The climb I'd been dreading

I'd had the Tourmalet drawn on my map for four months — a thin brown contour line with a name I kept saying wrong. For four months it was just a number: 2,115 metres, a sign at the top, a thing other people did. You can plan a mountain. You can read the gradients and the hairpins and the average percentage. What you can't do is plan for what it does to your morning, which is to sit on your chest from the moment you wake up in the dark and listen to the cold come off the rock.

I left Barèges before seven with frost on the tent fly and two croissants I'd bought the night before going stale in my bar bag. The valley road tilts up so gently at first that you start to think the whole thing has been oversold. It has not. Somewhere past the tree line the kindness ends and the mountain simply stands the road on its end and asks what you intend to do about it.

The middle hours

There is a stretch in the middle of any long climb that belongs to nobody. The summit is too far to believe in and the bottom is too far to retreat to, and you exist entirely inside a ten-metre circle of tarmac and breath. I counted hairpins. I counted them wrong, recounted, lost the number, started again. A man on a featherweight carbon bike floated past, said bon courage without a trace of irony, and was gone. I was carrying his bike plus a tent plus a stove plus, apparently, a small library, and I loved every gram of it and hated it precisely equally.

Four hours up, eleven minutes down, and a sandwich at the top that tasted like the single greatest thing ever assembled by human hands.

The summit, when it came, came the way these things always do — not with a view but with a sign, a cluster of cyclists photographing the sign, and a snack van that should be declared a national treasure. The view arrived a minute later, once I'd stopped wheezing long enough to lift my head: ridge behind ridge behind ridge, blue going to grey going to nothing, the whole spine of the Pyrenees laid out like it had been waiting for me to be quiet enough to look at it.

Then the descent, which is the mountain's apology. Eleven minutes of cold air and tears streaming sideways and the brakes I'd been so careful to bleed in Pau doing exactly what I'd asked of them. I rolled into Sainte-Marie-de-Campan with frozen hands and a grin I couldn't get rid of, found a café with a plug, and wrote most of this before I'd even taken my helmet off. The climb I'd been dreading is behind me now. There will be others. I am, to my own genuine surprise, looking forward to them.