To cycle up a mountain is to pedal into a world of paradoxes. Mountains are a playground and a torture chamber; an opportunity for wonder, a guarantee of pain. A mountain can drag you to despair but leave you soaring with joy.
When we think about cycling, mountains erupt into our imagination: a snaking Alpine pass or the curling grey ribbon of a Pyrenean hairpin. The most iconic moments of the Tour de France have taken place at altitude; photobooks of snow-capped cols adorn our coffee tables and riders make pilgrimages to legendary peaks. But we rarely pause to think how strange this fascination really is. Road cyclists aren't drawn in the same way to forests, fields or flatlands, although those landscapes feature in our rides and races. Mountains form the architecture of our cycling dreams. But this obsession cannot be explained simply by the physical challenges of elevation. And neither did this story begin with the Tour de France.
As the author Robert Macfarlane describes in his seminal book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination, for most of the human history mountains were regarded as dangerous, forbidding, and worthless places. They were feared as a realm of dragons and mysterious beasts; an abode of bandits, thieves, and social outcasts; an extreme terrain of dangers and disasters. Hard as this may be for us to grasp, mountains weren't even regarded as beautiful. Until well into the 1700s, as Macfarlane writes: "Alpine travellers often chose to be blindfolded to avoid looking at the vertiginous landscapes. Mountains were an ugly irritation, which prevented the free range of the eye and the free movement of our legs, over the cultivated landscape in which humans lived and worked."
This story is from the May 2022 edition of Cycling Plus.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the May 2022 edition of Cycling Plus.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Objectives of desire
Ned ponders his affection for cycling on a ride from London to Minehead
ONE OF A KIND
Project One combines premium-quality customised bikes with an endless palette of colours and designs from the creative experts at Trek. It's a winning formula. Here's why...
Trek Checkpoint ALR 5 Driftless
£2,700 Aluminium bike-packing-friendly gravel bike
Gower Peninsula, Wales
A rider powers up the Cefn Bryn ridge on south Wales' Gower Peninsula.
Slow commotion
Downing Street targeting 20mph zones is attacking popular policy
Black Series Multistrada
£5,629 British designed, all-road speedster
Helmetcam militia
Hey, bad drivers! Want to be in the movies? Then smile as you close-pass us while on the phone
Rolling horizons
2018 Tour de France champion Geraint Thomas tells us about the joy of discovering new routes
ENTER THE DRAGON
It's one of the toughest sportives in the UK, but did climb-loving cycling author Simon Warren have the legs to slay the beast of a sportive route in 2023?
LOFTY GOALS
Higher, harder, longer... the road-sportive calendar gets ever more extreme. Here are 10 of the toughest single day rides to enter for 2024