Beside all the hours of training and travel, John Courtney and Alex Langley got out of bed and 3 a.m. last November just to put their names in a metaphorical hat in the hope they would get in before the masses and find a place in the Tour Transalp.
When they woke up the next morning they found out they were two of 1,300 people who would be chasing cycling glory across the Alps up roads professionals fear and through quaint, European towns and finding pieces of heaven in the alps.
“Just racing on those roads, at that level, with these racers and the sun is coming out and the church bells are ringing. It was a little moment of perfection,” Courtney said.
That’s when the training began.
The pair trained for seven months, hiring a trainer to make sure they would be able to ride with the Europeans where cycling field is deeper than North America.
It turns out the trainer was worth it, as the pair placed in front of 642 teams, or 1,284 other riders at the end of the week of cycling.
It wasn’t easy getting to that point.
“It was a huge time commitment and pretty excruciating. He had us doing a volume of training and type soy training that I’d never done in my life and I’ve been racing for 20 years,” Courtney said.
The winter months in the gym and on the stationary bikes were the hardest, he said. But the effort paid off when they got outside in the spring and all the fitness from the winter was pushing them on and the wind was finally in their hair again.
And with those few sentences, we’ll breeze through lonely, boring hours in the gym where Courtney and Langley spilled litres of sweat and expanded kilojoules of energy with one thing in mind and get to the exciting bit.
In July, wearing surgical face masks to insure they wouldn’t get sick in the soup of bacteria that is recycled in airplanes, the pair got on their flight to Santhofen, Germany where they would begin their adventure.
From there, they raced through four countries: out of Germany, up into Austria, into Switzerland and then they finished at Lake Guarda in the north of Italy.
Riding that list, which takes all of five minutes to read, the two men rode elbow to elbow with competitors, rode up mountains that tested Lance Armstrong, and descended at speeds more associated with cars than bicycles, and duelling with world-class duathletes for the lead.
Day one the pair struggled to get past hundreds of cyclists on tight, European roads; day two was cancelled due to snow in the mountains: but none of that gives anything near a description of the experience.
There were, as Courtney put it above, ‘moments of perfection,’ such as the sun coming out as the riders hit a picturesque alpine town and shopkeepers cheered them on while the church bells tolled their welcome.
The peak though, metaphorically but not literally, was the Motirolo climb, which has been a part of the Giro D’Italia and which Lance Armstrong called the hardest climb he’s ever done.
“It’s a mythical climb – of mythical proportions – and I’m on it. I’m looking at it and I kind of had this moment and I’m thinking this is it, this is the moment that all the training has been for, all this hard work. This is a road that countless legends of the sport have raced on and countless fans have lined this road side and cheered: ‘Vie vie vie.’ All my preparations and all the history of this climb welled up in me at once and I started getting super choked up and then I realized my throat was closing up. I thought to myself ‘holy crap, get yourself together. you’re only a quarter of a way up this thing. You’ve gotta be able to breathe,” Courtney said.
And as the team beat each trial, they got stronger and stronger and made up positions until they were the eighth team to cross the finish line to be greeted by their better halves in polka dot dresses, an homage to the polka dot jersey the fastest climber wears on the Tour De France, and take some time to relax and take in a leg of the Tour De France a day later.
And the team aspect, was one of the highlights.
“It’s the camaraderie and the working together that makes these events so much more interesting. Especially cause you’re working off each others strengths and weaknesses and trying to balance it,” Courtney said.
“I’m super proud of Alex cause he’s a super strong rider and incredibly fast descender. But he hasn’t thought of himself as a super fast climber. In this event it was 2,100m of climbing, so not exactly a course that suits his strengths, but he rode so strong. He really rose to the challenge.”
Currently the pair have no plans to conquer the mountains again, but magic can be quite addicting.
