Rowman, let's talk about how I fared on the longest climb in the world
Rowman, let's talk about how I fared on the longest climb in the world. Alto de Lettras, let's cure that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Rowman Podcast. Roadman, welcome back to another roadman cycling podcast. I am in Colombia at the moment and I've podcasted in some strange locations in my short but colorful podcast and career but this has to rank up there as the very strangest, oddest place I've ever podcast from. If you could see me now, I'm going to hunker down on my knees with the podcasting mic perched on a log and a cable run across my laptop to record the audio, the room could not be set up worse acoustically with hard surfaces everywhere, there's music playing outside, the fan and the air conditioner are going in the background, but it's all going to add to the experience. I want to talk to you today about how I fared on auto de letras. It's the longest climb in the world and I know some people have come back and given me Strava segments on other climbs like there's another one in Columbia somewhere that's 90 kilometers, but I've been reliably informed by the locals that that's not actually a 90 kilometer climb because there's the sense in the Middle of it. So this is actually the longest climb in the world, which is straight through just climbing And I want to talk to you all about that today, but before I do it old man Let me just remind you how I keep this podcast show on the road and it's true patreon Small independent creators they rely on your support they rely on your sense of goodwill and generosity and decency to fund their pursuits and I'm one of those small independent creators. You subscribe to Netflix, you subscribe to Spotify, those huge corporations and they don't need your help. But the small independent podcasters like myself really really do. And it's the difference between us being able to bring the podcast and not. So if you'd like to contribute and buy me the price of a point of beer once a month to say thanks for the efforts, thanks for honking down and ruining the circulation in your ankles. Well, you're trying to bring this podcast from such a bizarre position, then way you can do that is head on over to patreon and it's patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore Walsh. And that's where you can do it from. Okay, Roman, let's dive in and talk about auto de Lettras. It is a epic crazy climb, but I suppose before I dig into the actual climb, my preparation from it was less than ideal. A twist of my ankle very badly and you would think that alcohol was involved but it wasn't. It was actually going out for a roid and I was in a region in Columbia which is beautiful if anyone gets a chance to visit a call Cartagena. I'm working on the pronunciation as I'm over here. Cartagena. And to beat the heaps we are starting to roid at like 5am or I was leaving the bedroom at 5am and on a twisty staircase in the dark. I rolled my ankle and I rolled it bad enough that I was limping for, I'm gonna say, three days since I was limping from struggling to bear weight on it. So I was tempted to pull the plug and not do although the let-ras but it's a long long way to come and not tick off one of your bucket list climbs which is literally just around the corner from me. So I had to suck it up a few anti-inflammatories and it didn't give me too much problems until about 60k in. But right, let me talk to you about the climb, let me talk to you about the day. So we started out super early, rolled out I think at 6am for Alt of the Letras, stayed in a town I'm here again tonight called Honda, spelt the same as the Boyse I got motorcycle I'm a manufacturer of Honda. I rolled I think about 45 minutes to the next town called Marquetta and that was our warm-up and gentle undulating road. It was like 400 meters of climbing or something. Then you get into Marquetta, had a coffee, had a culk, chilled out a little bit, went to start the climb, realized I punctured on a tubeless, tried to pump it.
Look it wasn't giving me much love
Look it wasn't giving me much love. I don't like tubeless at the best of times and I just taught you know what this is going to be playing in my mind all day. So I sucked it up and I actually changed the tubeless back to Klyncher which took a little bit of time. You know if you've changed tubeless yourself you know you end up getting fucking glue all over your hands and all over your jersey. That's quite a miserable just way to start your day. But look it was the way it had to be. So got rolling and in hindsight given my lack of training and since I've been traveling and my bad ankle I probably started to climb a little too hard. Rode the forest. So it's broken down. I think I said in the last preparation podcast there on Tuesday. The climb is really divided by towns. When I say towns, I'm not talking about towns like swords or nays back home. These are small towns. They're like, some of them could be like 10 makeshift dwellings of like someone has put together like a corrugated steel fencing and pile some bricks behind and interestingly I was chatting to where Torogoid Thomas pronounced Thomas that I keep doing anyway in ruin with the Irish pronunciation. Thomas runs a cycling Columbia, I'll link it up in the description it's a great Torr company and he showed me the ropes out here but I was talking to him about the temporary dwellings on the side of Alto de Lettras and basically they're squatters and they come along and they chance their arm with a bit of corrugated metal and to see if anyone moves them on and if they don't, there are a lot of you sticks and maybe a roof onto it and as the years go by they start adding a few bricks onto it and these sort of squatters end up building permanent residents but they are very rough and ready. The houses, the people are lovely and every place we stop everyone's just. Language barrier, I speak absolutely zero Spanish embarrassingly enough and I don't get to come back again until I learn a little bit of the language so that might be something to consider when I get home. But I've played the game of international charades, you know that one? Or you don't know how to speak the language so you just kind of repeat the word louder and more brashly in English. Coca-Cola! And then they seem to work, it seems to understand. But no the people are absolutely lovely and these are people who have absolutely nothing like they live on you know I think the average wage across Colombia I could be wrong but I heard this statre is like $200 there's an exceptional gap between the rich and the poor in Colombia and some of these people are living off like a couple of dollars a day and when you stop like they're willing to share which it are like sharing these little mini bananas bokadias which it are giving you water and you know there's lovely lovely people in Colombia so the climb it's those towns so a town of 20k a town of 40k a town at 60k they cost 60k gates a hell I get that out in a second and then the top is at 80k so the first 40k I rode it I rode it easy but I rode it with the guys Thomas and another lad from Costa Rica Henry boat nice guys vocal boy riders but both 60 kilo riders. I'm 80 kilos before Christmas so in all honesty I'm probably 82 83 kilos at the moment and rode with them didn't have a power meter on it but probably looking at sitting 300 watts for the first three and a half hours three hours with the lads and it started getting sticky then when I hit about 2,500 meters of altitude and because it was a training road it wasn't a race it was It's a little bit lackadaisical, you know, I had a big handlebar bag with me, with a lock for my bike in it, the camera, tools, bunch of other stuff that I didn't need, which probably added another two kilograms onto the bike. And didn't fuel brilliantly just because it was a training ride, and it was just mucking about going open. But it is a climb, even though you're out training, it is a climb that actually demands more respect than that, because it's hard and you're climbing for, I can't remember what you thought in a right time but it was in around five and a half hours and there was cruising up and I stopped and took some pictures and things along the way and I recorded a video blog which I would get out on the YouTube channel when I get home but you can't go up a climb that long without showing some respect and I paid for that at about 60k in and the call of the gate to hell because you've already been riding for, what, four, four hours or so all uphill, almost no break, small couple of downhill, it's been talking short short, like a couple of hundred meters and you hit 60k and it's the steepest part of the climb and in here you're hitting pitches of, it's not wildly steep but consistent pitches of kind of eight to ten percent and those pictures of 8 to 10% when you've been riding for that long you haven't fueled well it really really bites and I started getting touches of cramp around then and I was at the point where I knew that if I pulled out the power I was gonna cramp because I had that you know that sensation where just the muscle toys up and it's like calf goals hamstring goals quad goals I had that for one or two pedal revolutions and I was like I need to ease this back a bit because you can't cramp on this climb like you literally would have ended up walking up the side of the hill.
It's one that you can't free wheel for a little bit to get your…
It's one that you can't free wheel for a little bit to get your breath back and as you get a further and further past the gates of hell at that 60k point the altitude just bites and bites and bites like it tops out at the very top at over 4,000 meters and if anyone hasn't ridden that that's our altitude before. I'd describe like being at over 2,500 meters as like Like, it's like someone has your head in a bathtub, and your head's underwater, and they're only bringing you up for enough oxygen to keep you alive, and then they're sticking your head back in the bathtub again. Like, it's fucking grim at that altitude. And for the last six, seven K, I actually felt a little bit dopey. Like, I was looking at my hands on the handlebars, and I was like, I can see my hands on the handlebars, but I've no connection to them, I've no ownership to them. It's like, I'm not mine, they're like, just I'm looking at a set of hands on TV. They're not linked up to it. If I want to go left, these hands won't go left. And I was having some proper weird trippy shit with the altitude going on. And look, it's such a long climb. You go through absolute rollercoaster of emotions. Like I rode the Force 40k with the two lads and then the last 40k on my own. And it's a lot of a long time and you're going through just bizarre head spaces, everything from reflecting on the poverty that you're cycling through. I don't want to label it poverty because it's poverty compared to Western terms. It's more of a simple life. You're going past huts and dwellings that are very different to what I'm used to back in Ireland than you're thinking about those and then your tarts are drifting to the pain and then it's drifting to just family situations that you probably wouldn't ponder on a day-to-day basis because you don't have that time and that headspace and yeah it gives you a lot of a lot of alone time a lot of me time a lot of tinking time and you know I know you say you don't need to go to Colombia and ride up 81 kilometer climb to get some headspace but I'm just kind of reporting on what what I felt and the thoughts and emotions I had gone up and getting to the top I was yeah I was fucking delighted to be finished if I want to. It was a long long training, Roy. Very different buzz to race. Like a friend asked me today, was it the hardest climb I've ever done? You know what? No, it wasn't. Like I've ridden 5k climbs in races or 3k climbs in races. Like in a break or a gush on a go solo and like your lactates coming out your aways and you're twisted inside out and you can't breathe, you can't see and you just, you know you've got to push on more because if you can't breathe and you can't see that everyone else's experience and that pain and that suffering, it's very, very different to that. This is like a battle against yourself for the day and it's a battle of self-control, trying to pace it and not go too hard, not go too deep ever and it's a very different battle and I know people that ride sporties consistently like people that go out and ride the Mallorca tree one to the whole route. This is a battle they're well accustomed to fighting. But for me as a racer I'm literally just used to sitting on the wheel, following the wheel, don't let the wheel go, the pace will drop down at some point in the race. The brake will get easy once it's established. It's a very different rhythm to it and I really enjoyed it and it's something I can see myself doing a little bit more of and definitely punctuate in the race and season with, you know, over to the stealthy, over to do it, over to, you know, the really iconic climbs like Rocker Cobra and Jaron, which I love and they're just experiences more than just the bike. And to finish up, because my legs are gone pins and needles in this position. And I'm not sure even the quality of this could be acoustically terrible. And you'd be like Anthony, worst podcast, you've ever put out. Well, look, I want to get it out. I didn't want to break our run a podcast.
Might even appear as two podcasts on the same day on Friday because…
This might even appear as two podcasts on the same day on Friday because the internet speed here is like 2 megabytes a second upload speed, which is absolutely catastrophic. But in summary, I'm going to talk more about Columbia probably in common podcasts, because it's a country that's very, has a very troubled past and a very colorful past. And I know when I said I was coming out to Columbia, almost every one of my friends and family express safety concerns. and their opinions were almost entirely foreign from watching narco's on Netflix, and safety was just a concern I heard over and over again, but haven't spent over a week here at this stage. It's such a beautiful country and not at one point have I ever felt a little bit unsafe. Quite the opposite. Every single person I've met, even though I don't speak the language and I'm as dead referred to, a good angle. They've gone out of their way to make me feel at home safe welcome and if you're a cyclan fan like the roads like I've only scratched the surface and it's a country I'm gonna come back to time and time again because it's astonishing scenery it's astonishing roads it's breathtaking so I absolutely cannot wait to fill you in a little bit more on all that road men this is my report from alto de la tras I'm gonna chat the again tomorrow. Thanks for listening to my son's drug ramblings. Before you go anywhere, our first ever romance summit had aired back in December. I brought together 30 experts and they shared with me their secrets on how to biohack your physiology, how to melt away body fat and smash your cycling goals. Since airing that back in December, I've just been in on days of my Instagram DM's Twitter direct messages with requests to get access to this material. I had it locked up in the vault, but I've decided to open access to this material for you, the podcast listeners at the Roadman Podcast. So to get access to this, it's a one-time payment of 47 euro, and you're gonna have all the interviews, all those secrets forever. You're gonna have the videos and the MP-trays. In there, I've got interviews with World Tour Mechanics, nutritionists, sports psychologists, bike-fit experts, and some of the legends at a sport like Tyler Hamilton and Pete Sten. Over 30 hours of content in this members area that I've created for you guys. So if you wanna get access to that, the way to do it, it's to head on over to this URL, www.roadmansomit.com forward slash 2021. I'll give you that again. It's www.roadmansomit.com forward slash 2021. That's numerical. The link to that is in the bio. get it, check it out, learn this, take it in, because this is short to set you on the right path for 2021.