Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  VAM was one of the reasons George started coming to Europe. ‘By then my whole cycling psyche was dominated by rate of ascent. Everything was rate of ascent,’ he says. He settled on a goal of climbing a hill ascending 400 vertical metres in 20 minutes – that’s a VAM of 1,200 – and there were hills in the local Dandenongs range that were tall enough, but they were not steep enough to make it possible. ‘I knew that in favourable conditions, for a hill that was fairly steep and had no dead wood in it – no flat bits or downhill – I was in with a prayer,’ he says.

  He worked out that the Portet d’Aspet, a 9 per cent climb in the Pyrenees, would be ideal, and headed off on tour.

  That first time riding the Portet d’Aspet, he missed his target by a tiny margin, but the hunt for the perfect hill was on: ‘Quite a big chunk of my motivation – not quite 100 per cent, but a big chunk – is to find hills that are closer to perfection,’ he says. ‘By which I mean, a nice hill with a nice surface, that’s fairly straight so you can get a fast descent if you want one, and that is steep: ten-eleven-twelve, thirteen-fourteen-fifteen per cent, even. And the right size. Bigger is better.’ Although he says he likes riding unknown stretches of road, it is undeniable that benchmarking on cycling’s mythical climbs is more fun. Before setting out for his European missions, George scours Strava for climbs that will suit him. Then he checks the leaderboards to see if the age-group KoM is attainable (he has recently moved into the 55–64 category). If all signs point to Go, he then rides out and smashes himself to bits and, quite often, takes the crown with a good margin.

  Monte Zoncolan is one of the Giro’s most fearsome climbs, and it’s slap bang in George’s sights for this trip. It’s phenomenally steep: 12 per cent for 10 kilometres, although, he says, ‘It’s steeper than the numbers suggest. I think the middle six kilometres average 16 per cent or something like that. It’s absurd, it’s ridiculously steep.’ The Mortirolo, too, is a favourite: ‘indescribably brutal’ and the hardest HC segment he has ever ridden. ‘If I’d had any strength I would have cried,’ he tells me the next day, when the conversation swings back round to how awful it is to ride.

  In my modest experience, I say, as someone with a climber’s build if not a climber’s talent, I agree with all his reasoning: the place I notice my advantage is on the steeper hills, where sometimes I feel good and more powerfully built riders start to go backwards. He fixes me with a stare and laughs – low-key high intensity is his thing – and says: ‘Just in case there’s any confusion about this, I don’t feel great! I feel like I’m going to die.’

  Later, I find out that George took the Zoncolan KoM for the 55–64 age group by a whopping seven minutes. He holds the age-group KoM for that particular awful Mortirolo route and, when his travels finally took him to Alpe d’Huez during the trip on which we met, for his chosen segment (there are hundreds) he bagged the age-group KoM there too, winning by a clear minute. The one he went for was the ‘Official Chrono’ segment, which finishes where the Tour de France does, about a kilometre higher than the standard ‘tourist’ finish. On the more popular ‘tourist’ segment, he is only fourth, which is impressive in itself. Alpe d’Huez is probably the most hotly contested climb in Europe, and I’m sure he was measuring out his effort for the longer course. But even so I can’t help feeling he would have done even better if it had been a bit steeper. I suspect George would have liked it to be even harder.fn5

  Given the climbs he selects for his benchmarking – some of cycling’s most famous, that sing siren songs to riders around the world – he must be, in his chosen (admittedly specialist) discipline, right up there with the best.

  We’re done with our pizzas and are on to our second beer when I ask George how his rock climbing has influenced his cycling. It’s a theme he jumps on with enthusiasm. ‘My approach to my cycling is heavily influenced by my rock-climbing youth,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe that so few cyclists I know – and maybe I don’t know many cyclists! – approach cycling like a rock climber approaches rock climbing.’ To his way of thinking, any particular route up a mountain or a rock face is, in effect, roughly equivalent to a Strava segment, in that it’s a certain agreed-upon mini course or challenge on which people test themselves and show what they can do. George II’s particular proclivity – finding and picking off Strava segments that suit his abilities – shares similarities with how many rock climbers choose the routes they climb: they work out what is possible, what is stretching them, what will look good on their resumés, and then go climb. Though I’m taking his lead on the rock-climbing angle (I’m definitely no expert when it comes to mountaineering), from the cycling side of things it’s a convincing argument, and rings true to me for a certain kind of rider and way of riding – although there are obviously many other ways of, and motivations for, riding your bike up a hill.

  More significant is what rock climbing taught him about training to cycle in the mountains. Rock climbers worked out long before cyclists, he says, that short, high-intensity efforts would help their endurance efforts. He quotes a rock-climbing legend called Jerry Moffat: ‘What Jerry Moffat said was an increase in power leads to an increase in stamina. But it doesn’t work the other way around.’ George II has devoted himself to proving this right: ‘What I try to do in my training, which I’ve learnt from rock climbing is, if you want to get better on Donna Buang, you actually have to get better on the 50-metres-vertical sprint. Out of the saddle, fucking balls to the wall, fresh as a daisy having hyperventilated before, giving it the full fucking noise the whole fucking way, and getting to the top ready to die. A 500-metre-long uphill sprint. Really, if you practise those – and it’s hard, it’s really hard – you will get better at Donna Buang.’

  When he says it’s hard, I don’t doubt him, and his delivery is convincing, to say the least, as are his Strava results. But everyone knows hill reps are good training. What I’m less prepared for, at least initially, is the technique he calls his secret weapon.

  ‘One of the training techniques I’ve found effective – I mean ridiculously effective, more effective than anything else I can think of, even high-intensity hill reps – is stairwell run-ups holding your breath,’ George II begins, looking at me in a way that suggests he feels he is letting a rather large and beautiful panther out of a sack. When he worked in an office block, every other day he used to run up and down the stairwells holding his breath during his lunch breaks, just in his normal clothes. He explains more: ‘What you can do in a stairwell that you can’t easily do anywhere else is you can measure very precisely what the elevation gain is, by measuring the steps and counting them. And when you train for it, when you hyperventilate and run up stairwells, you can get good at it.’

  I’ll confess at this point that I am slightly clutching at straws. Not at the concept itself – I’ve heard of tower runs, organised competitions where people run up the steps in skyscrapers, and ‘vertical kilometre’ trail runs – but at the basic, masochistic toughness of it, and the quality of the lateral thinking involved. If you can’t train at altitude, hold your breath and run upstairs as fast as you can and get hypoxic (oxygen deprived): it’s the next best thing.

  George II continues: ‘Anyway, if you run up a stairwell holding your breath, you get very seriously hypoxic very quickly. Because it happens rapidly you can get deeper into the red zone than any other way. I’ve twice fainted at the end, and on one occasion kind of rolled halfway down. Fortunately I wasn’t damaged. You learn the signs, you learn to sit down before you pass out, so when you do pass out it’s not consequential. But for the record, I’ve run up 24.8 metres of vertical in one breath. That’s six-and-a-half storeys.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I manage.

  It is fair to say I am sceptical that this is a reasonable thing to ask oneself to do. (However, I will have reason to change my mind – a reason other than George’s achievements and his many, many KoMs – as we’ll see in a later chapter.) ‘Try it,’ says George II. ‘If you’ve got access to a stairwell,
practise that. Try that every second or third day for a few weeks, I think you’ll notice your climbing ability goes out of sight.’ He muses with regret that now he has retired he no longer has a stairwell at his disposal to train on.

  One other significant motivation for coming to Europe is for the physical experience of riding the famous climbs. It’s a virtuous circle: seeing pros racing up a legendary climb on TV makes you want to ride it, and riding it gives you greater enjoyment of the race – an understanding of what’s at stake and a connection to the pro riders and their physical feats. He mentions climbing the Col du Galibier, and then watching Cadel Evans struggle so valiantly and without help on the same slopes when he was chasing Andy Schleck in the race for the 2011 yellow jersey. It was, he says, ‘just pure brute suffering and prowess, [coming] from years and years of hard work and dieting and obsession’, and his voice is tinged with admiration. The same rationale about the physical experience holds for mountaineering: ‘If you haven’t ever climbed up a snow slope with an ice axe and crampons, it’s really hard to know what it’s like,’ he says. ‘It was only really after I’d been Alpine climbing and to the Himalaya that I could start to appreciate what my grandfather had done, a little bit. The additional insight I got from climbing Mount Everest myself is massive.’

  George was aware of his grandfather’s fame from a young age, maybe from when a family member by marriage published a book on Mallory and Irvine, and a copy got placed in his school library – difficult, he says, for a kid who didn’t want to attract attention to himself. He confesses that in his younger years it was even a bit of a burden. As he grew up he became a student of his grandfather’s achievements, his character and his principles, reading all the books he could find. He tells me about his grandfather’s brief involvement with the Suffragette movement, his association with the progressive Fabian Society at Cambridge, and the ethical code by which he conducted his expeditions.

  ‘I’m a shadow of my grandfather,’ he tells me. ‘He was hardcore.’

  But I can’t help feeling this might be an impossible benchmark to measure oneself against. And I don’t think it’s that stark, or that simple. Later, I am reminded of a few lines from a Louis MacNeice poem:

  Pride in your history is pride

  In living what your fathers died,

  Is pride in taking your own pulse

  And counting in you someone else.

  We rode together the following day up the Passo Giau, one of the Dolomites’ most famous and beautiful climbs, meeting in a car park at the bottom and heading off into uncertain weather. George was formidably in form, having worked hard on his fitness, as he always did before these trips, so that he could pack in as many consecutive days’ riding as possible, to make the best use of limited time and still be competitive on the climbs. This ride up the Passo Giau was just a recce for him, and I was really grateful he was taking it easy on me. ‘I’m comparative, not competitive,’ he said at one point as we spun up through the trees, and I think that just about sums up his attitude.

  Talking and riding with him gave me a lot to think about. George II’s approach to his cycling was so different to mine, and yet we both used the mountains as the canvases on which we drew our obsessions. ‘It’s like cycling in heaven here,’ he said on that ride, and I thought, yes, heaven, but each man takes his own path to get there. And I could barely begin to imagine the internal vistas he had explored, the dark landscapes and sensations of pain on all those repeated ascents that had brought him here, to this mountain now, a few wheel lengths in front of me.

  Still, so many things resonated. For one, he had talked of the emptiness of achievement, something that haunts many people who spend their time chasing goals, reminding me that desire is in the chase and not in the consummation. There’s always another hill, another record. ‘It is so vastly much better for your demeanour and your mental health and your enjoyment of life,’ he said, ‘to have … to have meaning. If you’ve got something worthwhile to strive towards. I guess I learnt that especially on Everest: that almost within the same instant that you achieve something, suddenly it becomes worthless.’

  But the thing that has stuck with me the most is the idea of pushing the envelope. Walter Bonatti, an Italian who was one of the greats of Alpine climbing, had a good phrase for it: ‘What had enabled me to find the strength to resume climbing was the awareness that I had been struggling at the limits of the possible for days in order to solve my personal problems,’ he wrote. The personal problems he was referring to were his part in a fraught Italian national expedition to K2, in the Himalaya, in 1954. While the expedition was ultimately successful, becoming the first to summit the second-highest peak in the world, Bonatti was accused by the summiting pair of using oxygen he was meant to be taking to them. Bonatti’s rebuttal – that he couldn’t have used it even if he had wanted to, and that actually they hadn’t placed their high camp in the agreed place, forcing him and another climber to endure a night in the open at 8,100 metres (causing his companion to lose his toes) – was disputed and disbelieved for over 40 years. Vilified, slandered and disillusioned, he went solo, driving himself beyond what many believed one man could achieve alone.

  ‘The limits of the possible’: the phrase recurs in his writing, and is echoed in those of Frenchman Lionel Terray, another founding father of climbing in the Alps. ‘Bit by bit I worked out for myself an ethic and a philosophy of mountaineering,’ Terray wrote. ‘In practice, the risk and suffering involved in picking the roses that grow on the borders of the impossible call for exceptional moral strength.’

  I’m not trying to draw an equivalence here between the exploits of pioneering mountaineers and what normal amateur cyclists get up to in the mountains. But maybe their in extremis ‘why’ can illuminate something about us. Some of us, too, have that same affinity for these glorious worlds of light and beauty of the high mountains, the same thrill at the confrontation between nature and human endurance. We may, in our own way, share that same feeling, when everything is going well at least, of cloud-stepping, of dancing on space. And even if our achievements are nowhere near the same league, that Everesting pushed back the limits of my possible. Likewise, Murakami’s ultramarathon. Or finishing an Étape, climbing Alpe d’Huez, riding the Madone in 29 minutes, 40 seconds, getting a PB on your local hill – each of these push back the limits, even if that’s just in a very tiny, very personal way.

  ‘Look, when you get to my age, any PB is a bonus. As far as I’m concerned, the sun has set. I’m into the twilight … I mean, PBs at 56, that’s not normal,’ George II said to me over that pizza.

  Terray also makes explicit something else: that for many, mountain climbing has a moral code. Terray and Bonatti (and Rheinhold Messner and many others afterwards) shunned certain comforts and certain pieces of equipment as being, in their own personal engagement with nature, somehow unfair. Bonatti, for instance, would only use traditional pitons (pegs to drive into cracks, in his day still sometimes made out of wood) and not the new ‘spits’ that started being used in the 1950s (pitons that were drilled into the rock face, creating new holds that previously had simply not been there). ‘Using this type of piton,’ he wrote, ‘… cancels the impossible. And it therefore also cancels adventure. One might say it is tantamount to cheating in a game one has chosen to play voluntarily.’ He continued: ‘I think everyone should confront a mountain in a particular and precise way, obeying natural impulses, and be driven by precise, personal motives. Right from the start my motivation has been mostly of a thoughtful, introspective nature, ending in an assertion to myself about myself.’

  I think George II would probably recognise this asserting-of-self-in-action in his grandfather. Do something long enough and hard enough and passionately enough and an ethos develops – or, more than that: it becomes an expression of the ethos that shapes the life. Recently there have been debates among the old guard of cycling’s Everesting over whether a (very) few of the numerous attempts that now take plac
e around the world every weekend are really in the original spirit of the endeavour. Should an Everesting course with a little downhill in the middle, where you can acquire a bit of momentum and gain a tiny bit of ‘free’ elevation on the downhill leg, count? This matters to George II. Because an Everesting, in his conception at least, is something hard and pure and uncompromising. It is about hoisting your ass up 8,848 metres, come what may, and to finesse that, one might say, is tantamount to cheating in a game one has chosen to play voluntarily.

  These things are only an accomplishment if they are gone about in the right way. Mountains give us a place to show what we’re made of. Picking the roses that grow on the borders of the impossible calls for exceptional moral strength. You cannot lie to a mountain.

  Chapter 6

  THE CLIMB IS NOT THE THING

  Or, the world’s greatest stadia, butterflies at the hardest Grand Tour stage ever and the arms race of the ‘extreme’

  I am sitting with Joe Dombrowski again, at the seafront café eating fish and salad. Or maybe it was the same time as before; we went there quite a lot, it was always sunny and we always ate fish and salad. The Giro is approaching and we are talking World Tour, the select races that make up the top level of competition in the professional road calendar. Specifically, I’m asking him what was the toughest moment he’s faced so far. He thinks for a moment and then says it was the team time trial in his first World Tour race, Tirreno–Adriatico, a week-long race across Italy from coast to coast: ‘It was really windy, to the point where I thought maybe they were going to cancel it. We had a hit squad of a team – [Chris] Froome, [Rigoberto] Urán and [Sergio] Henao – and I remember being nervous because there were a lot of roundabouts and slick corners. I didn’t want to cause a crash!’ I remembered that day; I’d been looking out for him and Ian Boswell, who was also making his World Tour debut that season, excited that they were getting their start. Joe continues: ‘Coming off the ramp, I think I was the last guy, and just … the jump! I almost never got on the wheel. I think I did one pull before I was dropped. Literally the first time through and I didn’t get back in.’ He laughs. ‘And I remember hearing the director on the radio literally a minute into this team time trial: “Guys, we’ve dropped Joe, just keep going now …” You hear that on the radio and it’s just like, shit, I guess this is the World Tour.’