Today, I did the last ride of my two-week 'jump-start' program. I fiddled with the schedule somewhat due to a few days of snowfall and one day of whimsical excessive distance, which I chalked up as two days in one. I'm finishing the program a day early since a snowboarding trip has cropped up in my schedule for tomorrow.
In total, I put in 21 hours in the saddle over the last 12 days. I feel thoroughly jump-started; even my backside toughened up after the first few days of resistance. I kept to my Ironman schedule for running, with a few minor modifications to ensure I had two total rest days for my legs, but swim workouts were cut a little short by bad time management on my part (believe it or not, I do have a fulltime job - although if I didn't work from home at North American working hours, I don't think I would have been able to pull off a riding schedule like this with the limited daylight at this time of year). Only in the last two days, when the pace of the rides increased and included low-gear attacks on hills, did my legs begin to show some tiredness, which seemed like a very good excuse to eat vegan dessert on these days (and I don't need much encouraging).
My final ride of the program was a 70km high cadence, moderate pace venture that took me over to France this morning. I crossed the border at St Gingolph, a town on the south side of Lake Geneva that, from our balcony in Chexbres, looks like a cluster of twinkling lights sandwiched between the mountains and the lake. Up close, St Gingolph is a schizoid little town with a border crossing right in the middle of the high street. One half of the town is unmistakably Swiss, and the other half unmistakably French. After passing through the border from east to west, the road suddenly becomes a minefield of potholes and everyone seems to be carrying a baguette under one arm. On Swiss national day last year, we watched from our balcony as fireworks went up from the east side of the town, while the west side sat in silent nonchalance.
The crossing itself always seemed like a regular party zone when I rode through it on various occasions last summer. Manned by a permanent stock of overpaid and underworked border guards whose job description was to smoke cigarettes and sun themselves while waving cars carrying goodness-knows-what through, I eventually stopped carrying my passport when I realised that they did nothing more than shout allez! allez! and sometimes clapped when I rode through. Today the crossing was much more dull; apparently the winter months only require one man to sit and smoke on either side.
For the locals with bikes: while the road on the far side of the lake is heavy with traffic in the summer months from tourists heading to Evian, mistakenly thinking it's a town worth visiting (for those who haven't been - it's not; this washed up little town boasts nothing but some unremarkable mineral water fountains near the Evian factory; the rest of the town is in a state of disrepair and has all the charm of a parking lot), the road is much less congested and much more enjoyable to ride in the winter months.
I arrived home in exactly 3 hours, and after eating a very large peanut butter and banana sandwich, dug out some pictures that Michael and I took on a ride to St Gingolph last summer. This was the first time we'd been to the other side of the lake, and we sat for a while and stared at the view back over to our side of the lake, realizing we had just entered a parallel universe where people on the other side of the lake must be staring back at us, as we stare at them, every day.
You can just about make out the terraced vineyards and Chexbres in the distance behind me in the first shot. Notice the baguette in Michael's rear pocket in the second shot; we were hoping to do a better job of fitting in with the French than we had with the Swiss at that point.
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