La Diagonale
A ride across France with The Chiswick Cycling Club
20-30 September 2019
Englishmen have become used to French mud. Our history is full of the encounters with it and now there is another tale in the making. Our little army of eight riders and three camp followers, surrounded by the huge industrial fields full of grey Acquitaine mud, were soaked to the skin, hungry and tired. ‘We are lost’ says the Bianchi, ‘Things go wrong,’ he adds resignedly as he peers at his rain spattered Garmin. Some minutes later, the Condor snaps out, ‘Follow me down here, next right and then left which will take us back to our original route’.
Four days previously eight men whose total years amounted to more than 450, in their eye-catching light blue club jerseys set out at dawn with three support cars to ride ‘La Diagonale', a journey from Brest to Menton in a diagonal line across France, averaging one hundred miles a day.
Like all small British raiding parties, we are a disparate group with a range of riding styles which our road captain (the Club Secretary) riding a Willier and his Lieutenant on a Ribble and his Sergeant Major on a Condor manage to turn into a smooth, dual line, constantly rotating unit. Initially at least there is frequent shouting for accelerating too fast, chastisement for not soft pedalling on the return to the back. Shouts of ‘Ease!’, ‘Hold the line’, ‘All on?’ reverberate through the French countryside. We are Masonic with our hand signals as we point out drains, potholes, speed bumps, other cyclists and parked cars to the riders behind us. When all you can see is a 25 mm black tyre, bum muscles twitching rhythmically and the whirring of shaved and unshaven legs, such communication is essential to our safety, efficiency and success.
As we pass through France, we are photographed for local papers, filmed and waved at by children and women behind their garden hedges. Sometimes we are joined by local riders keen to experience and share the exhilaration of riding in a fast, sleek group. Perhaps they return home saying that they rode with some pros out on a training run. A horse runs alongside us in its field just as they do on the overhead TV shots of the Tour de France. Cars and lorries are forever patient with their overtaking and the French roads are always smooth.
Our days are as drilled as our riding; alarm at 0700, breakfast at 0730, change into club kit, put our small cases in the lobby for one of the support crew to pack into the car, and clip in at 0830, by which time two of our support crew are already in the supermarkets shopping for lunch. We ride for 50 kms until the obligatory coffee stop, another 50 till lunch and the final stop is around the 150 mark, usually for snack-bars or drinks from the supporting cars. Around four, we arrive at the hotel where we find our bags already put into our rooms and the heating turned on to dry our kit. Bikes are washed (except the Boardman which ‘gets washed once a year - if it needs it’), followed by the cleaning of kit and bodies. A quick snooze, then out to recover with some ‘Kronenburg 1664’ which is followed by supper. By 1030 the lights are out.
Being a British cycling club, the ‘Coffee Stop’ is an essential ingredient of the ride. Some days we are lucky to find a village bakery full of patisseries overflowing with strawberries, apricots, or myrtles and the owner is happy to make a fresh jug of coffee. Other times we order our ‘grand cremes’, or ‘noisettes’ from a bar and import our buns from a nearby bakery. Lunch becomes a series of picnics on church steps, lay-bys and village greens where we eat our way through car boot loads of baguettes, fresh local goat’s cheeses, hams, pastries, fresh figs, pears and Haribos. Bananas and bars are squirrelled into pockets to be eaten on the road. We eat supper in whichever restaurant is nearest to the hotel; Italian, Moroccan, Michelin listed French, or Indian.
No different from the pros and in keeping with the gritty romance of cycling, we sometimes stay in cheap out of town hotels. Ibis does particularly well out of us even if we do not do so well sleeping on Ibis Budget beds with one hotel on an industrial estate opposite a Ceramic Coating Factory, another beside a motorway . We interchange Ibis with small provincial town hotels some opposite a Marie with a tricolour unfurling in the breeze, where the owner is welcoming and others where the hotelier is cold and diffident, refusing to open doors before 1700.
The Boardman says one night that he has not seen much of France yet, ‘unless you count the thin black tyre in front on you as France’. This was no sight-seeing tour of France, rather a collective endurance challenge. Yet we notice how the windy short sharp hills of Brittany morph into the gentle flatlands of the Loire with its chateaux and poplars fanning the sky. Mud, rain and heavy traffic dominate the central sections before the rising hills of the Rhone Alps lead us into forest clad hills of the high passes with their theatrical rocky outcrops, which eventually drop down to the olive groves and pines beside the sparkling Mediterranean with its grumbling Maseratis on the Cote d’Azur. All riders have their days of exultation - fast, hard riding for the power men on the flat valley floors, the gliding ascents of the Pegoretti, Orbea, Colnago and Boardmen dancing on their pedals and the grin inducing, racing-line descents from the high passes on traffic free roads for us all.
Our ride is not all carbon wheeled smoothness. Momentum breaking events include a cat running across the road taking out the Bianchi and Boardman, a broken chain, a broken rear mech and a front brake failure. From time to time, Garmins lead us onto unwanted bridleways and fatigue occasionally leads to temporary intolerances.
At the end when all is done, there is no podium, no glamorous girls handing out cuddly toys, not even champagne. So we dine on fish and bowls of pistachio ice cream and glasses filled with wine. Tomorrow we drive back home, back to wives and work, and our little bubble will burst.
Distance each day
Day 1 Brest to Pontivy
147kmDay 2 Pontivy to Ancenis
178kmDay 3 Ancenis to Chatellerault
174kmDay 4 Chatellerault to Le Chatre
131 kmDay 5 Le Chatre to Vichy
144 kmDay 6 Vichy to St Etienne
126 kmDay 7 St Etienne to Die
163 kmsDay 8 Die to Castellane
183 kmsDay 9 Castellane to Menton
128kms
The final totals
Total km - 1406.98
Total Calories - 16,841
Av HR - 124.5
Av Speed - 26.14
Total Elevation - 13,022
Total Pedal strokes - 199,560