PELOTON DE SADE
Paris travelogue, Group Ride Two
Rémy, the Fluffy Flying Frenchman, invited me on a ride yesterday morning, 9 am leave. I arrived at the appointed hour to find three young men astride bikes, outside the shop. A child from Rouen named Quentin, which sounded like con-ton so it took me a while. Guillaume, a thicker man like myself, and Timothy, from Knoxville, Tennessee.
Timothy is a Nuclear Research Scientist.
Timothy rides 26,000 miles a year. Think about that for a moment. I ride a lot and I’ll put in 6,000 and change this year. Timothy would be leading our ride, scheduled for 114 kilometers (70 miles), through and outside the confines of the City of Light.
Timothy is not a bad man, but he hurts people.
He clips in, rolls away, and churns like a diesel at a comfortable pace for him and painful for those even close to being in his wake. I watched him do it for hours. Sometimes close, and oft times from very far away. The day was spectacular with one exception… okay, two- the wind was howling…
and the whole Timothy thing.
Riding in and around Paris is an incredible experience, you move from pure organized chaos to tranquil pasture, winding forest roads, and farmland, within a couple hours.
Absolute picture book stuff.
And there are details, that the locals take in stride, that I found just marvelous, like stops to fill water bottles at town centers where there are these cast iron hydrants with brass knobs or spin wheels to get them going. We met another group of cyclists at one, during our first stop. It was at that pause in the action that I noticed Guillaume, the guy who was taking up the rear with me, speaking to Rémy in French. Guillaume had said a couple things to me in English, one of them was, “They ride too fast!” as we tried to help each other get back on Quentin’s wheel.
I couldn’t speak, so I nodded.
Further down the road, I noticed that Guillaume had fallen off again. I asked Rémy if we should wait. He said no, because Guillaume turned around. It turns out, the comment I heard at the watering stop from Guillaume was French for “Fuck this shit.”
Our loop took us through Sèvres, Chaville, Versailles, Châteufort, Voisins-le-Bretonneux, Milon-la-Chappelle… and on and on, through stunning villages and some of the prettiest twisty forested roads I’ve seen outside Marin County.
But my favorite was Bullion, a small village where Timothy hit pause on the punishment to look at his favorite church. He stood there and waxed poetically in a solid southern drawl:
“Man, just look at that little church. I love that church, ain’t it just the prettiest thing you ever saw? I’m not religious, I’m an agnostic, really. It’s not about the religion inside, it’s just the way it looks.”
This went a long way to explain why the praying for him to slow down, just a little, was having no effect. I wish that he had had more of a gift for extemporaneous oration, it would have given us more of a break. But off we went… more beauty, more history, more living at the edge of our lactic thresholds.
We stopped at a “T” intersection, in a forest when there was the funniest exchange of the day. Timothy stood astride his Cervelo and pointed off to his left. “We go left here.”, he said. Rémy responded animatedly with, “Left?! No! This way!” (pointing right) “I can see the back of the leaves! They are blowing with the wind! This is the GOOD way!”
Rémy lost the argument and Timothy said, “This is why you shouldn’t let an American lead a French ride.” It seemed as if Timothy of Knoxville softened a bit over the next 20 miles, but it was still a tough pace. We stopped at a light next to an aqueduct, the scale of which could only be described as magnificent. The order of our pace line had shifted so that the child from Rouen was in front of Rémy. I rolled alongside and slapped him on the shoulder. Before I could say, “How you doing?” He said, “I am fucked.”
So, it wasn’t just me.
About 15 miles from finishing our 79 mile ride Timothy said, “Thank you, baby Jesus!”
Oh, no wait… that’s what I said in my head.
Timothy said, “This is where I turn off boys, thanks for the nice ride.”
Quentin peeled off when we hit the outskirts of Paris and I followed Rémy into the 15th arrondissement, expecting to roll into the shop. Instead, my new favorite Frenchman jumped onto a sidewalk and rolled up to a cafe.
We sat at a table in the bright afternoon light and raised two large and lovely beers to each other and to a hard fought, wonderful day on the bike. I said that the first long pull on that gorgeous amber liquid was a religious experience.
He said that he always thinks of his grandmother and a saying that she had for just such an occasion. He said that he didn’t know exactly how to say it in English but it was something like:
“That’s better than Jesus Christ in velvet pants.”
That sounded absolutely perfect to me.