Glasto to Passo Di Giau: did festival fitness help me cycle Maratona dles Dolomites?

Music, crowds, death, and stunning scenery. Peter Kimpton finds alternative forms of motivation to help survive this tough, mountainous one-day rideIf there's one question you might expect to be pondering while tackling one of the toughest one-day cycling events, it is certainly not: what is the meaning of love?Struggling up the penultimate big climb, the Passo Giau - 10km averaging almost 10% gradient to 2,236m, and having already tackled five peaks before it, my thoughts were far more in dark, self-loathing, deep-curse territory. And yet the Maratona dles Dolomites, now a 31-year-old televised Italian institution, based in Corvara, has an annual theme, and this year it was heavily bannered as "Amur" - the word for love in the local Ladin dialect. But why? Continue reading...