French Revolutions

Himalayas. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said,
noting that this news had failed to comfort or inspire, ‘that was a pretty big
hill we just simulated. About 22 kilometres. And you’ll only need to work at
maybe 20 per cent of that rate.’
    I nodded wetly. All I could think was
that I’d just wasted 22 kilometres going nowhere in a room full of hot Lycra.
There would be times, I imagined, when I would dearly want those 22 kilometres
back, saving them up as a joker to be played in some epic Alpine crisis.
‘Except,’ he said, squinting thoughtfully, ‘I suppose you’ll need to be at it
for about eight hours a day.’
    Somehow blanking out the enormity of
this task, I managed one more spinning class and two jogs. Then, gingerly
consulting Chris Boardman, I came across the starding revelation that ‘with one
week to go, training should be finished... It is highly unlikely that you will
generate more form in this time.’ With five days left, interpreting this theory
of ‘tapering’ a regime as a competition approached (‘the volume of work is
slowly reduced as the objective approaches’), I tapered my training rather more
abruptly to a standstill. Everyone knows what the tough are said to do when the
going gets tough. But I went shopping.
    The sporting-goods industry prospers
from the eternal truth that people who are not very good at something would
rather blame a lack of expensive equipment than their own physical failings.
Certainly rectifying the former is a lot quicker. Every time I looked at those
little line drawings of Mr Boardman down on all fours howling silently at an
unseen moon or getting his leg over the dining table, I felt an itching desire
to slam his scary book shut and go into town to buy things made out of carbon
fibre.
    Not knowing anything about bikes, or
at least bikes costing more than fifteen quid, flicking helplessly through the
cycling-magazine adverts in Smith’s was a sobering experience. It seemed to be
quite easy to spend considerably over £1,500 just on a frame, a wheelless,
chainless, pedalless diamond-shaped assemblage of metal tubes. Almost randomly,
I came up with a figure of half this amount as my budget for a complete
bicycle. Venturing much below this price raised fears of another
two-wheels-on-my-Trabant DDR special, meaning that metal fatigue would set in
after four days, and that on the way to pick it up my father would appear out
of nowhere to place a kind, worldly hand on my shoulder and explain that the
male menopause was nothing to be scared of. Beyond £750, I would be too crap to
notice the difference, as well as potentially falling foul of the general rule
that very expensive pieces of machinery require regular expert maintenance. I
didn’t want a Fiesta or a Ferrari. A nice Golf would do me.
    I can’t quite remember why the GT
ZR3000 first appealed. It may have been the memory of the slanting GT logo
flashed along many of the peloton’s crossbars; it may have been because that
crescendo of numerals and digits conjured images of an enormously overpowered
motorcycle, thereby suggesting great speed with minimal human effort. When a
call to GT’s Martin Warren revealed that the ZR3000 was last year’s model and
could therefore be offered at an attractive discount, the deal was done. ‘Do
you want to assemble it yourself, or...?’ he asked, ending the
whimper-punctuated silence that followed with, ‘Or... yes, I’ll, um, put you
down for the “or” option.’
    The bike, of course, was only the
start of it. An astonishing
    4,000 people make up the Tour’s
travelling entourage — journalists, officials, members of the crap-chucking
publicity caravan — and 600 of them are there to support the twenty teams who
each enter nine riders. Ferried about in over a thousand official vehicles,
they carry food, drink, spare parts, spare clothing, vitamins and, er,
‘vitamins’. I would have to get all this stuff, and carry it myself in
panniers.
    There are plenty of people whose
dark, dull lives are lit up by opportunities to patronise and humiliate those
they encounter in their professional capacity. Although most of these people
work in the police force or Paris, while acquiring the peripherals for my trip
I was intrigued to note the number that had made their horrid little homes
behind the counters of bicycle retailers.
    I’d avoided them up to now, but with
time running out I had to get help where I could. In tones normally reserved
for asking small children