One Man’s Confrontation With Mont Ventoux — and Aging

“Don’t you want to do it right, under your own power?” I asked.

“I just don’t see the point,” he said.

Accounts of cycling up Ventoux, which was first included as a stage of the Tour de France in 1951, often employ the word “sufferfest.” And since I had squandered training time reading Cicero and was lugging a lot more body weight than Blaine — who had recently slimmed down using a calorie counting app — chances were excellent I would be joining him in the van.

When the big day came, we all rolled out of Château de Mazan at 8:30 a.m. It was a genial jaunt to the well-known La Route du Ventoux bike shop, where cyclists can commemorate the nonachievement of reaching Kilometer 0 by posing for photos on a podium. The record time from Kilometer 0 to the summit is held by the Basque cyclist Iban Mayo, who in 2004 made the 13-mile climb in 55 minutes and 51 seconds. For amateur riders, any time under two hours is notable.

Carolina was waiting at the bike shop with one of the two vans so we could top off water bottles and reload snack pockets. The next van stop would be in the Forest; after that, one van would be parked where the Forest ended at Chalet Reynard, and the other at the summit of Mont Ventoux.

Underway again, Blaine seemed uncertain about implementing SPARA. I could see him up ahead, cranking away in good rhythm. He had planned to board the van at the start of the Forest, where the road bends back on itself and the slope jumps from 4 to 8 percent, but he soldiered on — inspired, he said later, by encouragement from the guides, who downplayed the difficulties.

When I got to the bend, I had to stop and rest. Most of the Electric Company sailed past, cheerfully waving. Marc, who like Blaine and me was battery-free, trailed behind with Pete, who was on an e-bike.

The air was cooler in the groves of oak and pine. I had been monitoring my progress on the Garmin odometer, which showed distance in kilometers. Day 1 and Day 2, the kilometers had piled up at often fantastic rates. But as I pedaled through the Forest, there seemed to be no movement at all. Could the Garmin be broken? Close inspection revealed that if I did reel in a hundred meters of road, the device would bestir itself and add a tenth of a kilometer to my total.

After 45 minutes, I reached the van parked by some picnic benches. I pulled over and rested. Carolina was packing up, waiting only for Marc and Pete. The road ahead ramped up without relent. Even tenths of a kilometer were hard to come by. I pedaled for a while, then had to stop, straddling the bike. Pete and Marc rode past, cranking slowly but steadily. I was now officially bringing up the rear.

There were occasions in 1972 when Steve and I had to jump off our bikes and walk. Our shortest day, we covered only 32 miles in the Bighorn Mountains. When the road seemed impossibly steep, we felt no shame pushing our heavy steel bikes, laden with clothes, food and other gear. But on Ventoux, the idea of getting off a superlight carbon fiber bike to walk seemed ignominious, an affront to the good cycling style of every other rider on the mountain.

Still, I had to face facts. I’d been using the lowest gear since I’d entered the Forest, and I was barely moving. Walking offered the possibility of making progress even while exhausted. So I walked, and wheeled the bike alongside as if returning an unreliable pony to a pet store.

After 6 kilometers, I sat under a tree by a dirt turnout. It was getting on toward noon.

One of the vans came barreling down the road and skidded to a stop in the dirt. Gawain lowered the window. He’d already passed me a few times while I was walking.

“Everything OK?”

“Just resting.”

“You’re doing great.”

“Yeah, pedestrian of the year.”

“I stopped right here on my first climb of Ventoux,” he said. “It was more than I’d bargained for.”

I knew the answer but asked anyway.

“Still a ways to go,” he replied.

Half an hour later, Chalet Reynard appeared up ahead around a bend, one of our vans parked out front. The e-bikers had already been to the summit and back. It seemed obvious I would never get there. Six more kilometers and 1,537 feet of elevation might take me the rest of the week.

“We could run you up to the summit in the van,” Gawain offered.

I was about to accept when Bill, back from lunch, said, “Why don’t you take my bike?”

“Your bike?”

Nervous about the long descent to come, Bill had decided to ride down in the van. He ushered me to his Trek Verve+, a dark-gray Faustian temptation of an e-bike leaning devilishly on its kickstand in the parking lot. I stared at it as if I’d been invited to leave my family and run away to Saint-Tropez with Catherine Deneuve.

“You have to keep turning the pedals to engage the motor, but you can press this button to increase the power,” Bill instructed.

With no top tube on the frame, I didn’t even have to hoist my leg over the saddle to sit down. I slid onto the contraption before I could even formally renounce my principles. The e-bike was built like a rhinoceros compared to the racehorse I’d ridden — or escorted — to Chalet Reynard. Pedaling would hardly budge it, but at the touch of the magic button, it flew up the road as if possessed, and I heard an abject involuntary cry of electrified delight escape my throat. Tenths of kilometers whizzed by so fast the Garmin appeared in danger of overheating. Blaine and Marc had a head start of 24 minutes — a number I gleaned later from photos shot by a commercial camera trap — but I flew by them after just a few minutes, catching only a glimpse of two grim-faced purists in the throes of cycling purgatory. Up ahead I spotted our guide Max, who for a fun workout had decided to ride one of the nonelectric bikes up from Chalet Reynard. When I passed him, Max accelerated and tucked himself in my slipstream. Even at full power and pedaling the Verve+ as hard as I could, I couldn’t shake him. He did have the decency to pant. We rounded the last steep hairpin turn, and there was Carolina and the other van parked along the road: the summit. Total time from the parking lot was maybe 15 minutes.

Max was bent over the handlebars, gasping for breath.

“I feel sick,” he said.

Blaine and Marc arrived half an hour later, looking equally drained.

“That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Blaine said.

“I barely broke a sweat,” I said. “If you ask me, Ventoux is overrated.”

We posed for pictures in front of the summit sign. Scores of cyclists were arriving. The mountain’s white limestone crown, a product of deforestation dating from the 12th century, was dazzling in the sun. The world we had come from, with its olive groves and vineyards and sunflowers and Roman bridges and ochre hilltop villages, was buried under a bed of white clouds.

It has been seven centuries since the most famous ascent of Mount Ventoux. Petrarch, the great poet of the Italian Renaissance, set out with his younger brother from the village of Malaucène in April 1336. His only motive for climbing, he wrote, was “the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer.”

God knows what Petrarch would have made of the bicycle brigades today. But perhaps he would have understood that the revelations upon attaining summits are always of a lesser order than those of striving for them. Had the clouds held off, we could have glimpsed some of what Petrarch saw looking far northward to the mountains around Lyon, and south to the glittering Bay of Marseilles, and west to the great artery of the Rhone Valley.

When Petrarch was done with seeing what so great an elevation had to offer, he opened the copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions he always carried with him and read a page at random, which caused him to chastise himself for “admiring earthly things” instead of remembering “that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself.”

When I had finished my time seeing what so great an elevation had to offer, I rode Bill’s Verve+ back down to Chalet Reynard and reclaimed my analog bike. The 12-mile descent from there was as exhilarating as any ride I’ve ever had, rivaled only by the 22 downhill miles Steve and I covered from Powder River Pass through Ten Sleep Canyon in Wyoming in the summer of 1972. I can’t say there is any difference between flying down the western slope of the Bighorn Mountains and running fast and free off Mont Ventoux. Emotions don’t get old; at any age, joy is joy.

Back at college that September of my sophomore year, I typed up an article about our trip. I sent it off with a stamped self-addressed envelope to a magazine called Wilderness Camping. Petrarch may be right that nothing is wonderful but the soul, but did he ever find a letter in his college mailbox from the editors of a magazine offering him $75 for a story (and $5 a picture for all the pictures he didn’t take with the cellphone camera he didn’t have)? I was over the moon. Some weeks went by, then some months with no further word from the fairy godfathers of Wilderness Camping. I don’t know when exactly, but I eventually learned the magazine had gone out of business. I never got the story back, and if you need more evidence of 19-year-old naivete, here it is: That was my only copy. The story vanished like the trip itself. I’m not entirely dismayed, because the only line I can remember was an analogy comparing the rising moon to a giant grapefruit.

My mother once mentioned in passing that Steve’s mother had been a nervous wreck that summer and had frequently telephoned to share her fears about the adventure their sons were having.

“You weren’t worried about me, were you?” I asked.

“Not at all.”

It was my mother who took the only picture I have of Steve and me, setting out for the Pacific from our suburban driveway. She was the safe-keeper of our family’s life. She’s the one who put the maps I’d sent my father in a trunk for me to open someday. She died four years ago at the age of 96. The past makes children of us all, but never more than when there’s no one left to call who might tell us where we are.