Corragio

Miles from Home - 5354.1 miles
Firsts / Highlights - Mountaintop finish, Bolzona, bike paths, epic climb, strudel in the Alps, castles, Tyrolean food and culture.
Miles Ridden - 50.39 miles
Vertical Feet - 6,178 ft
Route - View Today's Route Here.
People - I am going to start including the people I meet along the way in the heading section of each post. Although I have been with Experience Plus for a number of days, I have not mentioned everyone’s names:

Michele and Stefania - Our Italian group leaders, guides, logisticians, translators, sommeliers and good people.

Don and Jane Volta - Kirkland, WA (near Seattle). Retired couple on their 8th Experience Plus tour. Turn 70 this year. Just completed a tour through Turkey.

Marvin and Margie Amernick - Basalt, CO and Delray Beach, FL. Retired couple on their ~12th Experience Plus tour. After a week of traveling alone, they are joining the third-week Giro tour with Experience Plus for the finish.

Bill Plutnick - Owingsville, KY (near Lexington). 46 year old, easy-going defense contractor. His wife was at a conference in Sicily, so he decided to follow the Giro for a week. They are meeting in Rome Thursday.

This post is for May 13, 2009.

My cold set back in last night. I woke up with little energy, but today was the final and biggest climb of my Giro week. The pros don't get to take a day off when they don't feel well, and either do I if I want to watch the race. The Giro stops for just about nothing.

Italians shout a lot of phrases at the racers. One that is reserved for the suffering riders who are obviously having difficulty just getting over a climb is, “Corragio”. It means, “dig deep, summon your courage, keep going”. Alpe di Siusi was the climb at the finish of Stage 5 today. It is a monster that starts in the river valley and climbs nearly to the top of the Dolomites at the mid-station of a ski resort. The length of 25 kms, grade of 8-10% and elevation gain of 5,000 feet make it a challenge on any day. For those from Steamboat, it is the equivalent of a steeper Rabbit Ears, followed by a 5km recovery at an easier grade, followed by another steeper Rabbit Ears. Climbing it today required me to tap into all of the corragio I could find.

It isn’t much consolation, but Lance had a pretty difficult day on the climb today as well. He ran into a spot of bother and finished 3 minutes behind the lead group that included teammate Levi Leipheimer. Today all but eliminated Lance from contention in the race. He looked exhausted at the finish.

Our day started with a van transfer from our hotel in Trento to a little town called Ora. Stefania got the other riders started on their way and then took me to a Pharmacia in search of cold medicine. Explaining symptoms to a pharmacist without a command of the language is a real challenge, so having a translator was a huge benefit. I got my medicine and began to chase down the rest of the group.

I caught them fairly quickly and rode along some amazingly well-developed bike paths into Bolzano. These bike paths went through vineyards, tunnels and around castles. Since they were formerly train tracks, there was infrastructure that could never be funded for a project that started as a bike path. By the time we arrived in Bolzano, the world had turned decidedly Austrian. Signs were in German first, then Italian. Architecture was Tyrolean. Food became very hearty with good dark bread, pretzels and streusel. We stopped for lunch in the city, which was well-maintained and picturesque. There were lots of pedestrians and bicycles throughout the center of town.

The weather forecast indicated that we might get some rain, but it wasn’t to be. The entire week of following the Giro ended without a drop. That was fortunate, because the climb that was about to begin didn’t need any help to make it a challenge.

The stats for the climb provided a pretty good indication that this would be a tough one. What the stats didn’t show was that when I was stopped at the bottom, my head was on my handlebars and I easily could have fallen asleep. Not the energy level you want to approach a big physical challenge. I decided to use a mental game to get up the climb. Rather than a 5,000 foot climb, I decided that I would do five 1,000 climbs. That way, when I got to 500 feet, I was half way to my first climb rather than only 10% of the way to the top. That tactic worked pretty well for the first 1,500 – 2,000 feet. After that, I had figured out that no matter what I said to myself, this climb was not going to end.

By the time I was 4 km from the top, the racers were only about 30-45 minutes behind me, but I didn’t know that. The police hadn’t cleared the road yet, so I assumed I still had a couple of hours. When I reached the summit, they had blocked the final 500 meters and the racers were only about 20 minutes behind. I would like to think that knowing they were chasing me would have motivated me to increase my cadence over those final 4 kms, but I don’t think Denis Menchov touching my back wheel would have made me go any faster. My heart rate was only idling at about 145-150 bpm, which is high, but not indicative of an all-out effort. I think the cold combined with my body calibrating its hemoglobin for sea-level riding just converged to make this a difficult day. It would have been fun to see how I could have done on such an epic climb feeling well, but getting to the top with adverse conditions creates it own rewards.



I could have turned around and headed down the hill looking for a good vantage point for the finish when I was blocked with 500 meters to go, but by that point, there was a goal to be achieved. I wasn’t going to turn around after getting so close. I got off my bike and pushed it through the grass and crowds parallel to the course until I figured I had reached the elevation of the finish line. I could then be satisfied that I had made it. Right about the line where I declared victory, I found a woman in lederhosen selling streusel and water. With one of each in hand, I found a spot to watch the big screen TV of the racers approaching with the race course in the foreground. Success.

As a frame of reference for how big a 5,000 foot climb is, the descent after the race back to the river valley took 50 minutes. That is 50 minutes with barely the need to turn my pedals.

Here is an article that compares the climbs of this year's Giro to climbs in North America. http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=14733

BTW – the camera decided to come back to life. Not sure how long it will last.