NED BOULTING
A CLIMB CAN BE CALLED MANY THINGS, AS NED DISCOVERS
Let us talk of uphill. Uphill, in case it had escaped your attention is the thing that makes cycling both wonderful and sickening. I remember well how, midway during the first Tour de France I was dispatched to cover in 2003, I turned to my colleague Matt Rendell, and asked him, incredulously, whether he had ever ridden up an Alp. “Yeah,” he said. “Of course.” “What, a whole one? Right to the top?” I couldn’t fathom such an endeavour. “There’s no way I could do that.” And in my mind I imagined with a choking nausea the slight rise of the road on which I lived in London, with its harmless gradient that made even a trip to the shops an arduous adventure.
“Of course you could,” Matt naively assured me. “Besides, climbing is cycling,” he explained, before adding, mysteriously the single word, “Mountains”. I nodded sagely, as if I had the faintest idea what he was talking about.
It’s true. Without the moment at which the pull of gravity begins to outweigh the dull pushback of air resistance, and the little climbers come into their own, cycling is just so much grunting into the wind.
But that doesn’t make it any more pleasant to do. Climbing hurts. In fact, only the sensation of stopping climbing is pleasurable. The rest is horror. And that horror comes in many different forms.
Recently, during a spell of commentary with Dan Lloyd, we decided to define the terms for the various different types of uphill more closely. We attempted to codify the various words commonly used by cyclists to describe the variations in the rush of tarmac away from planet earth in a skyward direction. Anyone who has ridden a personal battle against gravity will know that the agony takes different forms.