It is a fact well acknowledged that practice quite often makes perfect. Indeed – merely habituating oneself to an action makes a person, more often than not, proficient in that particular regard, and the art of perfecting said unqualified action is often known as training.
I can assure you, dear reader, that we have done no such thing.
WHAT?!
Yes. Now, this may seem absolutely nuts considering that we’re going to be living on two wheels for the better part of a quarter of a year, but, realistically, it’s not something you can really prepare for…Seldom does a weekend cycle ride see you strap a flak jacket and don your Duke of Edinburgh backpack in order to recreate your pannier’s sum weight. While working full time, the cumulative effect of distance riding and camping everyday is not a realistic possibility. In short, like much of an adventure, it’s something to be improvised and learned.
So, how have we prepared? Well, aside from swinging the leg over a road bike of a Saturday and getting a little out of puff, it’s been limited. We completed a dry run touring through the Black Forest in the summer of 2017, and this helped us get a taste for the rigours of riding bikes in the sun laden with panniers, and we’ve tried cutting down on chocolate, but in truth, none of this is going to go far to furthering our Alp-conquering ambitions…
The Hope?
Well, the one thing we do have on our side is time. Whilst the matter of fitness is important, there’s no reason why it can’t be picked up on the road. Why – with little else other to do than pedal mile after mile, for month after month, one would hope that fitness is something we’ll pick up fairly quickly, and with a good number of miles before we reach any mountain range, we can perhaps put faith in being a little foolhardy…?
