Title: Gironimo
Author: Moore, Tim
Published by: Yellow Jersey Press
Year: 2015
First published: Yellow Jersey Press, 2014
Date reviewed: 03.23
ISBN: 9780224100151

This is the fourth of Tim Moore’s books that I’ve read, and the ninth he has published. My reading is definitely non-sequential though: I read ‘French Revolutions‘, his third, in 2002; his tenth, ‘The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold‘ in 2017 and his eleventh, ‘Another Fine Mess‘ in 2020.

‘Gironimo‘, like ‘French Revolutions‘ and ‘The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold‘, is the story of an epic bike ride; this time he rides the route of what is claimed to be the hardest-ever edition of the Giro^*. He does it on bike of similar vintage to the 1914 Giro he is replicating, as authentic as he could make it, down to the wooden wheel rims and brake blocks fashioned out of bottle corks.

As crazy ventures go this is what we expect from Moore as he lurches from one breakdown to the next, one repair shop to another (when he can find one), as his narrative cuts between his own adventures and the historical record of the 1914 tour and its suffering riders. It’s makes an interesting read, but for me neither as engaging nor laugh-out-loud funny as his other cycling stories I have read.

* The Giro d’Italia, the Italian equivalent of the Tour de France.

It’s sixteen years since I read and reviewed Tim Moore’s “French Revolutions“, his first cycling book. Since then he’s written several other books including one about the notorious 1914 Giro d’Italia, “Gironimo”, in which he rides a vintage bike around the route of the race.

In “The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold” he is back on a classic rather than vintage bike, an East German Mifa shopping bike with 20-inch wheels and in most versions an open folding frame guaranteed to collapse. Fortunately he managed to find a non-folder, and someone to add a top bar for strength.

I first picked up the tale from his blog while he was riding south through the Finnish winter. Fascinated by this clear madness and remembering I’d enjoyed “French Revolutions” I followed his story. It turned out he planned to cycle on his Mifa from the north of Finland to the Black Sea coast along the line of the old Iron Curtain, a route sketchily defined as the Eurovélo 13.

Riding the Mifa means plenty of cycling episodes, but that’s not the main point of the book. It’s much more a social commentary on the various countries Moore passes through and how they have fared since the break-up of communist eastern Europe. He draws on historical sources and his own experiences of travelling through eastern Europe shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Criss-crossing the national borders along the route he meets people whose lives have been caught up in the sweeping historical and political changes in this part of the world. They range from taciturn and depressed to jovial and exuberant, depending on how the post-war years have treated them. The country that an exhausted, hungry endurance shopping-bike cyclist found most enjoyable? Surprisingly – Serbia!

Although his crazy journey could have suddenly ended at any time, he made it to the end – about 10,000km on a stupid bike. I liked the book. Oh, and I almost forgot to say — it’s very funny!

Title: The Racer
Author: Millar, David
Published by: Yellow Jersey Press
Year: 2016
First published: Yellow Jersey Press, 2015
Date reviewed: 04.17
ISBN: 9780224100083

Except of course he could be counted on. Here in 2014, his final season as a pro, Millar is a respected rider; the automatic choice for the job of team road captain. The directeur sportif plans the day’s tactics but he can’t be everywhere. It’s the captain on the road who sees how each rider is doing, calls the shots, redeploys the resources and hopefully guides the team to deliver their leader to the finish line. Millar knows how to read a race.

While the main thread of the book is Millar’s final racing season he dips into the past for some elements. From the start of the Spring Classics, through San Remo, Flanders and the Ardennes, the Giro, the Dauphiné, the national championships, le Tour, the Vuelta and the world championships Millar’s year unfolds. Along the way you’ll find out what it’s really like to ride a team time trial, to be in a major crash, or to ride Paris – Roubaix.

Two longer episodes stand out for me. Millar’s account of the stage in the Dauphiné when his Garmin team placed Andrew Talansky into the overall leader’s position above Chris Froome and Alberto Contador is a marvellous account of how a successful team works on the road. The other is the poignant story of his stage 3 win in the 2011 Giro when he came second on the stage and found himself in the overall leader’s maglia rosa, only to hear about the tragic death of Wouter Weylandt in a crash. Coping with that personally and on the following day on behalf of the whole peloton endorses Millar’s status as a respected senior rider.

He wasn’t selected for the Tour de France in his final year, which was a big blow. He uses the opportunity to describe the final stage of the 2013 Tour where he leads the race for most of the final laps. Here again the details of how to ride this world-famous circuit give a whole new insight into the race.

So thank you for this book, David. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

Title: Africa Solo
Author: Beaumont, Mark
Published by: Bantam Press
Year: 2016
First published: Bantam Press, 2016
Date reviewed: 01.17
ISBN: 9780593076330

It’s 2015 and Mark Beaumont’s back on his bike. Round the World – done it. North and South America – done it. Then a break from the bike to attempt the transatlantic rowing record – not done it because the boat capsized and the team nearly died. Then marriage and a child, which would lead anyone to re-evaluate their life objectives. But if you’re committed to being a professional adventurer rather than an accountant you’ve got to have a plan. Mark doesn’t tell us what his Big Plan is (though he does say it won’t involve rowing), but breaking the record for cycling the length of Africa from Cairo to Capetown seems to be a part of it.

If you had all the time in the world you might be able just to get on a bike in Cairo and pedal off to Cape Town with very little preparation. You’d expect to run into all sorts of problems; visas, customs, border crossings, dodgy food, armed military check points, route finding, bike maintenance, gratuitous low-level hostility, robbery, maybe even being taken hostage. You wouldn’t expect to break any speed records and realistically you probably wouldn’t get very far. But the modern adventurer looking for a record time lives in a different world of meticulous planning, fixers, security guards, wifi, social media, sponsors and documentary film makers.

Mark doesn’t describe his ride as a journey, it’s a race: a race against time not other competititors. So the book is not really a travelogue of the countries he rides through, more a tunnel-vision view of Africa from north to south. To quote cycling writer Andrew Curry,

“Racers spend their time looking at the wheel in front of them, not the landscape on the side of the road.” Andrew Curry, “Isadore”; Rouleur magazine #67, 2016.

He describes his ride day by day and country by country. During the day he is focused on the road, the bike, his own physical and mental state, the weather, the road conditions, the kilometres ridden and the distance still to go. At the end of the day it’s finding somewhere to sleep, food, recovery. If this sounds repetitive, in some ways it is but it is certainly not dull for the reader who shares Mark’s highs and lows.

For me the book really came alive in the last 1000 miles or so when with the end metaphorically in sight Mark throws everything into huge daily distances as he hurtles towrads the finish.

Books like this are often described as “inspiring”. I admire Mark for his persistence, single-minded dedication, endurance, fortitude and other great qualities, and of course for his achievement. But personally I’m not inspired to copy his ride or try something similar. These days I couldn’t cope with the discomfort and pain, the lack of good food, a warm shower and a comfortable bed. In my cycle touring days I at least had the (sometimes dubious) benefits of old-style Youth Hostels. But as an example of what an extreme endurance cyclist can achieve – “Chapeau, Mark!”

An account of a cycle ride across China. Hugely disappointing; badly written and with all the faults of an unedited self-published book. A missed opportunity.

This review puts me in a dilemma. How honest should I be? Let me explain.

I first came across Andrew P Sykes in the summer of 2015 while he was blogging his bike ride from Tarifa, at the southern tip of Spain, to Nordkapp (North Cape) in the far north of Norway. An epic ride! I followed him on twitter and after one or two exchanges he followed me back. We’ve had several conversations since, and I think of him as someone I ‘know’. I don’t want to upset him.

On the other hand I do feel I ought to be honest in these reviews, otherwise what’s the point? So Andrew, when you’re reading this — as I expect you will — don’t panic! I liked the book. But I think there are things about it that could have been better. Here’s my review.

How does a failed trainee accountant turned secondary school French teacher fill his summer holidays? By cycling from the south-east corner of Greece to the south-west corner of Portugal, of course. 50 days’ cycling through 10 countries, 9 rest days and over 5500 kilometres go into this book. Unlike some other writers in this genre Sykes has chosen to write a short chapter for each day of his journey. It’s a difficult self-imposed discipline: it made me think of someone walking along a pebbly beach picking up a pebble determined to find something interesting about it before dropping it and picking up the next. In this case it mostly works, but it makes the book quite long and perhaps smooths out the contrasts between the highs and lows of the journey.

What does come through is Sykes’ own personality. He had no real plan for his journey, deciding more or less day by day where to head for and where to stay, taking each day as it came. As he says, he prefers not to know too much about the road ahead; if it looks too challenging it can sometimes be hard to get motivated. He’s not quite carefree, but confident enough to cope with uncertainty and make the best of things. He gets serious about some things (the environment), flippant about others (odd place names), and takes time to give some background and history of the places he visits and people he meets. His bike, personified as Reggie, sometimes acts as the foil to Sykes’ self-deprecating humour.

It’s a shame he couldn’t find a publisher; this book is self-published. I think the book suffers a bit from not having a publisher’s editor involved. I would have welcomed some pictures and maps but presumably cost ruled them out, which is a pity because there are some great pictures on his Tarifa – Nordkapp blog.

But none of this detracts from Sykes’ achievement. It was a great ride, and an honest account of it. There’s plenty to enjoy as you share the ups and downs, meet the characters and explore the places. I want to go to Ubeda and stay in the Neuve Leyendas hotel with its delightful owners. And I want to read the Tarifa – Nordkapp book when it comes out.

In the introduction to this book the authors, themselves American, explain that most Americans don’t understand the significance and depth of feeling the European cycling Grand Tours generate in their fans. They set out to explain through the history of the greatest Tour, the Tour de France, how and why this race is so much more than a mere test of athletic ability.

I don’t think they quite achieve their objective but nonetheless the book’s well worth reading. It covers each edition of the race year by year from the start in 1903 through to 1964: the more recent years are in volume 2. Along the way there are some fascinating stories of hardship, rivalry, endurance, triumph and tragedy. The story of how the Tour began, its management as the personal fiefdom of its founder Henri Desgrange and its evolution into the major event it had become by the 1960s is as interesting as the tales of the riders and teams. In the early years the stages were huge, roads often unsurfaced, bicycles had fixed wheels (no gears, no freewheeling) and riders had not only to do all their own repairs without help but finish each stage still carrying everything they started with.

The historical detail is excellent: commentators far more knowledgeable than I praise how well the McGanns have covered the subject. What was missing for me was some sense of passion and excitment in the writing to reflect the emotions the race inspires in cycling enthusiasts. You can read it as a reference work to find the story of the race in a given year or to follow the career of any of the top riders of the early era. You can enjoy the historical information about the jerseys, the equipment, the changing rules of the race. But if you aren’t already excited and intrigued by the dramas played out on different levels during the three weeks of the Tour I’m not convinced this book will persuade you to invest the time and effort to become a cycling fan.

I recently retrieved from the back of a drawer a small notebook with a blue cover. I knew it was there – I’ve had it since 1963 – but I’ve only rarely taken it out to look at it, maybe once every five years. But a few weeks ago I thought I really ought to make a copy of it, a back-up in case of accidents. The obvious choice was to make a digital copy which could easily be duplicated, so I scanned the pages and re-typed the text.

The notebook is the diary I kept during a five-week cycle tour in Sweden and Norway which I did in the summer of 1963 when I was 18. Looking back and re-reading what I wrote I get no impression of the young man I was then. Although I can sense a time-line, some kind of continuity between the person I am and the life I lead now and how things were then, the line is tenuous in many places. The 18-year-old is the both the same person and very different. The account is almost entirely factual, matter-of-fact in tone. I must have deliberately chosen not to write anything personal, though why I don’t know. Instead I seem to have been obsessed with food, the condition of the road surfaces, and the nationality of fellow youth hostellers because I recorded these all the time. So while I’m still able to remember something about this journey I wanted to fill in some of the background which is missing from the bare account I wrote back then, nearly 50 years ago.

Another documentary source is the map I took with me. It’s a complicated folding map covering the whole of Scandinavia in four sheets bound together. My bike ride fits on one of the sheets, which is at a scale of 1:1,000,000 (1cm = 10km) and on which I drew the route I (we) took. Thanks to Google Maps I’ve been able to digitise the route. I still have my old youth hostel card (do they still have them?) on which I collected stamps from the hostels where we stayed.

And then there are the photos I took using a folding bellows camera my father had lent me. I can’t remember the make, but it was Eastern European – possibly Leica. It used 120 film, and for reasons I can no longer remember I decided to take colour transparencies rather than prints. Too big for a standard slide viewer, these pictures have lain in a drawer ever since until early this year (2012) I had them scanned and digitised by SLX Photographic. They’ve survived remarkably well (with the help of a little restoration) and I’ve put them into a slideshow.

In the summer of 1963 I was still at school, due to go back for a final term to sit for an Oxford scholarship and a place at the university starting in 1964. My companion was a school friend, Jan L. I don’t know whether Jan had done much cycling before, though I don’t think he was a novice. I already had several cycling holidays under my belt and the previous summer I had ridden solo through the Benelux countries for three weeks, a feat celebrated by the national letters GB, B, L, NL, D carefully stencilled in big red Letraset letters on my white rear mudguard. My bike was a lightweight Viking “Severn Valley” which I had paid for myself and of which I was very proud. Bikes then mostly had only 5-speed blocks at the back and triple chainwheels were virtually unkown, so my “double-clanger” at the front gave me 10 gears. My wheels were, I think, steel rather than alloy (no bad thing for the roads we were to meet) and had narrow-ish tyres – an inch and a quarter to my best recollection.

I don’t know why we chose Sweden for our holiday, but it had been agreed for long enough for me to learn the basics of the language and a small vocabulary from “Teach Yourself Swedish” earlier in the year. Ironically Jan had a Swedish passport as his father was the Swedish Consul in the London Docks, but he had never been to Sweden and didn’t speak any Swedish. This meant plenty of confusion when we checked-in to youth hostels or cashed travellers’ cheques. Maybe our choice had something to do with me being able to get a free passage on a boat. My father had contacts in the shipping industry at the time and was able to get the two of us a berth on a small cargo boat from Newcastle to Nyköping on the Baltic coast of Sweden south of Stockholm. We hadn’t made any definite plans but had a rough idea that we would cycle up the Baltic coast as far as we could, maybe to the Finnish border, and then see where we felt like going from there.

Our plans changed after a few days as we experienced the cost of living in Sweden. The numbers don’t mean much fifty years later and I can’t recall how much money we took with us, though for some reason the figure of £60 each sticks in my mind. Anyway, we found that just buying food and paying the cost of youth hostels would use up our cash in only a few weeks. We’d heard that food and accommodation in Norway would cost about the same number of kronor as we were paying in Sweden, but in Norway a pound would get us 20 kronor instead of only 14½ in Sweden. [I checked these exchange rates in the Financial Times for August 1963. It shows how memory falters: I couldn’t really remember the numbers but had a vague idea it was 10 and 6 kronor respectively. The point about relative costs still stands though.] So that’s why after a few days we left the Baltic coast and headed inland to cross into Norway, and probably why we became obsessed with road surfaces.

Click to view in Google Maps

Thanks to Google Earth I can see that our route took us through some areas which even now are seriously remote, on roads which are still only thin lines on the map. I would probably be more worried now than we were then, sheltered by our ignorance of what could go wrong. There were several days when we were riding through isolated, unpopulated, near-wilderness country with few resources or services.

Let me explain about the road surfaces. Once we started heading inland we were surprised to find that tarmac roads were rare. Instead we found ourselves cycling on what we were told were “oil-gravel” surfaces. These seemed to be something like a mixture of sand and gravel sprayed with a heavy oil. As the surface became more compacted, slippery and eroded, maintenance vehicles which we christened ‘juggernauts’ were sent out to harrow and level the surface. While suiting cars and lorries, these roads were hell for bicycles with narrow high-pressure tyres. They were easiest when well-compacted, though this also meant they were full of ruts. When the juggernauts had been along it was like trying to cycle on the beach. In wet weather – and we had a lot – spray from our wheels carried a slurry of fine sand into all the moving parts of our chains and gears, where it acted as a high-quality abrasive. Once the water drained away it could, and did, leave moving parts locked solid.

[I now read that in the early 1960s Norwegian engineers were developing just this kind of surfacing, which became known as “Otta Seal”. See Wikipedia for an American overview, or this full guide from the Norwegian Road Service.]

All that hard work meant we must have been rather fit. I don’t think either of us trained before the trip although I used to cycle regularly. By the time we were ten days in we were able to take a 136 mile day (to Dalholen, 17 August) in our stride. We hadn’t planned to ride that far, but you’ll have to read the log-book for that story! I only record being ill once: an upset stomach at Åndalsnes which it seems made me “bloody fed up”. Even so I managed to climb 850 metres (2800 feet) up the Trollstigen on a virtually empty stomach the next day.

One curiosity was the border crossing on 16 August. In 1963 traffic in Sweden still drove on the left, while in Norway they followed most of Europe and drove on the right. We crossed the border in a remote area on an unmade road. Two concrete traffic islands, a cairn and a “cross over” sign were the only border markers, and the tyre tracks in the gravel formed a neat “X” between the traffic islands. It was another four years before Sweden switched on H-day (H for Högerkörning) from driving on the left to driving on the right.

Having cash to pay our way was something we had to plan for. There were no credit cards or ATMs in 1963 and like most of my acquaintances I didn’t have a bank account. The only way to take money abroad was in cash or travellers’ cheques. Shops and hostels didn’t accept the cheques so they had to be cashed at a bank: there weren’t many banks on our journey and those that there were kept short opening hours. Between us we managed to stay solvent, despite Jan losing his wallet.

One last memory – the kit. Neither of us took much: I only had a single saddlebag. It was made of strong black canvas, not waterproof, and it had to carry everything for five weeks, plus any food we bought en route. I guess in modern terms it might have been about 20-25 litres capacity. I’m embarrassed to think how smelly we must have been for much of the time!

Click to open notebook (18.5Mb)

So there it is. I’m glad I’ve put this page together and preserved my diary but I don’t expect or encourage anyone to read it. To be honest, it’s boring: it doesn’t tell you much about anything. If you do decide to look at it though, there are a few notes below on some of the more cryptic or obscure references in the text. Alternatively you can look at our route on Google Maps, where the info-box for each day’s route has a link to the individual page or pages just for that day, and smaller copies of any photos taken on the day.

Explanatory notes:

bomp-bag

a light bag slung over a cyclist’s shoulder (a musette).

double-clanger

double chainwheel

fast-disappearing Lapp

A joke. We saw people in Lappish costume but as Jan said, such sights were fast disappearing.

flicks

The pictures/cinema/movies.

fly-over

aircraft which passed overhead. I was almost out of my teenage phase of being a plane-spotter but it seems I couldn’t resist noting down any registrations I saw.

juggernaut

Large road maintenance vehicles used to rake and level unsurfaced roads. Not popular with cyclists.

noshup

An unspecified rough-and-ready meal, probably some kind of stew.

ph

Photo. (I kept a record of where I had taken them.)

pølser

frankfurter-type sausage.

Title: The Man Who Cycled The Americas
Author: Beaumont, Mark
Published by: Bantam Press
Year: 2011
Date reviewed: 06.11
ISBN: 9780593066980

There is not so much adventure in “The Man Who Cycled The Americas”, although it was certainly a challenge. On this journey Mark cycled the length of North and South America, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. But there was an added twist: he climbed the highest mountain in each of the two continents – Denali (aka Mt McKinley) in Alaska and Aconcagua in Argentina. Of the so-called ‘Seven Summits’ (collectively the highest mountain on each continent) Denali is the third highest and second only to Everest in difficulty; Aconcagua is the second highest.

The two climbs, more or less bracketing the beginning and end of the book, certainly rate as adventures. Beaumont is not an experienced mountaineer, but he was strong, fit, and adequately trained. Both mountains proved as difficult as their reputations predict and success was hard won. He describes the mental and physical challenges well and holds your attention throughout.

The cycle ride, in contrast, lacks the excitement of his round-the-world ride. On that journey he was effectively alone, suffering extremes of temperature and weather, coping with misfortunes, dealing with whatever the journey threw at him from his own resources (with help from Mum over the phone). This time his trip was sponsored by the BBC, who made a three-part series about it. Carrying a laptop, satellite phone, web camera and GPS, with regular live link-ups with radio and TV programmes, his journey was much more regulated. There were back-room trouble-shooters and safety advisers, contacts to meet, suggestions for interesting places to visit and report from.

Beaumont doesn’t labour the point but it’s clear he found the lack of freedom and independence on the road frustrating. He still has good stories to tell and there are certainly highs and lows, but apart from the climbing it’s just a bit more monotonous and lacks the excitement of his previous book.

I don’t want to belittle his achievement in any way. It was certainly a great challenge and he deserves praise and credit for it. But the best adventures are those you have on your own or share with others in the same situation. When freedom and self-reliance are taken away the experience is inevitably dulled, and I think this happened on this journey. The book is still worth reading for Mark’s descriptions of the countries and cultures he passes through, and like his earlier book this one is mercifully free of the pedal turn-by-turn that cycling books can turn into. So congratulations again, Mark, and I’ll look forward to the next challenge!*

* Mark has joined Scottish explorer Jock Wishart in a team of six to row 450 miles through the Arctic with the aim of reaching a former location of the North Magnetic Pole. Mark has been asked to join the expedition by the BBC to be both a cameraman and an oarsman. More on Mark’s website.