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Trip to the Moon
by Tom Southam | 30/07/09
Some races are in remote places, the Tour of Qinghai Lake is on the moon. It’s not as far as I have ever gone for a race in a linear geographical sense, but in terms of everything else, it is miles and miles away. After all, I have climbed some high mountains, run through the fields, scaled city walls etcetera, but I really have not found anything like this.
High
You can’t talk Qinghai without talking altitude, altitude, altitude. Let me just sum up for anyone who hasn’t ever exercised at altitude; reducing the oxygen pressure to 66% of that of sea level is like someone taking away all of your heart rate zones between zone 2 and zone 7. It’s as simple as that, one moment you can be happily tapping along slicing a fine and aerodynamic line through the thin air, the next moment, when the swift sensations have gone to your head and you try something simple like accelerating, all of a sudden your needle gauge is thrown from 1 to 8.
From here, there is seemingly no way back, without that is, actually stopping exercise all together, letting the panic subside and slowly recovering your breath. The line is so fine it just doesn’t really bear crossing, as stopping every now and again isn’t really an option in most bike races.
The next big things to talk about are of course the 30km mountain passes. Now I’ve never (beyond the age of 14) claimed to have any affection towards mountains, no that’s a lie; as I may have remarked once or twice of their magnitude and/or beauty. Let me rephrase that, I have never claimed to have enjoyed racing a pushbike up mountains. I can do maybe one or two of those intense periods where you have to balance the concentration and suffering that are required to get over mountains, per race. Not however, two or three a day, there is only so much hatred my physical self can have for my mental self before my mental self shirks away and lets my body off the hook.
The Tour of Qinghai Lake is bloody littered with mountains, from day 1 to day 8 the organiser had seemingly added as many climbs as possible, there was obviously a liberal smattering of descents as well but they rarely tend to make up for all the going up that has to happen first.
Then the last of this little triptych of notable evils is of course another biggy; food. We all know the benefits of eating food before during and after the massive physical trauma that is racing stages each day. Food is, on a stage race, a lover, a mother, a friend, a colleague, a confidant and perhaps everything else your body could want after being pushed about the country all day.
Asia is sadly well renowned for bad food on races and all the hedge-jumping, bibshort-dropping experiences that come with unsanitised water systems. It’s all well and good brushing your teeth with bottled water but when your cutlery and salad is rinsed in the same water, sadly there is little you can do to stop yourself getting sick at some stage of the race.
Most of this doom and gloom was pushed to the back of our minds as we saddled up on the start ramp for the 4km prologue, it’s the old adage that ‘It couldn’t happen here’. We probably were still thinking the same thing that night when sat around the dinner table, the result sheets were handed out. One day after pretty much two solid days of travelling all the way up to Xining, Lappers had made the top ten, and I also slipped into the top 20 without too much effort.
In the red
So far, so good we thought, alas that was actually as good as things got and we had a lot, lot further to go. It was in fact as soon as the next day that we really got some idea of what on earth was about to hit us. With 25km to go of the so called flat first stage, after a cruisy day drifting mostly along dual carriageways in the sun, all of a sudden the race actually started.
I have never really felt anything like it; it was like a bad dream where you are trapped, constantly trying to keep up with some irrepressible force. I could see the front of the bunch snaking away up the road but accelerating was just impossible, I’d step out of the line to go, only to find I was immediately in the red without even moving up one bike length.
So I watched with horror from the middle of the bunch as the race went to pieces. That well known force in the cycling world, the Iranian Trans Petro Chemicals team, just took the race to pieces. So much so that by the end of the day, their leader had a four minute advantage on everyone. It’s worth remembering that he was still in the bunch with me at the 25km to go mark.
It was already very apparent to us that we were going to have to rethink our objectives for the race. We had always had the idea that we would want to come out of the race in better shape than we went in. But had also kept in each of our minds some notion of success along the way, now we would have to look to redefine what success was going to be, horizons had rapidly dropped.
Then as the week kept on, they kept on dropping. As with the effects of altitude, things tend to get worse before they get better. This coincided with the weather getting worse before it got worse and the locations we were staying in becoming increasingly more remote and a lot closer to the sky. Day after day passed by, the faces in the groupetto becoming more and more familiar as we huddled together for survival. Then the faces would start to disappear one after another as the numbers left in the race inevitably started to dwindle.
And while the Iranians and Kazaks seemed to be thriving on eating the same terrible shit every day, I personally had given up any hope of my body performing on a diet of stale Fruit Loops and Red Bull for breakfast (there was no coffee, I had to), pasta and broccoli for lunch and err… pasta and broccoli for dinner.
Riding as Bob
A war of attrition had begun and we somehow slowly ground our way around what is truly an amazing country. The blessing in being so hopelessly arseholed in the race was of course that I did have a bit of time to look up and even around me during the stages, I saw people living up mountains in tents, I saw Tibetan monks on motorbikes, I saw a new born baby with wild wolves all around it, I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it, I saw ten thousands talkers with their tongues all broken, I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of small children.
Oh no hang on, that was Bob Dylan not me. To be honest, the Hard Rain that did fall and the hills and the height and the competition were pretty much enough for me not to really know if I was me or Bob Dylan by the end of the race, I probably still don’t. What I am well aware of is, that the Tour of Qinghai Lake is like no other race I have ever done. From its moonscape arena, its strange gaggle of competitors, its fascinated and passionate spectators, its precision organisation and communist overtones.
Despite the obvious hardships, I’m going to have to confess it was a pretty cool trip. It’s rarely I do a race that really challenges me outside the actual cycling itself, and I suppose those challenges are pretty good for me in a ‘I’ll be glad I did that in 10 years time’ way. Well hopefully I don’t have to wait ten years for some decent form to come of it, some slightly more immediate results in terms of my physical condition would be preferred. I’m fairly confident now that after two weeks of what was pretty much begging, I think the form God will be kind.
Rock and Roll Stops the Traffic.
