The marvels of mountain masochism

There’s a joke I’ve never really understood. It’s about a man who’s repeatedly banging his head against a brick wall. Asked why he’s doing it, he answers, “because it feels so good when I stop”.

Except it wouldn’t, would it? 

Likewise, I don’t fully get a comment made to me when, as a teenager, I was riding my bike up a long and gruelling hill in Devon. 

“Arr,” said a farmer watching me, “cycling. That’s killing your legs to save your arse.”

Really? I mean, sure, it kills your legs. But it leaves your arse in a lousy state too. That’s even if you have a foam saddle and the kind of especially padded (or is the correct term “armoured”?) shorts my stepson David uses when he goes biking. 

Talking about David, it was he who kindly offered us a day out on bikes in the glorious Valle de Aran, the only bit of Spain north of the Pyrenees, where we’re having a week’s holiday. He joined us here for a couple of days.

We accepted his generous offer. A real treat, we thought, until the man in the bike rental place started describing the wonderful route he was proposing to us.

“You climb up the mountain here,” he said.

“You climb up a mountain?” I interrupted.

He dismissed my implied wimpishness with a shake of the head and a half smile, before continuing to describe the glorious sights we’d discover.

Now, I’ll come clean at once. We weren’t renting normal bikes. These were electric. As it happens, we have a couple of those at home, and they have a wonderful device I believe is called a “boost button”. You press it, and the bike responds as though it were saying, “a bit too steep, sir? Not to worry. Just let me handle the climb for you and you can take over at the top when you’re ready. Just release the button when you no longer need me.”

These weren’t like that, though. No boost button. Instead, they merely help.

“Just leave the bike on this setting,” the sadistic fiend in the shop assured us, “and you’ll get just the level of assistance you need.”

Just the assistance you need? It turns out this basically means you do the work and it will grudgingly help out a little if you press the pedals hard enough. Help you generally most need when you no longer have energy to press the pedals at all.

Unlike my own kind and respectful bike, this one seemed to be saying, “what? what? You need help again? Whatever’s the matter with you? Are you some kind of wimp? Oh, Lord. Well never mind. I’ll give you a bit of a push. But you just keep pedalling. You know, just dig down a bit, find a bit of willpower, and you can make it.”

Got to love a mountain stream

Well, we made it. In the end. With lots of pauses. Including one at a wayside restaurant and café to rest and recover a little. 

I must grudgingly admit that it was worth it. 

We kept crossing a fierce mountain stream, which was dramatic. 

We got a breathtaking view of the highest mountain in the Pyrenees, still with snow clinging to its heights, even though the temperature where we were was around 30 degrees Celsius. 

Mount Aneto with its summer snow

And eventually we got to the fine waterfall we’d been recommended to visit, the Saut deth Pish. 

The falls at Saut deth Pish

The name, incidentally, means ‘the leap of the fish’ in the local language, Aranese. It doesn’t mean anything like what I suspect someone with a less clean mind might have imagined based on an English interpretation. Especially as that final ‘h’ doesn’t affect the pronunciation of the third word.

Sadly, the waterfall wasn’t the top. We ploughed on a little further, making for another restaurant, where we’d been told to have lunch. After a lot more effort, along increasingly difficult tracks, we emerged onto a high valley running up to a distant ridge, beyond which we could guess the path ran down to the restaurant. But between us and the ridge there were another four or five kilometres of continuous, unrelenting, grinding climb.

“That’s enough for me,” I announced, “even the best of things must come to an end.”

Fortunately, everyone agreed. We turned our bikes around and went hurtling back down the way we’d come, stopping only at the restaurant we’d visited before. We had an excellent lunch there, though by then, pretty much anything would have tasted great. 

The way down replaced strain on legs from pumping pedals, with strain on hands from gripping brakes. Approach another bike and you got a powerful whiff of burned brake pads. But it was fun. Even though it seemed to last about ten minutes, while it had felt as though we’d taken five hours on the climb (the true figures were more like two and a half hours and forty minutes, but I’m just saying how they felt).

Enjoying the way back down

The most startling discovery was just how steep the road had been. Somehow, we hadn’t noticed on the way up, even though we’d been battling against the slope. On the way down, we all kept asking ourselves, “what? I really came up that?”

What I can tell you is that my legs didn’t feel any better when I stopped, any more than a beaten head would when you stop banging it against a brick wall. And there was no saving of arses, however much we may have killed our legs. 

Still, it was a wonderful day. We saw some fabulous places. It’s glorious being in the mountains in the summer.

It’s just a pity that they keep the mountains in such hilly places…