Mountains old and new, and winter

So I survived my little Irish tour in August 2016. It was magic. I hadn’t ridden a bike in Ireland at all since, if I remember correctly, 1998 or so; I think I rode down to sister #2 via Ballinclea hostel in about 1992; through the heart of the Wicklow mountains probably not since 1987 or ’88. It’s my landscape and my climate, I like being out in it, even when the weather’s a bit wild. Distance, I find, is a bit relative: a day on the road is a day on the road and it feels much the same whether 90 km or 150 km is your level. The thing is to find your level. For the form I was in, the stages I picked were alright.

Because those are roads I know – I’ve ridden most of them many times – riding them also gives me a subjectively much more meaningful, tangible picture of the state of my fitness and what my goal might be than just about anything else.

In my mind’s eye the goal is moving though that landscape with a certain fluidity. Could it reach to a ride like the Dying Cow 200 or the dreaded Mick Byrne? I don’t know. But it can be better than it was on that trip. I should be able to ride all those climbs without pushing. After all, I now have a 24:28 granny gear instead of the 42:28 of my youth.

The upshot was that I came back to Graz and started thinking about what kind of rides I could do that would be more or less equivalent to crossing Wicklow.  But my normal tootle of the last 14 years or so – for family-related reasons – is just 32 km in the shortest version straight up the Mur valley and doesn’t really have any hills. I can ride up and down that regularly with hardly any improvement in my fitness; for legs that have a memory of cycling it just isn’t really a thing.

So: hills? Well, we do have hills in Austria. But they are a bit different to the hills in Ireland. Back in the old days, practice hills were the high points of Co. Meath. ‘Proper mountains’ were the Wicklow roads I did on my 2016 trip. But these are old mountains. Not very big and not very steep. Over here, the landscape is younger, big mountains are properly big and even the little hills – especially the little hills, because their roads aren’t important enough to invest a lot in flattening out the gradients – are full of steep bits, and by steep I mean ≥20%.

The first hilly deviation from the Mur that presented itself was the Leber. This is the westernmost spur of the Schöckl, and I first thought maybe I could work a crossing from Stattegg to the Semriach road into my route. First time I looked into it I was going from north to south and headed up the Semriach road from Friesach. This went fine as far as the turnoff at the Volksschule, where I realized I’d dropped my sunglasses and turned back to Friesach to look for them – successfully (parked them on my saddlebag while stopped for a drink and forgot about them).

Next try, I headed off one morning straight out through Stattegg. I hadn’t studied the steepness of the hill in great detail. At the bus terminus Fuß der Leber, I first thought the road must just be a track up to someone’s farmyard; when I realised it was the road I got off and pushed, thinking there’ll be an easier bit somewhere. Nope! I pushed my bike all the 1.5 km to the top, and it was a hard push, too. There’s a warning sign at the top, by Martinelli’s pub, saying 28%. having cows look at you from a height, just because they’re standing in a field a few yards up the road from you, is a bit disconcerting. I headed very carefully down the steep descent on the other side, which was good because about halfway down, the asphalt gives way to a macadam surface. This was some time in November 2016.

The project was then to see if there was any route up to the Leber that would be rideable for me. There is another road, from the centre of Andritz up past the Höchwirt pub. Above the pub, it continues up in a few zigzags to the Volksschule at Kalkleiten, and then crosses over through open fields to a cluster of houses at Buch and then does a bit of a bump up through the woods and down to Martinelli’s. I scouted that out by car in the course of taking my snotty cold-afflicted daughter up for a Sunday walk on the plateau. It didn’t seem terribly feasible, though I saw other people cycling up it.

Then I looked at the map more closely. Just above the Höchwirt, another road branches off to the right and wiggles around first over towards Weinitzen before doubling back towards Kalkleiten. This looked like it must be the easiest route, at least by average gradient, because it’s about twice as long.

Around this time I was also speculating whether a route all the way though the hills to Frohnleiten would be possible. The issue with this is the deep valley running southwest from Semriach, which cuts the hills in two. There’s not much point climbing up the Leber if you throw away all the height going down to the Semriach road and have to climb up there again. Better to stay higher up, if possible: and there is a road from Martinelli’s that contours around the north side of the Schöckl and ends up either opposite Semriach or even above it, depending on where you turn off. These are fairly small, remote roads and it wasn’t clear from Google maps which would be passable.

I had a first look at this one evening when I’d been held up by other stuff all day, and set off late and frustrated, determined to get up at least a bit of the way. I stopped on the steep bit below the Höchwirt and couldn’t get started again, so had to push a bit. Beyond the Höchwirt I headed off along the side road, into the woods, with darkness falling. I got up the first couple of twists and then turned back.

My next try was on the 3rd of December, which was an improbably warm and sunny day. This time I got up the steep bit below the Höchwirt for a breather by the city limit sign a few yards on. Continued all the way up the Zösenberg and across to Martinelli’s, no problems. It was about 13:30 when I was there, so I weighed things up and carried on towards the Theisslwirt. By the time I got there, I wasn’t sure which road to take; I thought one of the roads marked Windhof would get me to Semriach. I was wearing a cheap soft-shell jacket, with, I think, a cotton thermal top and a T-shirt underneath, and by this point I was very sweaty inside. On the descent, which is on the north side of the Schöckl, I got pretty cold; also, the road I chose dropped down well below Semriach and I had a push back up the other side to get to the village. I popped into Pfleger’s Konditorei for a bowl of goulash soup. Peeling off my jacket I noticed that my inside sleeves were soaking wet, so I kept the jacket on. On leaving the café, I put on my rain jacket over the soft-shell jacket and squashed my warm Buff around my face and under my helmet, and headed down the main road to Friesach to get out of the hills. I was so wet that I couldn’t take anything off but had to keep going like that up through Peggau to Frohnleiten. This episode impressed on me that my non-Lycra approach was not going well.

For my next few rides, I squeezed myself into my oldest cycling jersey, an 80s-model Toshiba-LaVie Claire, the classic Mondrian-based design. I like it for its towelly inside, a material that still seems good to me but appears to have gone out of fashion. I got a cheap polyester base layer and a thermal cross-country-skiing jersey (a good brand and cheaper than an equivalent cycling jersey) and put on a fleece on top. This was sufficiently breathable but not windproof enough for subzero temperatures, and I ended up using the rain jacket once or twice more, including heading up to Frohnleiten for Christmas. My Christmas wishes were all for bike stuff and vouchers, and so I ended up with a proper winter jacket (a Gore Bike Wear Phantom 2.0) and a pair of pretty heavy-duty Mavic overshoes. These turned out to be perfect; I can ride round in this gear comfortably at -5 °C. In the meantime I had also got a pair of Endura overshorts, to cover the hole in the arse of my one pair of thermal tights. I look like a funny little gnome in this stuff, but, y’know, at some point function is more important.

During the rest of the winter, I rode up to Martinelli’s and back a few times. I’ve usually been hesitant about riding when it’s snowy and icy: but I found the road is often not as bad as I might have expected. Most days in the winter are actually rideable; it probably helps that this is the south-facing slope of the mountain, and inside the Graz basin; we don’t get much  precipitation here in the winter. Also, I reckon if I ride up and down the same way I can spot any iffy-looking bits on the way up. There was only one day like this, though, when it was damp and starting to freeze (I don’t seem to have any photos of that day …).  It’s so nice to get out of the winter smog down in the city … and a good lunch is always to be had at the pub. If I remember to bring money. 🙄

In the course of February, the weather in these parts eased off a bit:

And by late February, I had planned out the final route I wanted to do and was ready for a crack at it as soon as the roads seemed ok.