MORE CLIMBING; TOUR DE FRANCE THOUGHTS; BELLINGHAM-ROUBAIX

McNeil Canyon descent in last month's Chelan Century Challenge; I'm scared and this isn't even the steep part.

With just a couple weeks to go 'til the Shasta ride that I may or may not do, I spent the last few days getting in a rather eclectic collection of climbs. Mountain biked up the Pine and Cedar Lakes Trail which is probably the steepest ridable trail around B'ham. (That I can think of anyway.) Climbs 1,360 feet in 1.7 miles; my Garmin doohickey registered grades of 36-percent in spots. (Though I don't know how accurate that is.)

Also a climbing workout of Cleator Road followed immediately by a schlep to the top of the Galby Towers (MTB); the next day was some Squalicum Mountain repeats with a foray down to Lake Samish (road bike). Between the two days, I got in eight hours of riding with about 8,000 feet of climbing. So we'll see ...

Speaking of the Tour de France, methought this one was amazing, and I'm super glad Cadel got it done. I'll make a prediction too, that Andy Schleck will never win the Tour de France. Great climber, but that's all he can do. Along with not being a good time trialists, we learned during this tour that he's not a great descender either (he's like me in the top photo) and since Alberto Contador excels at both and is highly motivated to win the next few (he's already said he'll never again do the Giro), I think Andy's climbed as high on the podium as he's ever going to get. (I'm a big Cadel fan but at 34, he's already the oldest Tour winner in the post-war era so I don't expect him to repeat.) The only way Andy wins the Tour de France is if there are no time trials, just 21 mountain stages, and Alberto Contador crashes out. (Or is serving a drug suspension.)

So ends my catechism ...

Switching gears (pun sorta intended), watching so much Tour got me thinking about our Paris trip last year and the incredible day we spent watching Fabian Cancellara destroy the field at Paris-Roubaix. So I thought I'd share a story I wrote about that experience and how it ultimately led to a broken collarbone; the story originally ran in last fall's Adventures NW. Please enjoy ...

The cobbled streets of Compiegne.

Bellingham-Roubaix
by Mike McQuaide
For as long as you can remember, you’ve been this way. You watch someone do something really cool and you get inspired. You think, I can do that! I can be just like them! Even when you probably can’t. Even when you’re probably a little too old to still be thinking this way. Even when it might not be smart or even safe to attempt what it was that so inspired you.

So there you are in the north of France at Paris-Roubaix, the most prestigious one-day bike race in the world. Held each April since 1896, it’s a 165-mile megamarathon known as the Queen of the Classics. Known also as the Hell of the North because of the 28 sectors of rough cobblestones—called pavé—that the riders have to negotiate. Big, blocky hunks of granite lain in the earth a tad sloppily to be honest; some sectors are so rough the riders say it’s as if the cobbles fell off the back of a truck and were left to lie where they landed.


And there you stand at the most famous pavé sector there is, the Arenberg Forest. (Or Trouée d'Arenberg to true aficionados, as you now consider yourself.) You and thousands of screaming, beer-filled Belgians and Flemish and French and Brits and Australians and Americans and Netherlanders and Colombians and cycling fanatics from everywhere.

Tom Boonen pulls the peloton through the Arenburg Forest.

I want me some of that! you think to yourself. I want to be just like them!

You are inspired.
And that evening, on the high-speed train back to Paris, you come across Yoann Offredo, a pro racer who’d just finished Paris-Roubaix for Française des Jeux, a French team. And your mind is boggled because here’s a professional cyclist not only riding the same train as you, but apparently—like you and your family—he doesn’t have a proper seat. Like you he’s forced to squeeze in near the luggage racks. And you talk, you and Yoann Offredo who just finished Paris-Roubaix (64th out of 71 finishers, but he finished!) like you’re two normal cyclists chatting it up at the Farmer’s Market after the Donut Ride. And outside the windows of the high-speed train, the French countryside scrolls by and eventually you see the unmistakable spire of the Eiffel Tower and you think, This is the coolest thing in the world.


Again, you are inspired.


So what you do when you get back to Bellingham is you take that second road bike of yours, the one that hasn’t been ridden much since you upgraded a couple years ago, and you turn it into your Bellingham-Roubaix bike. A bike on which, Tom Boonen-esque, you’ll power over the pavé of Bellingham. OK, if not exactly pavé, you’ll power over the hard-packed dirt and gravel trails of Bellingham’s Greenways. Heck, you figure, if the pros can survive Paris-Roubaix on those delicate bike of theirs, your beefy aluminum bike will be fine.

Fabian Cancellara on the homestretch through Roubaix.

And it is. (For a couple days.) You have a great time pedaling the flats of the Interurban, hitting 22, 24 miles-per-hour, hands on the tops of the bars just like you saw Tom Boonen do in the Trouée d'Arenberg. And you think, This is so much fun! Why doesn’t everybody do this?


Then rudely your question is answered.
You’re Bellingham-Roubaix-ing it on the trail from Boulevard Park to downtown. It’s deserted this early afternoon two-and-a-half weeks after Paris-Roubaix, and so you let it rip. You’re Fabian Cancellara making the winning move in this year’s race, a move so sudden, powerful and fast, that he was accused of riding a motorized bike. Today, Mike, that’s you. You’re hammering it, riding so hard you convince yourself that aging is a myth. That getting slower as you get older is something other people suffer from. Not you. No, Mike, not you.


But then …


… your skinny tires, the ones made for smooth paved roads not rough and tumble riding like this, hit a bump—a thimble-sized bump a hundredth the size of the cobbles of Paris-Roubaix—and your hands slip off the handlebars. You’re launched airborne like Superman, which is a problem because as far as you know, you can’t fly. So while your return to earth isn’t surprising, it’s still jarring, what with the hard crash, the sliding and tumbling over on your right shoulder, and your helmet grinding against the ground before you finally come to a halt.


Ouch.


Your shoulder hurts and when you trace your right collarbone with your finger you reach a point where it just disappears. Like a road that comes to an abrupt end at the edge of a cliff. Broken. You have surgery to pin the pieces back together again and two days later you get a phone call from your buddy John Clark, whom you’ve been riding and running with for the past 10 years and whom you’ve never known to suffer even the slightest injury. He’s calling to tell you that he’s sitting in a ditch waiting for his wife to come pick him up because he just flipped over his handlebars and broke his collarbone. W, T, you-know-what?!


Neither of you are allowed to run or ride for far too many weeks than seems fair and so you go on long walks together. You feel like patients from a mental institution out for your daily exercise. Life, as you know it, has been flipped upside down. How, you wonder, did you go from being Fabulous Fabian Cancellara to someone whose main exertion is a pleasant bayside walk?
 You’re one of those annoying types who search for some reason or meaning to attach to things like this, as if your inconvenient little collarbone break has some major role in the order of the universe. Nah. Prolly not. You got carried away and fell off your bike. The law of averages caught up to you. Forty-plus years of riding, probably 40-plus years of getting inspired and carried away, yet this is the first time you’ve broken a bone. Actually, that’s pretty good. You hope you learned something. Maybe, that it’s good to be inspired—fired up, even—by the actions of others. But if your inspiration happens to be a professional athlete two decades younger than you, it’s probably not best to go out and pretend that you’re him.

Or at least wear shoulder pads next time.



John Clark and I.

And when that distinctive French siren heralds the riders’ arrival, and big Tom Boonen wearing the black, yellow, and red of Belgium’s champion, powers past—like a locomotive pulling a train of the best cyclists in the world— you, like the thousands of the beer-fueled fanatics around you, erupt in absolute cycle-craziness. An arm’s-length away, the riders’ bikes rattle and shake over the rough and tumble pavé, like they’re being pedaled down the middle of the railroad tracks on that last annoying section of the Ski to Sea mountain bike course. On their sleek, elegant, featherweight road bikes—bikes not at all built to take this kind of pounding—these pros pedal past with such speed, power and grace that the rush of wind makes your eyes blink.

AREA MAN'S PARIS-ROUBAIX PREDICTION: THOR

Yes, I know the above shot is of last year's winner Fabian Cancellara haulin' arse through Roubaix just before entering the velodrome, but for whatever reason I think it's going to be Thor Hushovd's year. (Or maybe Flecha finally gets one?) Above pic is from last year's race; below shot is a video capture my son took at pretty much the exact same moment:

He got the better shot.

Rode the Donut Ride today for the first time in about a year-and-a-half. (Titanium Clark and Titanium Cancellara rode it too.) Man it was fast, especially the tailwind-aided ride out to Birch Bay which we made in an hour and three minutes. (It's 21.5 miles.) The Donut starts early, 7 a.m., and so by 9:45 you're back in town and you've already got 45 miles in. Nice.

I took the above pics at the end of Walnut Street where the peloton passes coming from downtown. I thought I'd have no trouble latching onto the back after taking my last shot. But with the tailwind (or my dubious time-trialing skills), it took me 10 minutes of pedaling about all-out to finally get on a wheel. I'm not sure I ever recovered the entire ride. Still a lot of fun though. Below is the Birch Bay stop.

END-OF-YEAR FRANCE PHOTS

Though these photos aren't bike-focused per se, I wanted to post a year-end batch of never-been-posted photos from our Paris trip last spring, which was amazing, incredible and everything we imagined it would be. (Most of them haven't been posted yet anyway.) Please enjoy!

Sunrise over the Seine.

Crescent moon under Tour Eiffel.

The boy Baker looking out the window of our Paris hotel room.

Parisian schoolkids pass in front of Notre Dame.

Youth choir inside Notre Dame. I'm not the least bit religious but the sound of their voices in such an incredibly beautiful, historic place absolutely gave me chills.

Baker chatting up some breakdancers in front of the Paris Opera House.

Throng of Mona Lisa admirers at the Louvre.

Shakespeare and Co., the famous bookshop just across the Seine from Notre Dame.

Fabian Cancellara destroys the field at Paris-Roubaix and WE WERE THERE! (Photo by Baker McQ)

Happy New Year from the McQs! (Photo taken at Luxembourg Gardens.)





MORE PARIS-ROUBAIX IMPRESSIONS

In La Trouée d'Arenberg (the Arenberg Forest), when the breakaway passed by, nobody paid much attention. It was more a moment for us fanatics by the side of the race course to check our positions, to lock in our sightlines for the next minute or so when the big boys, the guys who really mattered, would be passing by—Cancellara, Boonen, Hushovd, Fleche, and so on. They were preceded by a thunderous roar, the crowd erupting as big Tom Boonen—and he does look big; Cancellara appears to be getting smaller and smaller, albeit faster and faster, in comparison—led the peloton through the cobbled road in the woods. At 2.4 km, it’s the longest, but apparently not the hardest section of pave; still, the bikes rattled and thrummed, bounced and jostled like they were riding down the middle of a railroad track.

Boonen, the hometown favorite (“Tornado Tom Frits” read the homemade banner held aloft just down the way), was having fun. His hands on the top of the bars, he appeared to be pulling everyone through, like some beast of burden pulling a plow. Just in front of us he turned around to inspect the damage he’d done just as I remember him doing at the same spot in last year’s race. (Though then of course, I was watching the Versus telecast.) This year though there was a difference: Fabian Cancellara, just two spots behind him, watching Boonen like a hawk, letting Tom do all the work, and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Which of course he would do in historic fashion riding away from everyone with some 30 miles to go.

Arenberg was the second spot we stopped. The first was Inchy, the first section of pave, and we stopped at a spot about a half hour past Arenberg which seemed almost a repeat of what we saw in the forest—Boonen at the front of the peloton doing all the work, Cancellara wisely tucked not far behind waiting for his moment. One wonders if Boonen got carried away in his quest for a fourth P-R or by the hometown cooking of the French-Belgian-Flanderian faithful.

The roar that erupted each time he pulled the peloton past us was deafening. We attended a few stages of the 2009 Tour of California which was certainly exciting, but the depth of feeling-devotion-history here in Northern France was unlike anything there; you felt it in your very soul. Or at least I did.

***

Still jetlagged, for we'd arrived in Paris just two days earlier, we awoke early that race Sunday morning and rode a cab to Gare du Nord where we caught a train to the start of Paris-Roubaix about an hour north of Paree in Compiegne. Narrow streets choked with fat chunky cobbles got us excited for the start as did the arrival of the Team buses—Saxo Bank, Quick-Step, BMC and all the rest.

We saw Cancellara’s bike but no Cancellara; he, along with most of the big names, must’ve waited ‘til the final minutes to sign in for we saw no one of note save for George Hincapie. As we watched and waited, listening to one overwrought rock ballad after another blasting from the PA (“Too much love will kill you, everytime …”—where did they get these songs?), we heard someone say “Hey, you’re from Bellingham, aren’t you?” It was Chris (whose last name I don’t recall), a real nice tall dude I met while racing some of the Indie Series races last summer. (Small world, or what?) Turns out Chris was doing the same thing we were—meeting up with a British group, Sports Tours International, who would be transporting us to several spots along the Paris-Roubaix route to watch the race. Truth be told, the bus—and more specifically, the hilarious, cycle-crazed guys in the back of the bus—from Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Columbia and the U.S.—were probably what made Paris-Roubaix such a memorable experience for us. Most of the bus passengers were in it for a few days—they’d come over from London a couple days earlier, many even riding 112K of the race course the day before. (Oh, how I envied them.) Jen, Bake and I were among the handful or so who were in it for just a day trip.

They immediately welcomed us into their fold, sharing photos, drink, food, as well as hilarious tales of their misfortunes in attempting to ride the cobbles. A couple of them had hands that were absolutely chewed up with blisters from trying to hold on to their handlebars while battling the pave. Perhaps our favorites were the two young British boys—13 and 14—who had brilliant senses of humor.

One had a charming lisp and at one spot while we were waiting for the riders to come through, he noticed a fan across the roadway who’d obviously ridden out to watch, then put a pair of pants on over his shorts. He must’ve removed the white straps of his bib cycling shorts from his shoulders too because they just sort of hung down behind him.

“It lookth like thumone gave him a mathive wedgie,” he said to me.

It did too. And the phrase ‘mathive wedgie’ will now forever be in my lexicon.

2010 PARIS-ROUBAIX TIDBIT

About 10 days ago, after a long fun day in Northern France hanging out with rabid cycling fans and witnessing Paris-Roubaix up close and personal at four different spots (including the Arenburg Forest), we took a high-speed train from Lille back to Paris. Shortly before our arrival in Paree, Jen notices a lanky guy behind me futzing around with his luggage. He wore a Francaise des Jeux jacket and when we saw a pair of cycling shoes, we just had to ask him: “You didn’t just race Paris-Roubaix, did you, and are now taking the same train we are, are you?” (Earlier, at the Lille train station, we’d seen four or five guys wearing BBox shirts, including one carrying a bike frame but quickly dismissed them as mere cycling fans, albeit rabid ones.)

Turns out yes, and yes—he’d just raced P-R and was now heading home. Yoann Offredo is his name (he gave us his cycling card), a very nice guy who, though he told us he finished 25th or 26th, actually finished 64th out of 71 official finishers. But he’d finished! And appeared as whooped and wiped out as if he’d just ridden down to the corner Starbucks and back. Crikey! We talked for a few minutes—I asked him which was tougher: Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix; he said P-R—and when the train arrived in Paris, he said “Ciao!” grabbed his bag and rushed off without the slightest limp, sign of soreness or anything. Seven hours on a bike across 160 miles of the Hell of the North and not at all the worse for wear. Incroyable!

                                               

McQ's PARIS-ROUBAIX PHOTOS

Gather 'round kids, here're some phots from the 2010 Hell of the North! And shout-out, props and all that to Baker McQuaide (age 11) who came up with much better pics than I did!

Race poster in Roubaix.

Second-place finisher Thor Hushovd survives the Arenburg Forest. (Bake McQ, photo)

Big Tom Boonen on the streets of Roubaix just before entering the Velodrome. (Bake McQ, photo)

 

Close-up of the pave at Compiegne, about an hour northeast of Paris and where Paris-Roubaix actually starts. (Bake McQ, photo)

Fabian Cancellara's winning bike is the front one on the left.

George Hincapie at the Compiegne sign-in.

Baker McQ at work.

After Paris-Roubaix, an exhausted Baker McQuaide and mum Jen on the train from Lille back to Paris.

AREA FAMILY IN FRANCE

A day after witnessing Fabian C. destroy the peloton at Paris-Roubaix, Area Man goes on an hour-long run under the Tour Eiffel, along the Seine to Place de la Concorde, past Esplanade des Invalides and back to Rue Cler. He is becoming quite the Francophile and will no doubt be annoying about it once he returns to les Etats Unis.

LOTS OF FUN THANGS COMING UP

Big few days which leads to an even bigger week and a half or so. First up, we're heading to Seattle on Wednesday where I'll be doing a slide show-presentation thingee for Team in Training at the big REI. Should be lots of fun. Thursday, check out my story in the The Seattle Times Northwest Weekend section about our little exploratory trip of Birch Bay, Drayton Harbor and Semiahmoo Spit.

Also on Thursday, we fly to Paris where we'll be for the next 10 days! Since we're staying in an apartment (near Rue Cler), once we're back I plan to annoy people by beginning sentences that refer to our time there with "Well, when we were living in Paris, we would ..."

Oh, and guess what happens to be taking place during our time in France: the 108th edition of Paris-Roubaix, the queen of the Classics, the Hell of the North. And guess what, we're hooking up with some British tour group to watch the race. Should be a gas, gas, gas.

For old time sake--and to give Tom a bit of a boost for this Sunday's race--I thought I'd run this photo of big Tom Boonen and I hanging out in Pasadena during last year's Tour of California.

TORNADO TOM!

In honor of Tom Boonen's third Paris-Roubaix win, I thought I'd share you you a photo of he and I hanging out together.

PARIS-ROUBAIX EVE

Out riding again with the Team Unattacked Boyz. Forecast was for rain, so we headed up Alpe d'Chuckanut on two 29ers and a 'cross bike. Always a great time. About 30 miles, 2,500 feet of climbing, about 2:45 of riding. Solved a lot of the country's problems too.

Tomorrow, Easter, and Paris-Roubaix. I'm probably waking at 5, gonna shoo away the Easter Bunny then watch the race live on Cycling.tv. I'm a full-on cycling geek nerd dork dude, I admit it. Hardly care at all about baseball season starting or the Yankees' coming and goings--their new stadium, etc.--which, until about five years ago was pretty much what my sporting spectator world revolved around. Anyway, it'd be cool to see Tornado Tom or Fabian Cancellara on the podium, or even George Hincapie, though that's more a sentimental wish than anything. Here's a quick pick: Boonen, Flecha, Chavanel.

Bummer bit of news: looks like the Mount Constitution Hill Climb, which I rode last May and was planning to again next month, is cancelled for this year. Apparently a victim of the bad economy.