Suffering and scavenging at the Tour de Lesotho

The Tour de Lesotho is billed as "Africa's toughest cycling challenge", and involves four major mountain passes and some 2100m of vertical ascent. The short version is an 84km route with "only" 1000m of elevation gain.

I rested on the starting line, set apart by my pale skin and unshaven legs, shivering in the morning cold. I felt good. I had been riding my road bike for 3 days, and was starting to get a feel for it. I knew the climbing wouldn't be a problem, though I was anxious about the steep and twisting downhill sections. My internet research on fast cornering and sharp descents turned up the following gem:

"Cornering requires reflexes to dynamics that are easily developed in youth, while people who have not exercised this in a long time find they can no longer summon these skills."

Not comforting. I was a late cornerer. I have not developed those dynamics.

Race profile: not your average Sunday ride

It is difficult to describe what it means to attempt an 85km ride across multiple mountain passes at a race pace on an unknown bike, having barely ridden at all in the last six months. I imagine it is something like rolling out of bed on a Saturday morning, drinking an instant coffee and then jogging a quick marathon. Or stripping down to your shorts one mild day and swimming the English Channel. It is, in a word, inadvisable. But because my foolish pride borders on something worse, I wasn't just riding to finish; I was eyeing the competitors with my mind set on winning.

It took approximately five minutes for me to come to my senses - five miserable, lung-bursting, oxygen-deprived minutes. The group in which we had started was shattered, but the pace car was still close in front of us, indicating that the racers had not yet actually begun racing. I had forgotten about the suffering aspect of cycling, proof that memory of pain and misery grows mild with time. Five minutes into the race, the old survival instincts were making it pretty clear that winning wasn't going to be in the cards.

There is a pattern in these things. Eventually, and in my case very quickly, realism overrides ambition, you let the long-legged people who actually train for these events race off ahead, and you settle into a group where the suffering is only a mild torture, something like being punched in gut every couple of minutes. It was, after all, a beautiful day. We were riding clear roads under an azure sky, the fields alive with cosmos, highland flowers shimmering in pink and white and violet. The Basotho of surrounding villages stood on their doorsteps, wrapped in blankets, and cheered us on.

The pace remained difficult for me, and the hills made more miserable by the knowledge that they were too small to register on the profile. We passed a rider who had flatted and was getting into a car. The lucky bastard, I thought to myself. He's escaped the climbs.

And then Ha Relajoe was upon us. As if suddenly angry, the road turned brutally upward and disappeared around a bend. In the distance, impossibly high, we could see its continuation over the top of the pass. I had the questionable advantage of knowing the road, having driven several times to our destination at Mohale Dam. Here, the Jetta coughs and sputters and refuses to climb in anything but the 1st gear, and even then it is reluctant.

I was slow, slower than everyone else. One by one, my fellow riders bled into the blurry horizon. I was doing all I could. I zigzagged across the road to lessen the grade. I massaged my quads with my hands to melt away the cramps, and forced myself not to look up. Just. One. Stroke. At a. Time. I was all alone. Trying so hard not to think ahead, not to hear the mind saying, This is just the beginning. The second climb is twice as bad.

Eventually pain is replaced with numbness, and time becomes irrelevant. There are no more riders and there is no more race; there is only the black tar, the watery heat, the pushing of a pedal. And mystically, the top of the hill appears though it seems impossible to in fact be arriving.

At the crest of the pass was a Powerade feeding station, and a large group of children lining the road. The Powerade barely in my hand, the first kid approached. He was about 10 years old, with bare feet and the lost eyes of malnourishment. Without warning, he reached for the drink in my hand. I threw up an elbow to block, almost losing balance. I made an angry, defensive sound, which I think was a bark.

There were dozens in his wake. They ran alongside, pointing at the Powerade, pointing at my bike bottles. "The bottles!" they shouted enthusiastically. Thinking like Bond, I took a last gulp and sent the Powerade in a tall, lazy arc into the roadside bushes. It was an effective decoy - they cleared the road to chase the bottle, and I made safely away into the descent.

The space between passes went by too quickly, and as the flat turned again to mountain, the children increased in number once more. And in greater numbers came greater aggression. My speed was in the range of that attainable by tricycles, making it very easy for even small children to jog or walk along side.

There was no longer any pretense of cheering. They just wanted the bottles. "Give us the bottle!" the mantra rang out. "Give me my bottles!" I wondered if they would use force, knowing I did not have the strength to stop them.

They were all around me, like the fans on the Alpe Huez, like vultures circling a dying animal, and it is amazing that none fell under my wheels. Or perhaps not amazing, given how slowly I was moving. The requests were increasing in creativity. They congregated in the steepest section and solicited me, some making furtive grabs toward the bottle cages. There was the positive approach: "Give me a drink and I will push you up the hill;" and there was its complement: "Give us your bottle, or we will kill you." Some were a bit out of touch, like the one who ran alongside and tried to sell me an endangered spiral aloe.

I should be more forgiving, the children's aggressiveness being brought on by passing tourists stopping to give candy and money (because they are indeed cute when they are not threatening to kill you), and the pros who I am sure were ditching their water bottles in these climbs. And nevermind the anachronism of 300 South Africans riding road bikes costing R18,000 ($3,000) past children whose families will be lucky to see a tenth of that in an entire year. But I was hardly in an introspective state... And so I barked, and I swatted, and I elbowed, and I did everything I could to make it to the top of the pass without being pulled to the ground for a gulp of water.

I did make it, and I made it somewhere in the middle of the short race group. I crossed the finish line, and collapsed in a heap. It had been a devastating ride, and I was thrilled to have done it, though I would not walk properly for some days.

It is difficult to conceive that the riders in the long race had done two mountain passes more than me in almost the same amount of time. Compounding my awe, as I took the shuttle up to the finish, I saw several teams riding back to Maseru, willingly taking on another 120km of riding and 1000m of elevation gain, as if what they had just done was insignificant.

It did occur to me on the drive home, as I watched herdboys and their goats through the car window, that I have the home court advantage - only a minority of the riders had ever been to Lesotho before the race. So next year I'm doing the long race, and with a few more days of training, I'm pretty sure I can win it.