a bike rider Im never going to win a sprint and Im not built for the cobbled Classics of northern France and Belgium. But that doesnt mean I was a born mountain goat. I was actually born in London, a good way from any actual mountains, and didnt show any early signs of unnatural uphill tendencies. I didnt start cycling seriously (whatever that means) until my early twenties, and didnt ride a proper mountain until a few years after that, but when I did, something just clicked. Something was right, and I was hooked.

Some years ago never mind how long precisely having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me in town, I thought I would cycle about a little and see the mountainous part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking peoples hats off then, I account it high time to get to altitude as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the bicycle. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the mountains with me.