The vocabulary of cycling in English can be a makeshift thing that struggles to match the variety and precision available in other cycling cultures. That is not to say that it is bereft - to call an incline a “drag” perfectly captures the feeling of being pulled backwards, the sense that some joker has loaded ballast onto your machine or into your legs. But compare it to French - what price the bald engineer’s term “bicycle” next to “velo”, a word evocative of the speed of a bike gliding over a smooth road. There is nothing in English to convey the sense of the “randonnee”, a long ride done not for the sake of competition but for the personal challenge and the joy of the open road. And then, rather than “climber” there is “grimpeur”, a word that conveys immediately the sense of plastering yourself to the side of a mountain, hauling yourself up hand-over-hand, slowly chipping away at it with each turn of the pedals.
Heading out of the city through Rathfarnham, you eventually find yourself on Cruagh Road, narrow, tree-lined, winding upwards towards Sally Gap. It’s important not to take it too fast. Climbing is about settling into a sustainable rhythm, finding a low gear and a good cadence, not letting the burn in your legs get out of hand. On the hardest climbs you find your field of perception shrinking, until it becomes no more than you and the road. You reach inside yourself, recalling the most brutal climbs you have done before, leaning on the knowledge that you have endured worse in the past. Just keep the pedals turning…it becomes the sole mission, the only direction of your mind. When you reach the top, you are light-headed, conscious of nothing but your breathing and the lactic acid starting to ebb from your muscles. And then, once again, the world opens out before you, suddenly vivid.
Cruagh Road doesn’t offer that kind of walk across the coals, but it’s long and hard enough to give you a rush of satisfaction after you cross the first narrow bridge that indicates the worst is behind you. The trees fall away on your right and you can see Dublin, the urban patient etherised on the table, a grey-brown haze of monoxide sleeping gas floating above it. From up here, the sprawling city looks completely flat, as though it is water pooling up in the bottom of a basin, and you’re happy to be leaving it behind for the solitude of the mountains. Sally Gap is ahead, with its bleak, lunar landscape of peat bog scarred with turf-cuts.
For the dedicated grimpeur, there is an impressive resource in the form of the Challenge BIG, a website listing the thousand finest climbs in Europe, complete with maps and elevation profiles. There are fifteen in Ireland, Sally Gap and Wicklow Gap among them. Naturally such a site lends itself to a box-ticking mentality but each to his own. For me it will be a portal to many incredible rides, countless opportunities to flush the asinine demands of the working week from my mind, to experience the stark beauty of the mountains, and to submit once again to the iron discipline of the upward-leading road.
