The square in front of San Frediano church, located a few seconds from our flat in Lucca. On the left is the outside seating for the bar that we've adopted for our nightly aperitivi
The slope that begins our daily cycle ride up on Lucca's city walls is, and I don't want to be too melodramatic about this, killing me. In the The Discovery of France book that I was banging on about in earlier postings, the author Graham Robb credits the invention and popular adoption of the bicycle as one of the most important factors in France's development. He writes also on the practicalities of cycling in the late nineteenth century:
Simple truths have been forgotten. As almost everyone knew a hundred years ago, the secret of riding a bicycle as an adult is to pedal just hard enough to keep the machine upright, then to increase the speed very gradually, but without becoming too breathless to hold a conversation or to hum a tune. In this way, with regular intake of water and food, an uncompetitive, moderately fit person can cycle up an Alp, with luggage, on a stern but steady gradient engineered for an eighteenth-century mule.
Having spent several years cycling around France to research the book he mostly likely knows his stuff, but I still find getting some speed up the best way to get up a short slope. I've not tested this theory on the longer slopes of an Alp yet. The old dog-like wheezing sound my bike gives out when only on the flat makes me think I'll need to trade up before I can be competitive on the Col du Tourmalet.
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