French Revolutions

once you’ve shot up B12, it’s only a small step to
steroids or amphetamines. Certainly Paul Kimmage realised this, sweating with
shame as he lost his hypodermic virginity to an iron and vitamins jab.
    But at the time I’d taken the
apparently crucial role of vitamins at face value, filling an old sunglasses
case with Sanatogen, along with extra tablets of C and B12 which someone had
said the body flushed out quickly, and a handful of cod-liver oil tablets which
I somehow thought might lubricate my joints. Having forgotten to take them that
morning, I fuzzily withdrew the box and ferried a succession of tablets to my
mouth with the wincing deliberation of someone performing long division at high
altitude.
    All better now, I thought, flobbing
riboflavin into the muddy verge and pedalling off. But of course it wasn’t. Passing
through a hilltop copse, I turned towards the source of an attention-attracting
cough: a fat man met my gaze, smiled distantly and neatly exposed himself. I’m
almost certain he was a bona fide human entity, but the experience was enough
to start up the bad thoughts again, and within ten minutes I’d fallen off for a
second time and heard the taunting whisper, ‘Shave them, Saint Eric, shave
them.’
    I was having a bonk.
    Cyclists burn up 9,000 calories a
day, roughly four times what the average shiftless 36-year-old needs to sustain
himself for twenty-four hours of domestic pottering. Eat, eat, eat, I’d been
told, but due to the awkward logistics of in-the-saddle refuelling I’d hoped I
could get away with shovelling in the kilojoules at breakfast, lunch and
supper. This was an error. Pros start nibbling their Fig Newtons after the
first hour, and thenceforth maintain a steady intake of nourishment to avoid
bonking, the term unhappily applied to the moment when the fuel reserves run
out and the body starts eating itself. Sugar is sucked out of the blood, and a
traumatic sense of delirious exhaustion sets in. Tunnel vision, seeing stars,
Eddy Merckx up to his wheel rims in tar and not understanding why he’s being
overtaken — the Tour de France is a bad trip by any definition, and never more
so than when you’re bonking.
    From then on I’d know to tide myself
over until lunch with the half-dozen croissants I’d smuggle into my panniers
from the breakfast buffet, or the trio of pains au chocolat washed down with a
Coke for elevenses outside a village boulangerie. That day, with all the shops
shut for lunch, it was a question of finding a restaurant before mythical
beasts started popping their heads out of my bar-bag. I remember eating some
sort of cheesy vealy thing in a restaurant full of plastic flowers and sons
treating their mothers, but even now, looking at the map, I can only narrow its
location down to le Dorat, Bellac or somewhere in the 12 kilometres between the
two.
    It is relevant to point out at this
stage that I was lost. The itinerary I’d copied down at Loudun had ended at la
Trimouille, and though the bar-boys there had been certain the route to Limoges (where the stage ended) was a straightforward D675/N147 job, I was sceptical.
Because the Tour requires roads to be closed for hours, the organisers, where
there’s an option, generally choose quiet back routes. But as I swooped
insanely out of Bellac towards the foot of a long, wet hill, the road broadened
into a dual carriageway and I was suddenly engulfed in camions. The countryside
was almost English — crisp, green and rolling as promised — but then so was the
traffic. I’d become used to having the road to myself, but now I was harried
and buffeted in an uncomfortably familiar fashion. A Peugeot estate with half a
dozen bikes on the roof went past with a wave and a blast of the horn, the
first of many drive-by hootings that were well-meant but nerve-shredding; the
N147 began to undulate alarmingly about its horizontal axis and all I had to
look at was roadkill: slugs, obviously, but also the odd weasel, badger, coq au
van and hedgehogs a-go-go (or rather a-gone-gone).
    With my shoulders rolling from side
to side and every part of my body from the tops of my feet to my wrists in some
measure of discomfort, I drrr-thwicked into an abandoned picnic-area and
fell flat on my back, oblivious to the under-arse pine cones, the rain and the
fact that crapping by the roadside is a widely enjoyed French pastime. Yawning
massively, I blinked up at the dripping fir trees before drowning out the HGVs
with a bellowed