BBA IV: Cyclists Indeed

I've often wondered what it would be like to live local to say, the Tour of Flanders route, or Mont Ventoux. Would you meet up for your Sunday club run and ask, "So everyone: first sprint at the top of the Koppenberg?" or "Climb the Giant, as usual?" I'm pretty sure that is indeed what it would be like. On the London Dynamo Sunday rides into the Surrey Hills, we seek out every cruel hump of earth between Hampton Court and Box Hill, and I think a masochistic streak is what separates cyclists from ordinary people who ride a bike.

On Tuesday, the official itinerary had us visiting the Ridley and Bioracer factories. It was an easy decision to pass on the Ridley tour; seeing how the frames are all shipped in from Taiwan to be sprayed and stickered-up would just be disheartening rather than enlightening. I was a little disappointed to pass up the Bioracer visit, though; they make a product called ReSkin which, by all accounts, is pretty amazing, and sounds especially useful if you plan on riding over cobbled roads.

But we are cyclists and hadn't travelled to this part of the world to wander around a couple of factories, we wanted to climb slippery cobbled slopes! So we drove down to Oudenaarde and set out to ride part of the Tour of Flanders route. With the weather much more clement than it had been for the sportive ride on Saturday, it wasn't just the first time over those climbs for me, but it was like a completely different ride for the others as well.

We first tackled the Oude Kwaremont, and I was extremely pleased, but a little disappointed, to have made it all the way to the top with little difficulty. The climb isn't too steep and, in the dry, the cobbles are relatively even. Next was the Paterberg. David, our guide, thought that this was the hardest berg of all. "The cobbles seem to jump up at you!" I didn't get a chance to contemplate the texture of the cobbles much; the 20% gradient did me in and I soon had to unclip and start walking - Just like the pros do!


My usual strategy for tackling big climbs is: pedal, breathe, repeat until one or the other becomes impossible. On the Koppenberg, both became impossible pretty quickly and I was beginning to think that I should've picked up a spare set of cleats as well as a pair of Vittoria valve extenders during the previous afternoon's visit to the famous Plum Gent bike shop. Before we reached Steenbeekdreis and the Taaienberg, one of us pulled up with a mechanical problem and I was grateful for an excuse not to have to walk up any more narrow, cobbled roads - strictly for the sake of my cleats, of course. I decided to ride directly back to Oudenaarde with David and Steve to find somewhere we could get a repair.


The staff in the Ronde van Vlaanderen Centrum directed us to Flanders Fietsen where the mechanic took one look at Steve's Dura Ace rear gear cable where it had snapped out of the lever housing and shook his head. "This is the second one I've had like this today. Shimano's no good. We see this all the time." He explained that it was something to do with the way the cable take-up worked. "On the climbs of Flanders, riders are always pushing and pushing the lever, looking for a bigger sprocket that isn't there, until it just breaks." What's the best system to use, then, I asked. "SRAM." He said without hesitation. "It has a light, strong action so that you can easily shift even when you're under a lot of pressure climbing." (Hmmm. I might have to get a Red groupset to test over this course next year. And it pains me, being a committed Campagirl, to admit that Dura Ace 7900 sounds worthy of a test, too.)


Luckily, Steve's cable had snapped relatively cleanly and the mechanic was able to pull the end out of the lever hood without disassembling it. We mooched around the shop for a bit and then headed back to the town square to lean our bikes up outside a cafe for a while. Just like the pros do!