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No Hablas Espangnol
by Tom Southam | 11/02/10

My Spanish is appalling. I find it so rude and embarrassing to be in a country and not have much of a grasp on their language. What’s so frustrating is that I really should know better, and I almost do.

Watching the barmaid pour my two glasses of vino tinto on the bar, she pauses, smiles at me and says something low and fast. I am so concerned with thinking that I might not know what she is saying, I throw in one of my two stock standard linguistic gems, ‘No’ (the other one being of course – ‘Yes’, I can do that in any language you care to mention amazingly).

And as she grins, turns, and knowingly misunderstood, recaps the wine. The sentence undresses its foreign complexity in my mind and I can hear her saying as clear as day, una pocito mas? Not hard really, and of course I would like a little more. In the next microseconds, my mind manages to pick out some a broken Spanish phrase that would be both a worthy conversation starter and witty riposte. Sadly though, the time for this is long gone and I am left confounded by my poor Spanish once again.

It’s not that I really want to talk to this barmaid; I barely even feel the need to sleep with her (that is a joke folks). It’s just that that is exactly how you start to learn, and I would love to learn Spanish. I mean, I like Spain, I think it could be a lot of fun. It’s got bullfighting going for it, it has world’s most unfazed laid back culture and of course it will be great when it’s finished.

I’ve been coming to Spain to train (thankfully mostly for training and rarely for racing) for eleven or so years now and every time I come, I picture myself turning up quite a bit later in the year to actually enjoy it and see what it’s like in its summery prime. But for now at our Malaga training camp we are just afforded an odd February style glimpse of what might be.

Spain, it would seem, does all its sleeping at this time of year. The hotel staff seem more than mildly disgruntled to have to get up and open the breakfast room up at 8 am, and then even when we set off at 10 on the road we pretty much get the silent treatment from the rest of the country. Riding through dusty little towns and villages nothing stirs. We seem like the riders of the apocalypse (plus a couple of mates) as we sweep through the streets, six bike riders on shiny new bikes, dressed head to toe in black with no noise bar the squealing of the team car tyres behind us.

I haven’t seen anyone remotely fresh faced or even below the age of a free bus pass. Those I have seen have been men as old as civilisation who stand, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and watch you like you are arriving with some fairly vital replacement organs.

No glossy taught beach bodies here, saggy leather seems to be the only skin on view, and donkeys the transport of choice. In the mountain villages you feel like you are from another time altogether. Dusty Renault 4’s and the inevitable Seat Marbella’s (a Fiat Panda by any other name…) are the only occasional reminder that we have passed through any kind of technological advance since the Spanish civil war.

We don’t get to cruise the sea front either, we go looking for mountains, big ones. This is where we spend our days surrounded by rocky peaks and green scrub, goats chased by lost herders and an inexplicable number of scraggy stray dogs that roam around in the absence of any other place to be. The landscape says nothing of the adventures that my imagination associates with Spain, but then my mind has been known to wander, particularly when faced with thirty plus hours of cycling in just one week.

Maybe though this is the perfect balance for a training camp, and John has achieved some sort of zen balance between body & spirit. While my mind spends very very late nights stumbling through wine bars in Madrid, and drinks Sangria with dark haired girls on the seafront in Barcelona. My body is in fact getting fitter while uncomfortably churning 39×19 up a desolate gradient looked on only by grey brown goats.

If I know what is good for me I probably shouldn’t pick up the Spanish text book when I get back, maybe that should be a doorway that’ll have to remain unpassed until I have retired from this pedalling business, and have the time and freedom to be wandering off all night & day. I hear you are required to be jolly fit and healthy to do these bike races well after all and some form of training might well be in order.

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