No matter how long and hard I stared down at my Garmin, the numbers weren’t changing. There were 8.8km and 760m of climbing standing between me and the summit of the Nufenen-Pass in the south of Switzerland.
I tried to forget about the 2,400m my legs had already climbed, and as the early afternoon sun beat down on me, I was a certified battered and broken cyclist. I’d pulled into a small gravel lay-by to get a little respite from the unrelenting gradients of the road, while quietly hoping that allowing some of the lactic acid in my legs to dissipate may enable me to finish the job. I pulled out three small packets of gummy sweets and devoured them, not quite the structured fuelling plan I had envisioned they would be a part of but, right there, at that moment, I really needed every bit of help I could get.
Still straddling my bike, after probably 10 minutes of staring at the climb ahead of me, I summoned all the ambition I could muster and pushed off, once again settling into the rhythm of the climb.
One lurking worry that did sit in the back of my mind was my flight home. I would be flying out of Zurich, back to London at 9 p.m., and between where I was now and getting to the airport was a two-hour train journey and the remaining 40km of this ride, a large proportion of which was at an average of 8.6%.
“There’s nothing quite like the risk of being stranded on the continent to keep your legs spinning,” I told myself.
The juxtaposition of battling through my internal monologue to just keeping on climbing and the tranquillity of the mountain was almost cruel. Their quiet, consistent strength was all I could wish to mirror. One question I was suppressing was: why am I here? The answer to which can only be answered by winding the clock back by 10 days.
While I sat in the office on just another Wednesday, Peter Stuart, editor of Cyclingnews, looks up from his computer and asks, ‘Sam, are you free next weekend to go to Switzerland?’. Me, being the young, single and child-free twenty-something-year-old who can cancel plans at the drop of a hat, obviously said yes without hesitation. In the following week, I did a little bit of research into what I was actually letting myself in for.
I’d be taking part in the Granfondo San Gottardo. I somewhat optimistically opted for the 115km route, which consisted of 3,200m of climbing. To put that into a bit of…
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