Real Cycling

On a recent warm spring evening, some fifty kilometers north of the Austrian-German border, a highly select few gathered for the 2015 season's inaugural MRRC Wednesday night "intense" cycling training. The ride would take the participants due south towards the ultimate result of immense African and Eurasian tectonic plates colliding over a period of tens of millions of years, bringing forth from the fiery depths of the Earth continental Europe's most extensive mountain range. Picture-perfectly peaked year-round by snow, the tallest of the Bavarian Alps glowed in the evening's remaining sunshine. There was but a small breeze in the air and the paths and roads were laid with the slightest dust, coppery and insignificant in the hazy twilight. The remnants of the destroyed trees from the aftermath of Cyclone Niklas's brutal tear through the Munich area, and the rest of Western Europe, had long been cleared from the roads, though reminders of the damage that Niklas wrought remained as a whisking blur, left to the sides of the streets and in the banks and ditches of the Perlacher Forst and the Isar River.

Pemulis would arrive at the meeting point near 17h55 Central European Time on his late-2000's model Specialized Transition Elite aluminum time-trial bike equipped with Look Keo clipless pedals, and home-stirred Blood Orange PowerBar Perform Sports Drink. The spoken language was German, but the emotional language of the road was a universal drive for speed understood by cyclists from all cultures and backgrounds worldwide. The quest for raw power in all its glory is the search, through the depths of the darkest tunnels of pain that it entails, for what makes us human. Every man, woman, and child, has yearned to go further, and faster, and these cyclists understood, all too well, that there are no shortcuts around, through, or over, the debilitating hurt that must be endured on the glorious path to righteous power and speed.

Le trajet a commencé lentement, oscillant autour des 30 km/h, pendant que le petit peloton gagnait progressivement de l'altitude, allant des limites sud-est de Munich vers la Mecque de Bad Tölz et au-delà. Il y a de la beauté dans le fonctionnement parfaitement machinale d'un peloton synchronisé volant à travers le paysage, en harmonie. Le silence parfait de la campagne est seulement interrompu par le bruit vrombissant des roues aérodynamiques qui entrent en contact avec la chaussée en dessous. Le cliquetis des engrenages est suivi par le bruit croissant de la respiration des coureurs, alors que l'inclinaison augmente à un autre niveau et la somme du dénivelé s’accroît, de nouveau.

"It's a spiritual connection to the land, binding you, the rider, with the bike, man and machine, to the Earth below," said rider George Pemulis, a Canadian expat who seemed to hold up the more established cyclists at most bends and at all of the even insignificant increases in elevation. "Die Kanadiern sind sehr langsam" noted Wolfgang Radler, a former UCI pro rider who has been regularly joining the Wednesday night rides since shortly after his lifetime ban from professional cycling for installing a small motor in his bicycle hidden in the bottom bracket. "What about Ryder Hesjedal?" Pemulis asked innocuously.
"Wer ist das? Ich habe noch nie von ihm gehört," Radler noted.
"He won the Giro d'Italia in 2012. He is a former mountain bike world champion with an olympic silver medal. He won the most difficult mountain stage at the Vuelta d'España last year. He's even leading the newly formed Cannondale-Garmin team at the Giro 2015 starting a few weeks from now with a legitimate chance of being a true contender," replied Ryder Hesjedal as he cycled past the group, where they were stopped for an ice cream cone, with a breathtaking view of the Alps in the distance.
"Er muss einen deutschen Vorfahren haben," Radler said drily.

The remainder of the ride was completed in a hushed silence. Pemulis again threatened to slow everyone down but managed to hold on just barely. The final 10km stretch had the peloton moving at a consistent speed of above 40km/h, in an epic battle against lactic acid build-up, fatigue, exhausted blood capillaries, and the quickly fading, setting Bavarian sun. The cyclists congratulated each other with some pleasantries and went their separate ways. But just before the group separated, Radler had one last piece of advice for Pemulis: "Du hast eine wirklich gute Arbeit gibt heute. Bis nächste Woche!". Pemulis rode home at a recovery pace in anger, thinking that old Wolfgang had said "please don't come back next week". In fact, Radler had said something more along the lines of "great job out there, see you next week", but either way Pemulis would return the following week.