The snows are finished. The wind is warm. The clocks have leapt forward and the sun now shines until dinnertime. All of which means… the season of Epic Rides is here!

Since I began this little log I haven’t said much about riding. This is bizarre and unfair, because I came here, after all, to ride my bike (not to cook and meet boys), and because most people don’t know Chambery for what it really is: a dream town for someone who has no job and great mobility.

It takes three minutes in light traffic to get from my door to the bike path. Another five or ten minutes and you are out and gone—Chambery is behind you, the roads are deserted, only the cows are watching. You can start climbing almost immediately; to get into the Bauges or the Chartreuse, the two ranges that loom to either side of Chambery’s valley, you have your pick of cols—long, steady climbs where you can spend an hour on the switchbacks and see maybe one or two cars, at which point you already feel so far from modern civilized life that you wonder what they’re doing there. You can also go a ways down the valley in any direction and find more cols, bigger, smaller, steeper, according to your liking, or you can get on a train and go to Annecy, Albertville, Bellegarde, or St-Jean-de-Maurienne for more cols. There is an inexhaustible supply of cols. And of course, a good col is like a good book: each time up is an altogether different ride.

My first month in Chambery I was dazzled and utterly uncreative. All of my rides had the same profile: I went up, and then I came down the other side. Then I jet-setted into winter and didn’t ride nearly as much as I used to in Massachusetts. I bought a pair of old Fischer skis for 10 euros and spent most of the winter inelegantly going not very far, Thom coaxing. Skating is hard! I did eventually start to like it, because in fact it was a lot like climbing out of the saddle.

But all of that can wait until next year. Spring is here and finally the ideas are hatching: what if a ride had not one col but several? What if you didn’t have to carry all your food but stopped on the way for a warm, fluffy pastry? (Believe it or not, this was quite a breakthrough for me. I rode my bike for four months in France without a single pastry stop.) Once in a while, you go on what I call a wake-up ride. There are such things as breakthrough rides, which happen in the course of training and which tell you that you’ve gotten stronger. But wake-up rides have to do with your mind, not your body. If a breakthrough is the realization of the change that’s already taken place, a wake-up is the realization of what already is. You wake up to the facts of your condition, which is at once unimaginable and unbelievably real; which is, in a word, freedom.

Even my friend Marc, after four years of riding in Chambery, is subject to the occasional wake-up ride. Our ride on Wednesday, which began just after 11am at the train station in Bellegarde, wound through the cross-country ski resorts turning into white soup in the Jura and ended at 6pm back in Chambery, was leg-wearing, eye-opening, mind-freeing. That is, Epic!

Epic Rides.
What are. An Epic Ride is not your every day ride. It isn’t even simply a very long ride. I don’t know if I can give a good straight-up definition of an Epic Ride but I can try to give some of its qualities, and maybe from the assemblage you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it is. Of course some of these qualities are also found in normal training rides, so maybe it’s really something else that makes a ride Epic, and you have to already have some notion of what that elusive element could be in order to understand something as Epic. (Didn’t Locke have something to say about this? Oh, would that I hadn’t ridden my bike so much during college!) Anyway, an Epic Ride contains:

- a sense of self-affirmation. And I mean a big sense. A great Yes! that bursts from somewhere deep in your lungs out towards the four corners of the earth. Yes, I’m on my bike! Yes, World, I am here and I am coming! This is the best thing I could possibly be doing on this day! (And yes, I’m going to be all day.)

- some period(s) of pretty intense discomfort. Heat, cold, fatigue, hunger, pain in your legs, numbness in your feet (or worse);

- a degree of doubt about whether you will be able to finish the ride;

- recovery from discomfort, redoubled vigor. On happy rides this happens on the bike and not after you’re home and in bed.

- laughs. For some reason being on a bike makes a lot of things in the world very, very funny.

- your fill of sweet, starchy food.

I think those are the essentials. Here are some non-essentials, which are nonetheless part of most Epic Rides:

- major changes in weather or temperature;

- navigating (and a slight skepticism that what exists on a map really exists in the world and will take you home);

- mountains, or the region’s best equivalent;

- a pastry stop.

Yes, OK, to get all that in, an Epic Ride has to be long. But I want to make clear that a Long Ride, plain and simple, isn’t necessarily Epic. Maybe it’ll turn out to be, because in the course of five hours a lot of those elements occur, but length doesn’t automatically give a ride Epic status. You could argue too that an interval workout isn’t Epic because it isn’t long enough, even though there too you have the sense of having gone to the edge, over it and back, which is the best resume of the Epic that I can think of. But lots of things are missing from that kind of ride, namely (and I refer you politely to the list) the sense of being alive in the world (you’re certainly alive when you do intervals, but I think you have very little to do with the world), the eating, and the laughing. However, you can very well adopt an interval mentality at certain moments of an Epic Ride and it’s still perfectly Epic. The important thing is that you’re not in it all the time, you come out of it when you recover—because what really makes a ride Epic is the change from one state of being to another (and another, and another).

Ever since I’ve been capable of doing them, Epic Rides have been the best things I’ve found about cycling.

Thom and me in Prague.

The holidays were a real flurry. I jetted all over the place, first with Jen, who came to visit me in Chambéry, and with Thom, and then with family + Thom. I have yet to root through the pictures from those hectic weeks. Since then I have had a bit more time to think (though still often on trains). On my bike too, though it looks like the errant streak of spring that passed through Chambéry and Fribourg (my two haunts) is coming to an end. The first blast of winter hit this week, keeping me mostly indoors, concocting things in my head and in the kitchen. Jen took the above photograph of me and thought it gave a good account of me: bound for somewhere, facing backwards, absorbed by the passing landscape but smiling really at my own reflection.

Here I am at home in Chambéry on Jen's visit, laying out my favorite kind of breakfast: the vast kind. Foreground, plastic baggie: the inspired Nutella-meusli cookies we baked for Thom (and about which he was completely ambivalent!); just behind, our massive banana bread (which was exquise).

Romping through Geneva with Jen.

In the kitchen at Jolival in Fribourg. (You know Jolival---the much-talked-about artists' enclave in the famous university town.) A supper with Jen featuring another imported item from Savoie, the famous reblochon cheese, melted over pasta and smoked trout. But it was so strong after having kicked around for a few days that the delectable heap you see on our plates was practically uneatable.

London (1 - 4 Dec)

Exactly one month after we met Thom and I returned among the Anglo-Saxons. Actually we were not so much with the English as with the Chinese. We stayed with my cousin Lulu in her new flat and met up with my college pal Jen, on vacation from Cambridge. After being an undifferentiated member of the Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese population in the French alps, I was surprised to see not only perfectly assimilated Asians in London but old Asians--grandmas who spoke, I was sure, English more posh than mine.

Here we are at Lulu's favorite dimsum place in Chinatown (Lulu left, Jen right). As Thom would say, c'était la classe.

This was Thom's whole reason for wanting to come to London: the five-story slide in the Tate Modern.

Browsing old book shops with the boy from the moon.

And a stop at St. John's College, Cambridge.

Fondue night in Chambéry, version suisse--Thom arrived with the cheese (100% vacherin) and by 8 o'clock our little apartment was packed. There is Thom the chef on the right putting on the finishing touches. It was a happy reunion for him and Philippe, my other flatmate, who was his ski buddy in Grenoble.

This is Patrice, who I now realize is the French version of a leprechaun. He was our great benefactor in Ireland, and it was a shame that in the end he wasn't able to come himself. We have him to thank for our whole itinerary, for Joel, and for la folie pure.

Ireland (28 Oct - 4 Nov 2006)

Going to Ireland was my flatmate Florent's idea. It is now universally acknowledged to be one of his best. There we are from left to right: Florent, Violaine, me, Thomas, David, Elise and Aurore.

Like I said, my adventure is already three months old. I live in a small city in the northern alps. I have two flatmates. I am signed up with Chambéry Cyclisme Competition but have yet to really start training again. The French talk all the time about coupure, repos, etc., so after riding all the mini-cols around Chambéry at least once I started doing other things.

Not long after I got here I got a taste of another kind of climbing. I was led by a real mountain goat. There he is up on the left. And here we are at the top of Mt. Aiguille--Yaco (a kayakiste), me, Antonin (mountain goat).