Columns: Crawling Back Again

When measuring cyclists on a scale of survival probability in comparison to other outdoor sports enthusiasts, I gotta say that we fall pretty close to the bottom of the heap. We plan elaborate excursions into the wilderness and convince our friends to come along. We like to pack light; most of us take the bare minimum of food and spare clothing. When things go wrong, and we're a long way from home, many times we come crawling back within an inch of our lives.

I'm not the quickest of cats at the best of times, but you think that after having my ass kicked a few dozen times over in the mountains, I might have learned a thing or two about preparedness. Nevertheless, here I am with a couple dozen other cyclists all in the early stages of hypothermia, standing at the ticket counter in the Oberwald train station in the Wallis region of Switzerland and thanking the good Lord I had some emergency cash in my saddlebag to buy a train ticket home with.

The event is a celebration of masochism called the Alpen Brevet. The purpose: to test a cyclist's mettle in the mountains. (Brevet means "diploma" or "certificate" a la francais.) Riders have the choice of three courses: not-so-wee, frigid huge, and pound-of-flesh, off-road sacrifice. Each is well over 62 miles, with quad-shredding amounts of climbing. Several local riders have recounted that the weather chooses every year to be conspicuously inclement on the Brevet weekend, and partakers always suffer worse for it. Still, pedaling to the starting point at six this morning along wet streets through a dense morning fog and a light drizzle, I was surprised to encounter, at the start, about 400 other cyclists also prepared -- and I use the word loosely -- to take the Brevet challenge.

Off we went like monkeys in the fog, and after a good two hours of riding at a conservative pace, I mounted the summit of Susten Pass, the first of three passes on the course I intended to do. By the time I reached the pass, I was already wearing everything I had brought with me, and considered turning around with the notion that if the weather got much worse, I could really be in for a spanking. Once I dropped over the other side of the pass I was committed to at least a couple hours' more heavy riding before getting back to Andermatt, the starting point.

I was soaked through from the inside out and the outside in, but I didn't see anybody else turning around and my bloated ego just wouldn't let me do it. I crossed the divide and began to descend. Almost immediately on the other side of the pass, the wind picked up and the rain really began to wail, but I kept going. When I finally hit the bottom, I had to sprint for the first mile or so heading to the second pass just to get some sensation back into my fingers and feet. I road all 5,062 feet up that pass wearing every thread I had, chest zips pulled to the choke position, and it was still nippy at the top. I could see the snow line hovering in the mist on the mountains just above the saddle.

August. Likely the warmest month of the year in most places in the Northern Hemisphere. I'm wearing leggings, leg warmers, a jersey, a thermal top, a light windbreaker, and a light toque under my helmet. I keep thinking of all the places in the world I could be riding in shorts at this moment, and comment to a colleague at one point that I could very easily still be living in sunny Southern California.

My teeth are chattering uncontrollably, I have zero sensation in most of my fingers, and my body shudders as I hand my soaked currency through the bulletproof glass to the train station attendant. Why take the train? There's too much snow to ride the third and tallest of the three passes on the Brevet course: the Furka. I descended from 7,103-foot Grimsel Pass to the small mountain village of Gletsch in a heavy rain that froze my face and hands. When I arrived, I leaned my bike against a hotel and went in to drink tea while sitting next to their open fire. Wrapping my frozen mitts around the small glass, I grudgingly tolerated the not-so-subtle ridicule of the haughty waiter, who clearly thought me a moron.

"So you're really a man now, you've done the Brevet!" he said with a thick German accent "You've taken the pain and now you're a man." He kept telling me how proud I should be as he gesticulated wildly. I kept on thinking how much more I liked the waitress who didn't speak English, and wondered if it'd be worth the effort to try to kick this guy's skinny ass out the door; maybe the effort would warm me up some. I rather sulkingly drank my tea instead. When I got up to leave, I had to apologize for leaving a puddle the size of Lake Erie on the polished marble floor.

Once outside, while wringing out my gloves, a policeman stopped me and said that I couldn't ride the last pass because a foot of snow had fallen on the top -- or that's what I gathered from deciphering his German with my elementary knowledge of the language. So I headed for Oberwald, another four miles of frigid descending.

Not well accustomed to navigating a bicycle over wet pavement while suppressing full-body, involuntary muscle spasms, I almost lost the whole game when my rear end kicked out on some wet railroad tracks. That gave me a nice scare; the rest of the way down, when I wasn't shouting obscenities or contemplating pissing myself to warm up some -- I couldn't possibly get any wetter -- I was verbally reminding myself to stay with it and pay attention.

Once on the train, I sat on my hands and almost immediately nodded off. In the intervals that I was conscious, I remember looking around at the blue-lipped faces of the men and women in the car -- teeth still chattering, shoulders still convulsing -- and thinking to myself that it's better that I didn't piss myself.

I learned later that the Brevet had actually been canceled in the morning due to the weather. The start gun had never been fired. Seemingly nearly everybody present went anyway; like sheep we'd followed the first rider to head down the road. There's a good chance that guy had already thrown in the towel and was just heading home.

SYNDICATION

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