The Cycling Europe Podcast mainly features, well, cyclists. The interviewee in this episode, however, is first and foremost a mountaineer. But he’s not just any mountaineer. His name is Tim Ralph and he’s a seven summiteer; a man who has climbed the seven highest mountains on each of the continents. In the last few years, he’s also taken up cycle touring and has just published a book called ‘A Life Accomplished: From Spain to Norway on a Bike’. So what can mountaineering teach us about cycle touring? What can cycle touring teach mountaineers about climbing mountains? And what happens when an experienced mountaineer sets off to cycle from Europe’s geographical southernmost point at Tarifa in Spain to its northernmost point at Nordkapp in Norway?
Tim Moore has been referred to as ‘Bill Bryson on two wheels’. Any reader of his adventures – both on and off a bike – will appreciate why the comparison is justified. In his first cycling travelogue, he set off on the route of that year’s Tour de France just weeks before the professionals. He went on to recreate ‘the most appalling bike race of all time’ – the 1914 Giro d’Italia – on a vintage bike. More recently he embarked upon a brutal cycle following the stages of the 1941 Vuelta a España. Ever the glutton for punishment, he’s also ‘The Cyclist Who Went Out In The Cold’ who set off on an East German shopping bike along the route of EuroVelo 13, the Iron Curtain Trail… The Cycling Europe Podcast chatted to him in a Tube carriage at the London Transport Museum.
I’ve never entered a cycling sportive in my life… but I’m a sucker for a good poster and these posters from the people who organise the Eroica events have featured several times in the past on CyclingEurope.org. They’ve just sent through the complete set for 2021 – yes, it appears that they are starting again… – and the first of their cycles is actually today in South Africa.
In 2015 I cycled from Tarifa in Spain – the southernmost point of mainland Europe – to Nordkapp in Norway – the northernmost point. It took me over 100 days. In 2019 Dr Ian Walker – an academic at the University of Bath – completed the journey in the opposite direction… in 16 days 20 hours and 59 minutes. In the process he became the fastest person ever to cycle across Europe north to south. That’s no mean feat for a man in his mid-forties who had only taken up ultra-long-distance racing a few years prior to breaking the record. I needed to find out how he did it…
By Ryan McDonald As the location of the highest ski station in Spain and the southernmost in Europe, little can match the majesty of the Sierra Nevada when snow crowns this range of mountains, dominating the landscape as the stunning backdrop to Granada and the iconic Alhambra monument. […]
A photographic retrospective looking back over 11 years of cycling Europe…
