Chipper

After a summer of limited cycling training following the birth of our son, I had intended just to cruise round the only race of the year that I had entered.

The Eddy Merckx Classic Radmarathon runs through 155km of beautiful countryside, with the final 60km taking in some fairly tough climbs. A friend from New Zealand was visiting and a gentle potter would have been a fun way to spend the day.

However, after 20km, I couldn't find my friend in the bunch and a red mist had filled my head: I was going to race this MF as hard as I could. It made no sense, I didn't need to and beforehand I hadn't even wanted to. But what the hell, I wanted to make my legs hurt.




For the next 100km, things went well. The climbs were not proving difficult and I was sitting comfortably in the main peloton. We hammered through Oberösterreich, past Mondsee and back into Salzburgerland and the village of Thalgau. Then, as expected, everything split on Thalgauegg and I was riding with a little group, not too far down on the leaders.

Dropping into Fuschl, where my family and friends cheered us through, was a marvelous feeling - I was a proper racing cyclist again.


Reality struck 5km later as I was promptly dropped on the Perfelleck, a short sharp ascent out of Fuschl. It was here I realized that motivation and experience couldn't account for a lack of longer distance endurance training.

There was about 30km to the finish and a shedload of climbing in the way. My thighs felt fatigued and despite eating four bananas and two energy bars, I thought I was on the verge of bonking.

Over the Gaisberg, the penultimate mountain and longest climb, was awful. There weren't enough gears on my bike and more and more people passed me. "Well," I thought, "I wanted to hurt my legs, so I better get on with it."



The descent was long enough to recover slightly and I caught one rider up before the bottom. But the final hill dragged and I was dropped again, left to my own thoughts about why on earth I was doing this and how much I was looking forward to a radler.

After 4hr 46min I rolled through the finish, in 70th place out of 350 and 25min down on the winner. An OK result. Could have done better if I was fitter. But I guess that despite however much I want to be, I'm not a proper racing cyclist anymore. I'm just an old chipper who still likes trying to beat people and making his legs hurt.