Sandwiches for lunch

It was a small shop. The glass counter took up a great deal of space, and neatly piled boxes of pasta and tinned goods made maneuvering about the shop floor quite difficult. It was as if the idea of browsing wasn’t really supported; the shopkeeper had made a direct channel through the produce toward the counter, so as soon as you’d stepped in the door you were looking into the eyes of your hosts, the shopkeeper and his wife.

From time to time you find Italian shopkeepers who look exactly like their trade, just as butchers and well-fed chefs do. I couldn’t imagine either of this couple doing anything but standing behind that counter in their striped aprons taking stock of their produce, and their clients.

The shelves were stacked with food, but nothing at all had a price on it. There was nothing to see beyond the beautifully simple Italian labels on the tinned food.

Besides, all of the best produce was behind the counter. The baskets of salted focaccia and that dry stiff Tuscan bread that is made for soaking up sauce, the cured meats and the cheeses.

You were supposed to know exactly what you wanted when you walked in that store and most of the people who went in there were house-wives who would pull out hand written lists from their purses which they would wait patiently for their turn to read out to the shopkeepers at an ever increasing cadence as if trying to catch them out by reading out the lists, 

‘un etto di prosciutto crudo, due pane, i pomodori’ 

 while occasionally throwing in a bit of light gossip, 

‘hai vista la Romina? In tanto ho sentito que lei era lasciata per la sua marito…” 

 – before cutting quickly back to the shopping 

“due mozzarella anche…’

This particular grocery was a few hundred metres from my apartment. There were several closer, but this one was open on a Monday morning, unlike the others which would close from Saturday night until 4pm on the Monday.

The first time I went there was on one such Monday when I had been away for the weekend and had gone for a hard ride in the morning, forgetting that nowhere would be open until mid-afternoon. It was a hot day and I had fumbled through the door still in my salt-stained kit awkwardly moving past the vegetables and up to the counter.

I was, and still am, English, so I thought that a sandwich would be the best option for lunch. I planned on buying all of the component parts, taking them back home to my castle and making one. I started asking for the ingredients, only to see a look of total confusion appear on the grocers crumpled face.

“But what are you going to do with this?” he asked.

Confused, I replied, “I’m making a sandwich.”

“Un panino?” And he looked over at his wife. “How far have you ridden?”

“Erm, four hours, about 120km.”

“Then you should eat pasta! Sei un corridori, devi mangiare la pasta!”

His wife nodded in absolute agreement. Italians I had discovered really seemed to believe that eating pasta wasn’t just a matter of consuming carbohydrates; it was a hugely important part of daily life. Food is never just food in Italy. If you didn’t have your pasta for lunch, then you had to have it for dinner, and it had nothing to do with food either. For a corridori – a cyclist – like me, pasta was vital.

Unfortunately by now I really had my heart set on a sandwich, I love pasta, but I just could face boiling the water by then. I wanted to eat. So I stood firm and explained that I just didn’t want pasta.

Defeated by my insistence he responded, “Ok, ok... so what would you like?”

“Some prosciutto crudo, erm… and some of this cheese” I said pointing at a hard cheese in the glass counter. Once again though I drew that pained look of horror that comes over Italians when insulted by someone’s total lack of culinary culture. Again, this had little to do with food, and everything to do with food.

“But look at the weather outside!” he cried. “You don’t want a hard cheese. No, no, no. Let me make the sandwich”, mumbling under his breath, “ti faccio io una pannino buona fresca…”

My new favourite shopkeeper then took down a bread roll, opened it up poured in a little olive oil and fished out a fresh mozzarella from the big bowl of brine under the counter. He chatted some more and asked me about my recent races as he put several minutes of artistry into making what would turn out to be the best sandwich that I would ever eat. He sliced the meat and cheese; he selected and cut the salad, he darted about the store seemingly finding  inspiration as he went. When he was done I’m fairly sure he just guessed the price.

But still as I went to leave the shop with my paper-wrapped sandwich, delighted with what I thought would be my new found lunch stop, he couldn’t help but say, “please, don’t come back here for sandwiches for lunch, have some pasta. Sei un corridori …”

The best thing I saw in the year that was.

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The best thing I saw last year was in a Parisian back street.  

My girlfriend and I had just left a jazz bar in the Left Bank and as we walked down the alleyway that led back towards the river the back door of the club flew open and a man strode out in a straight line that intersected our path, before sitting down on a step on the other side of the alley.  

In the orange light I could see that his long hair was distinguished by grey in places, his shirt was half unbuttoned, his suit jacket still on. He looked expensive. He was muttering angrily under his breath.

In that very instance my girlfriend and I turned our heads toward the door to see a tall and completely naked woman appear. She was screaming something at the man, that I guessed she'd started screaming some time ago.

Like rabbits in headlights we paused mid-step and looked at her with disbelief. Unabashed she continued to shout, right over our heads; our presence not meriting so much as a blink of an eye. Her naked body lit up like an Italian statute.

A whore? A mistress? A wife?

Impossible to tell. 

We stood there with the music from the bar accompanying the screams that passed all around us, but somehow couldn’t touch us, and for a moment we were completely invisible amongst other people’s lives.

I thought to myself then, it doesn’t often happen like this.

Like in the movies.

Irving Plaza

Back of a taxi,

she ran her hand through my hair.

“I still think of you.”

No Line On The Horizon

I watch the Tour and I think about Bradley Wiggins. I think about his meteoric rise to where he is today, and how it seemed to come at such a late stage of his career. The Wiggins who was racing when I was, some 6 years ago, was the Wiggins who would come a hundred and something-or-other in the Giro, and would occasionally pick up a stage win in a week-long stage race, before mumbling something about the track and disappearing for a while.

In a way, many people pigeonholed Wiggins right there and then, and to them, nothing about the former track-man winning the Tour makes sense. But there is no accounting for what goes on in someone’s head, and Bradley Wiggins is a man who has long since had vision beyond his apparent horizons.

A friend of mine told me a story about Bradley Wiggins once. We were on the U23 national team, and we would only see Bradley occasionally when he would come and dabble on the road for a bit. I think by that stage he was already at La Francais des Jeux, and we were already all mightily impressed that he was wearing Pro Tour shorts and had bleached his hair like the pros did in 2003.

Anyway, on one of these trips my mate had roomed with Wiggins. When he came up in conversation at a later date, at some dinner table somewhere, he had said in absolute awe, “You know, when we were sharing a room once I asked him, ‘Brad do you think you could ever win the Tour one day?”

This, remember was at a time when Wiggins was focused on the track, and the only murmurs he had made about being good on the road had seemed more like lip service to his profession for the three non-Olympic years each cycle.

To my friends amazement though Wiggins response was thus, “He put his book down, considered the question, looked at me, and just said ‘Yeah, maybe one day- if everything goes right.”

It astounded my friend, because he really meant it. What astounded me was the fact that Wiggins mind hadn’t worked like the rest of ours. Normally, you start off believing you can win the Tour when you are a kid, and then you race more and more, and you get good, but you discover at some stage your level and your ambitions match that.

For most riders, this is formed in their first few years of getting a kicking in the pro peloton. The hiding’s you take temper your goals, and you learn what you could one day possibly win, and what remains way beyond your grasp. For most riders, the question ‘could you win the Tour?’ becomes a stupid one beyond the age of nineteen or twenty.

For Wiggins though, despite his apparent early limitations as a road rider, his goal remained winning the biggest race on earth. He has always seen himself as the rider he is now; it was just us, perhaps, who didn’t see it.

In a weeks time, everything could have conspired to go right, and whether he knew it or not those ten long years ago, should Wiggins win, it will, in my mind, remain testament to one thing; the indubitable power of innate self-belief. 

This Land Is Your Land

Sometimes you hear something you've heard a thousand times and you get it for the very first time.

This Land Is Your Land came on my iPod while I was out riding the other day.

There is a verse that goes:

The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice was calling
This land was made for you and me

That struck me as the most incredible bit of songwriting. 

'Strolling, rolling, calling' 

Lovely. 

The Constitution

There are a lot of things that go into making a good cyclist, but I strongly believe that first and foremost being a good cyclist comes down to one thing: constitution.

There are those that have it, and those that don’t. There is no real way of properly defining constitution, or indeed testing for it in a lab. Some of the most unlikely souls seem to be possessed of the most rugged constitutions, and there are plenty of dilletantes who think they should have it but who just don’t.

You can't create or replicate constitution any more than you can sprout wings and fly. It is something you either have or don’t, and it is apparent in all walks of life. Lou Reed had constitution, Keith Richards & Margaret Thatcher had constitution. Like them or not, they were people who could live off scant hours of sleep, and still work at an incredible rate, without making themselves ill.

To be a bike rider you have to have constitution simply so you don’t miss races by being sick or injured. These days science fights an ongoing and impressive battle with constitution. Riders only have to show a glimpse of talent at a young age before they can be supported by all sorts of practitioners and specialists who work so hard to make human bodies that keep failing, keep going.

Injuries and sickness are often tagged as bad luck, but being slow to recover, or being sick or injured in the first place, is often natures way of telling the human body that it is beyond its limitations.

However the fact remains, you will always have to have constitution to be a bike rider at the highest level. You will have to not injure easily, not get sick through periods of physical and mental exhaustion, and you will have to keep digging deeper and deeper into reserves that won’t deplete.

I was made up to find then, during some research, the palmares of this man: Benoit Faure´.

http://www.cyclingarchives.com/coureurfiche.php?coureurid=3826

Not only was Faure´ 8^th in the 1930 Tour de France while riding as a ‘Tourist-Routiere’ he was a professional cyclist for a remarkable twenty years, racing between 1925 to 1945. Conditions for cyclists in that era were unbelievably arduous compared to today’s standards (even without the world being at War for the last 5 years of his career).

How he managed to keep going for twenty years at that time is beyond me. Faure´ wasn’t a real winner, taking only 24 victories in 20 years, the most important of which being the Criterium International in 1941. But he must have had enough to keep slugging away.

All I can say judging from the few photos of him, the remarkable career length, and his 80 years on the planet, is that there was a man with a constitution, a man cut out to be a professional bike rider.

Retirement 2.0

After 17 years of bike racing I am very happy to announce that I will be officially putting my racing days behind me at the end of the 2011 season. My last competitive outing will be the Ritchey Oktoberfest 8-hour endurance Mountain bike relay event in Bristol on October the 15^th. I would have loved to finish on the road at the Sun Tour, but the opportunity wasn’t there, the way that this event is run though will mean I can compete in a team with my good mates: Simon Richardson, Jonathan Tiernan-Locke and Zak Dempster.

I have seen cycling change a phenomenal amount in the time that I have been involved, not just within this country, but also within the sport as a whole. Like seeing a photo of someone close to you and suddenly realising that they’ve aged, often in cycling you can be too close to the sport to see how the differences have begun to add up.

When I began racing I dreamt of being World Road Race Champion, I didn’t ever get to be, not many do, however I did at least get to line up and try for it on six occasions. Even the start line of the World Championships can be a long, long way from Penzance, Cornwall.

I have had a remarkable time, met some extraordinary people, as well as some fairly ordinary people who could do extraordinary things. I have learned a few languages, been around the world plenty of times, I have raced some of the truly great bike races, and seemingly all of the very, very bad ones. I have come out of it with much more than I went in, which is fairly rare for me.

I would consider that I had a career of two halves. The first half went pretty much as planned on the bike and those successes mean a lot to me. But the second half was a lot nicer, and allowed me to do things on the terms that I wanted, without having to deal with the evil, corrupt, shameless mothers who put me off doing what I loved the first time round.

I was fortunate to have been in some great teams, on both sides of my 2006 ‘half time’, and I considered Rapha Condor Sharp a real gem. John’s teams are always excellent, and I got to line this one with people I actually consider friends; something I know is actually a real rarity in this sport, despite all the PR bullshit that says otherwise.

In June I finally knew that knew this would be my last season racing. The fat lady was waiting for me at the Boucles de Mayenne and her rehearsals have been getting louder and louder ever since. The good news is she has quite a voice.

I have been studying for my Masters in Professional Writing since last January and as that is due to be finished in the New Year, the timing compounded the fact that I think now is the right time to stop. I consider myself incredibly lucky (I always have) to have found something else that I am passionate enough about to conceivably be able to keep squeezing life on my terms out of it. I am really looking forward it.

I also of course have a few thank-yous to put out there; Gary Dowdell, Mike & Pat Taylor, John Herety, Theo Hartogs, all cornerstones of my eleven years spent racing full time. There are many more people who I will take the time to thank too, but of course I wouldn’t have gotten past the Tamar River without an enormous amount of help and support from my family. In particular my old man, who I began the adventure with, driving the length and breadth of the country to get to races all those years ago, and who, more than anyone helped shape the imagination that allowed me to conjure those dreams up to begin with.

Thanks all. It’s been quite a time.