Portugal 2004

The Portugal Daughter

No Woman, No Pause

Wombat in Portugal

In my long mountain bike racing career I’ve never ridden harder or pushed myself further than a race I’d never heard of, and hadn’t trained for.

SuperTravessia Garmin was the subject heading of the email that came in March 2004, and since I get a fair amount of junk email marked “Super”, I nearly deleted it.
But it was in fact a personal invitation from the race organizer to come do what no women had attempted yet in his two year old race: breathe hard for 11 days in a row, an average of 109 km (68 miles) per day.

Off road .

Every two wheel person knows there is a big difference between Paved Miles and Unpaved Miles….and who doesn’t know about Lost Miles taking more energy than Familiar Miles? I would be in for some serious effort.

He assured me there would be nightly stops at good hotels, and my own intution told me that the food in this country might be a treat. As a semi-professional eater (all bikers are) I value any place that doesn’t have an expression for “food service”.

Of course I told him I could come. I had four days to train, in between teaching gigs in Alaska and Boston. A decade has passed since my last UCI World Mountain Bike Championship, The last time I’d pinned a number on myself for any reason was….let’s see…the 1996 World Bike Messenger Championships here in San Francisco. To qualify, a rider had to pay a $75 entry fee. In the ensuing dot-com boom, I taught overworked women to enjoy fat tire riding. Not racing, just off-pavement Accident AvoidanceI had forgotten how to pre-worry. Instead of envisioning a broken arm on one of my errands (these negative fantasies were part of the package when I was contending for medals) all I could think about was :would I remember to write down the names of the hand-crafted cheeses, and sketch a couple of farmhouses sometime after one of the grueling stages?

I looked at my calendar and decided to go for it despite all the blacked-out busy days bordering the crucial two week slot. A Trans-Portugal competition would meet all five requirements for a reasonable life, to wit:

it gets me out of the house
it gets me out of the country
it gets me out of an existential rut
I get to eat new, strange foods and meet new friends
I can postpone “groan up’ stuff on the summer to-do list

People like me live by the motto: “Ready…FIRE!….Aim!” We dive into adventure without tons of planning and forethought, just to see what will happen.
Call it built-in randomness. It keeps you on your toes. Planner types always seem to know what is coming down the road, I’ve never been able to relate.

I know Fate sometimes tweaks those plans….and I’m willing to admit my wimpiness before Fate and her sister Fortune. Perhaps it is the Crapshoot Cult…but I already belong to other tribes, other cults. Breast Cancer Club. Women Who Barge Into Boy’s Clubs. The Guild of Girls Who Maddened Dad . The Women’s Mountain Bike & Tea Society.

Female Entrepreneur’s Enclave. Life Is Too Short To Eat Bad Cheese Club. Oh, and I mustn’t omit the “Church of the Rotating Mass’. The devout ride nearly any kind of bike, we don’t care if it’s suspended (life has enough suspense for most of us), multi-geared, single speed, ugly, pretty or covered with mud. It’s a tool that we ride, not an object of worship. The ride is the thing ( if pushed to admit we worship anything).

Perhaps the other thing I truly respect is time.

I knew that I’d only have two weeks, and Portugal produces roughly two hundred artisan cheeses, A gnawing sense of duty requires that I try most of them. Serra de Estrela. Tres Igrejas. I’d read about them, and now I was going to meet them on their own turf.

The first line I taught myself to say is “Que e isto?” (“What’s this?”), the second line “Estou aqui pela comida” (“I am here for the food”).

Many bike racers I know have morphed into chefs, some quite accomplished (Emile Waldteufel sprints to mind) thanks to the well-known equation

Huge miles+massive, unfussy food intake =success in the long stage races in far-off lands.

If you have to eat 3000-5000 calories a day, there is no time for fussing about the lack of Cheerios, burritos, or whatever magic foods a person might cling to..

My past experience with long stage races taught me that I would have trouble eating enough. I signed up for the Clean Plate Club. Having raced Ore-Ida back when it was the premier stage race in the world opened my eyes to the unfortunate fact of eating disorders among elite athletes…and made me realize how lucky I failed the entrance exams for Anorexia Adherents and Bulimic Bikers, Inc. Needless to say, as the designated Woman racing with 20 men, I intended to be a “credit to my gender “(apologies to Warren Zevon).

This means eating with both hands, and maybe even my feet.

On July 22^nd I met the other American riders at the airport in Lisbon (we would have to wait til after the 11 day event to check out the amazing city center) and Antonio drove us the 6 hours north, into the hinterlands called “Tras Os Montes” (beyond the mountains”).

After the bikes were built up, he gave us our navigational tool, the Garmin global positioning system receiver). We practiced with them on the first 20 km of the 1200 kms we would ride. …. No need to look for pink surveyor’s tape, arrows on cardboard, and other marks that usually keep a hypoxic herd of dirt racers on track. No, we would have to have the presence of mind to actually Look Down At The GPS. This would prove harder for some that for others….as Antonio put it: “The dimension of your mistake depends on the degree of your concentration”, I’ve often believed that if races included a ‘brain’ element, I might be able to do a bit better than usual. I trust my brain…under normal conditions.

Our shakedown ride was a magical, unpressured tour through a tiny ten-house town with a very sleepy central square, a town named… Labiados (hmmm…”he lips”? “The labia”? ooh, a sign to remind me to bring that Bepanthene cream we got in our goody bags?) where we all got lost at the first intersection, and got re-educated about the Garmin instrument. A few kilometers away (on a climb of course) the dogs at a nearby farm challenged my “bike-ipoise”—We just pedaled on and pretended this wasn’t a Dantean test.

Wild shrubs like cistus perfumed the air… Our course was designed to showcase Portugal’s own secret backyard. Most Portuguese live in cities, far from the outlying subsistence farm lands with their own dilects, their own food styles. Antonio has for over ten years, worked to change that.

From northeastern edge of the country, along the Spanish border, to the bottom left hand corner on the Algarve coast we rode tiny byways, medieval cobbles, farm roads.. For an entire day on stage 3 we rode the precise border: our left foot was spinning in Spain while our right foot pedaled in Portugal

Being something of a space cadet, (read: ADD) I knew that they might have fun trying to find ME as I tried to find my way back to the course.

When I ride for fun, I always stop at intersections, do an about-face, and study the intersection from the other direction. It helps my built-in camera recognize a familiar location. Without this simple trick I would be “l’Austin Space”. .

I’ve never ridden across any country, not even any state. . My usual training these days consists of back and forth to the library, post office, and grocery store, with a weekly fun ride of about 2-3 hours (usually on dirt).

Antonio Malvar was the guy who brought mountain biking to his country, organizing World Cup races, leisure tours, and operating the country’s only mountain bike shop near Lisbon. In his email, he said there needed to be women in his race, and he was happy do everything in his power to get me over.

If you have been in sports as long as I have, in a “men’s “ sport, that is, this is the nicest thing a person could possibly say.

Here in the USA, the governing body of mountain biking, the sponsors, everyone, has their eyes on the men who win the races. Even after 20 years of concrete evidence that women ride bikes, love riding offroad, want to have good bikes and decent gear, it’s rare to see much energy directed at women . It’s beginnng to happen, but nobody is inviting women (perhaps they invite Paula Pezzo, the amazing Italian gold medalist and pin-up girt of mountain biking) to races to even out the gender balance.

I was looking forward to “Tortugal” (my husband’s term) like it was going to be a vactation.

. The rules of the race stated that from the minute you left in the morning until you reached the destination (always some tiny hilltop medieval town) you were completely on your own: you carried all your water (or filled it up in the town fountains, or in a café), food, tools to fix a flat or a broken chain, and most importantly, you got all you route finding advice from a small tool firmly anchored to your handlebars, the Garmin GPS receiver (correct term?).

If I could remember to slow down at the intersections, I would then see ESQ or DIR in block letters, telling me to go left, right (or straight on, when there were no words at all).

The little black arrow on the screen would lie directly atop a blue line in the center of the screen. One or two taps on a button below would zoom in or out, letting me see the general trend of my travel. There was even an arrow that pointed to north. More than once, I saved myself several km by remembering that since it’s a North-to-South race, I was riding along the blue line, but in the wrong direction…