The sloshing of the team cars and branded tour buses heading towards the start of the bicycle race is both a wake-up call and a weather announcement: it will be a wet day in the saddle.
Still, less out of hope than interest in the procession marking the 96th edition of the Giro d’Italia, the storied three-week Italian bicycle race, I poke my head through a crack in my room’s curtain.
The view from the window of my guesthouse in Caldes, a commune in an apple-growing region of Italy’s northern Dolomites, is a liquid grey, interspersed with flashes of BMC red and Team Sky black.
I dress, eat breakfast, check my day’s route again on Google Maps. As a final act of preparedness, I pull on a pair of waterproof covers over my shoes.
As in many parts of the Dolomites, clearly signposted cycling paths map out quiet alternatives to the narrow and often congested national roads. My route hugs the course on the Torrente Noce (Walnut Creek), a fast-flowing river popular with kayakers.
I pedal at a steady rhythm alone up through the M's — Male, Monclassico and Mezzana, small villages that offer summer diversions (hiking, fishing, hunting) for urbanites living on Italy’s populous floodplains.
The thin, sleeting rain drenches my gloves and shoes. In Pellizzano, at the start of a pass linking Trentino to Lombardy — a place where Jews experienced the cruelty of Charlemagne’s pogroms in the ninth century — I improvise.
Seated under an eave, I tear up my poncho, wrap the plastic around a fresh pair of socks, put on another pair, and then wedge the swollen mass into my shoe. I am warm again.
Over the years, trekking by bicycle across the United States, Japan and Scotland, I’ve learnt some basic lessons. Push on through the rain (it won’t miraculously stop).
Also, distrust maps (they’re often wrong about details). Say hello to fellow cyclists. Stop and ask a local when you’re lost. And know when to ignore their advice.
In Pellizzano, a farmer lugging firewood points me in the direction of Tonale Pass, which leads to Ponte di Legno, the start of today’s epic mountain stage over two famous cycling passes, Gavia and Stelvio. After a breath, he adds that the road is closed.
Mountain Biking
I check the LED signboard at the start of the pass. Nothing. I shrug and push on, slowly. My 20-year-old mountain bike is loaded with nearly 15kg of luggage, a month’s worth of supplies to negotiate high-altitude cycling, as well as Venetian and Paris exhibition openings.
My speed rarely tops 10km/h. It is tantamount to doing very little. I call it slow travel, an expression I picked up in Japan last year.
The landscape changes from a sodden green to winter white. Snow, as I learn, is still a form of wet. I stop to buy dry gloves. Two clerks in the hiking store express disbelief, not at me, but the weather: it is nearing the end of May, well into early summer, and yet it is still winter here. I push on.
You know you’re either doing something potentially interesting or just plain dumb when people hoot, give you the thumbs up, and even stop their cars to take photos of you (as happened when one of the Giro’s crew cars braked hard and a man leapt out the passenger door with his cellphone to snap my picture).
I don’t pass one other cyclist on my way up to the summit, which I reach around lunchtime, too late for the start of the race down in the valley. I have only cycled 32km — my end destination, the winter ski resort and Roman spa town of Bormio, is still another 80km away, across another pass.
Exiting a coffee shop in Tonale, I stuff a newly acquired postcard into a pannier bag.
The postcard shows a collage of photos from the 1988 Giro, when riders crossed a snowbound Gavia Pass in June. One rider wore only a short-sleeve Lycra jersey and goggles, his brown hair dusted with white. His slumped pose speaks of determination; it also describes the eccentricity of the professional bicycle race that I failingly stalked.
The Giro, as cycling journalist Bill Strickland has written, is possessed of an “essential otherness”. Unlike the Tour de France, which follows a “logical rhythm” and is marked by a well-choreographed pageantry, the Giro is “frail, tragic, awkward, full of scandal and regret”.
Freewheeling
I experience some of that regret freewheeling down the mountain. The cold pierces through everything as I pick up speed. My hands burn. My heart rate accelerates wildly. I begin to shake involuntarily. I alternate cycling with one hand. Nothing works. It was easier cycling uphill. I scream out loud in frustration and agony.
Ponte di Legno, once a popular point of departure for alpine walkers, is decorated with pink bunting. The mood in town is sombre, however. “Tappa annullata”, the official record for stage 19 of the 2013 Giro will forever read: Stage cancelled.
My uncontrollable tremors explain why: “With windchill temperatures expected to drop to -20°C, organisers decided it was not safe for riders,” says the BBC.
Unlike the riders, who get whizzed off in luxury busses, I have a prepaid hotel waiting for me in Bormio, on the other side of another mountain range. There is also no train link, only an indirect series of bus rides or a massively overpriced taxi ride. So cycling it is.
Exiting Ponte di Legno, I brake hard outside a farming hardware store, walk inside and buy the thickest gloves I can find. They are made from pigskin.
Before putting them on, I check Google Maps again. Gavia, the quickest route to Bormio, is out because of snow. I will use the alternative route, over Mortirolo Pass.
As preparation for my trip to the Dolomites, I did two things. I used Google Maps to track my route. Stupid. It measures only distance, not altitude gain.
But I did buy a copy of Daniel Friebe and Pete Goding’s Mountain High, a nifty guide to Europe’s best cycle climbs.
I brought with me photocopied pages for some of the passes I would be cycling, including Stelvio Pass, the nearly 3km-high Mecca for all cycle pilgrims. I overlooked Mortirolo.
Friebe and Goding describe this pass, whose name is connected to Charlemagne’s rampaging army, as a “leg breaker”, and rightly so.
“It’s a terrible climb,” said Lance Armstrong in 2004. “Mortirolo is the hardest climb I’ve ever ridden.”
I concur. Try it with luggage and no juice in your veins.
It took me nearly three hours to reach the summit, time enough to study the fading daylight and get multiple views of the craggy peaks that resist commercial forestry.
Nothing much happened in that time, but for pedalling and sweating and a quiet sense of ecstasy about being out there among some of this planet’s truly immovable fixtures.
It’s a strange kind of privilege.