Professional bike riders tend to take a very practical attitude to mountains. They will head up ascents across the globe to hone their climbing form, they will sleep at the summits for altitude training and they will drop down into the valleys below for training rides and tests. If you’re a resident in Andorra in the Pyrenees, you might even say they combined all of the above in the principality and then live there as well to (in many cases) save a lot of money on taxes.
But ride up a mountain for pleasure? All climbers may have a favourite ascent, for sure. But it’s rare to hear of a rider going up a 20-kilometre mountain, widely rated as one of Italy’s hardest single ascents, over 30 times a year, purely because they love the climb for its own sake: not as a challenge, but as a place. Unless, of course, their name is Gaia Realini.
As the 24-year-old from the nearby coastal town of Pescara sees it, her connection with the climb – which peaks out at 2,000 metres above sea level – is much more spiritual and emotional than a physical challenge. Or, as she puts it: “I get the feeling that I’m at home there.”
The first time Realini went up the Blockhaus – partly deeply and beautifully wooded lower down, but also famous for its wide-open, exposed, verdant slopes higher up with not even a fence or tree on it for miles around – she was 16 or 17, she says. But unlike the elite men’s Giro d’Italia, which only ever tackles the first 14 kilometres of the ascent (the last six are pretty much inaccessible to motorised traffic) even back then as a teenager, she got right to the top.
“It felt like I was climbing Everest in every sense you can imagine,”…
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