They say that over the years we return to our first loves. If I have to remember one in my adolescence, it would be my love for the bicycle. It was a passion, a permanent, immutable, conscious and absolute illusion. Quite simply, between the ages of 13 and 22, I was as happy as one can be. I did not stop being a competitive cyclist: cycling left me. To be clear. Let it also be clear, by the way, that I didn’t win a single race and that I was rather bad. It took some time and a lot of luck until I found a replacement at its height. But the passions are stubborn and now, turning 50, I have returned to the pedals… to land in a world in full mutation, a world that I hardly recognize although in essence it is the same. Getting back on a bike after years of being ignored was fine, but I needed an incentive, obviously ruling out the possibility of competing. I asked here and there and many pointed out the Transpyr, an organized test that runs through the Pyrenees from its Cantabrian coast to the Mediterranean. From Saint Jean de Luz to Roses, as a fabulous trip and as one of the best organized and planned tests that exists. According to National Geographic, it is one of the 10 best tests of these characteristics that exists. They also told me it was one of the toughest. In fact, the organizers do not describe it as a ‘test’ but as a ‘mission’, just what I needed, even though the term has somewhat religious connotations. When I called one of the organizers, Oriol Sallent, and suggested that he invite me to write a diary, he asked me if he often rode a bike. I told him about my cycling past, 30 years ago, and there was one of those silences on the other side of the line that we call embarrassing. Very elegantly, Oriol, suggested to me the possibility of participating in the electric bike modality. The idea of him felt like a gloved slap to my ego, but I quickly thought that it takes a lot of stupid for ego to dictate something in the life of a fifty-year-old, so I immediately accepted his offer. Orbea would lend me the bike and Deporvillage, another of the event’s sponsors, would dress me. Because if I have verified something on my return to the world of two wheels, it is that one cannot go out and ride in any way. In other words, the bicycles must be good or very good, the clothing worthy of professional riders and the height accessories. Appearances matter, a lot. I looked at my old bicycle, my shoes bought 15 years ago, the loose jerseys, the vintage helmet and asked for help: I couldn’t go with ballooning pints as well as with an electric bike, second sacrilege. If it weren’t for the bike with assistance that gives one away, no one would have been able to think today at the start in San Juan de Luz, that I am a true balloonist, a term that is incredibly difficult to define. To adjust the meaning of the term, I turn to Antonio Alix, former triathlete, always a cyclist and multidisciplinary commentator for Eurosport. From the outset, Antonio warns: it is impossible to define the term, which is almost as old as cycling. In my time as a runner, the balloonists were the ones who did not compete. Evenepoel, Pogacar, Van Aert, Van der Poel… they are not balloonists, just like the rest of the professionals, elite, under 23, etc. “But it is that one can be called a balloonist for many reasons: because he is dressed to the nines and with a 12,000-euro bike and he doesn’t even go backwards. Or because he walks like a plane and is in rags and with unshaven legs, ”clarifies Alix. The last straw, according to this scale of values, is walking less than a kicking boat and looking disheveled.
The habit does not make the monk, but between pedaling an electric bike and wearing a coulottes well padded (some cost more than 200 euros) or riding on iron and placing the buttocks on a leather chamois, there is a huge fan on the scale of suffering. In my time, by the way, they didn’t say ‘suffer’ but rather ‘live in misery’.
Transpyr started today from one of the most desired locations in the French Basque Country: Saint Jean de Luz, where Jean de Rivière, a technician in the Pyrenees-Atlantiques tourism department, is enthusiastic about the presence of Transpyr: “It is a event that connects perfectly with the moment of profound change that we are experiencing in terms of tourism. Until now, our beaches were the main claim, but now we have seen that we must diversify to have the tourism that really interests us and not end up, for example, being like Venice. Now we look inland, towards the mountains, towards the scene where our shepherds lived and still live”, he argues. From the beaches of Saint Jean de Luz and its surroundings, you can only see friendly, green, rounded mountains, a setting that local tourism (on both sides of the border) has not been able to exploit. There is life beyond the lighthouse cities, the pintxos and the Cantabrian, the tourism technicians are now claiming, frightened by the idea of turning their little paradise into a hell of senseless consumerism.
The Transpyr consists of seven mountain stages, nearly 800 kilometers bumping up and down, 19,000 positive meters of unevenness and many hours to ride in company or in absolute solitude. It is not a race, although for lovers of rankings there are timed sections. Most of the participants with whom one has come across are more concerned with finishing whole than with playing at the races and, all of them, highlight the postcard of this first stage that has concluded in Saint Jean Pied de Port: one would have to be a poet to aptly describe such serenity and beauty. Here, one can spend half a day lost among twisted valleys and stacked hills and end the day having dinner in the old part, next to the citadel, in a fairytale enclave at the foot of Roncesvalles.
The Transpyr organization makes you feel as if you were a Tour runner: they bring spare batteries to the refreshment points, they pick up and leave your belongings at the hotels, they have masseurs, mechanics, cleaning service for the bikes, vans for the transfers, services that serve both those who travel by mountain bike and those who travel by road to a total of more than 250 registered. “The profile of our participants is a person between the ages of 35 and 50, a cyclist, who has experience in other similar events, with liberal professions and a medium or high economic and sociocultural level. We have everything from CEOs or senior managers to teachers… 40% are foreigners from all over the planet and the rest are mainly Catalans, Basques, from Madrid, Valencians…”, explains Oriol Sallent. My first roommate (as on the Tour) is Chilean and repeats the experience. He assures that he does not know of any other more beautiful and better organized test. His motivation for him? Apply to the bicycle what you apply to your work: set a goal and achieve it, without being the first, but always arriving. My motivation? One winter morning, while we were driving through the roads of Gipuzkoa towards the start of a youth race, we came across a bunch of balloonists who seemed to be going to the limit of their possibilities. My coach watched them go by and concluded: “there go the frustrated”. No one said anything, but I have never forgotten their appreciation. So my motivation will be to enjoy myself without looking at what the rest is doing, like a legendary amateur cyclist who, having escaped with several minutes climbing the Tourmalet in one of the most prestigious races on the calendar, stopped at a curve to admire the landscape. When his director, hysterical, scolded him from the car demanding reasons, he replied: “I have to take a good look at all this, in case I never come back.”
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