Cycling in the Mountains
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I have started cycling again after a few years lay-off. I have always been an endurance athlete throughout my life, so cycling round the back streets or along the sea front simply doesn’t interest me.
The best route for me is the mountain climb to the white village of Benahavis. This is not a route that one could do straight off, so I have been progressively going a bit further up the undulating mountain road in incremental stages.
For the first two weeks, I was content to ride as far as the bottom of the first challenging climb and then I’d turn around and come back down the gentle slope to the main coast road.
Graham’s Pizzeria, my restaurant and bar, is just 500m from where the Benahavis road meets the main N-340 coast road. Now into my third week, I’m doing the first climb and then carrying on to the “recinto y inglesia de Roamaria”. That is a very large picturesque spinney of eucalyptus trees with a quaint white church in the middle. The road at that point is both flat and shady, so it’s a great place to stop, take a drink and turn around for the return journey.
I ride in almost any temperature, but I’d probably draw the line at above 36 degrees. Most people think that it’s really uncomfortable to cycle in high temperatures, but actually as long as you are moving at a reasonable speed, the airflow keeps you cool.
When I get back to the bar and stop though, I do start to feel hot, but that’s simply remedied by sitting underneath the air-con in the lounge with a beer.
The Benahavis road is a country road and as well as being wonderfully scenic, skirted on both sides by trees, fields filled with wild flowers and several golf courses. You pick up all the wonderful scents produced by nature, that are lost when you travel by car.
The secret of cycling on undulating roads is to always make sure that you are in a low gear ratio, the moment you start struggling to push a high gear round you are finished. You’ll either end up too tired to make the return leg or you’ll have very sore legs for a few days afterwards.
At the moment the figs are ripening on the roadside trees and as Ines absolutely loves wild figs, today I stopped and picked some. The local Spanish people, being very wise always know exactly what’s in season and when, so most of the figs low down on the tree have already been picked, but as I’m tall, I was able to reach some that those before me had left on the tree.
The problem with cycling is that you never have anywhere to put things. Sometimes with a newspaper for instance you can shove it down your trousers, but sticky fresh figs, I don’t think so! I didn’t want to disappoint Ines so I put them in my leather bag, which I use for my telephone and bankers cards etc.
I knew that some of the natural sugar would ooze out on the return journey, but I could see no other way of getting these delicious fresh figs back to my wife who was waiting in the bar.
Spain is a wonderful place to live.
