Small Beginnings?

I remember it all, now, the weak and wobbly knees, the funny walk, the muscle pains reaching from the feet all the way into the shoulders, the strained arms and the cramped hands, and that being out of breath. Some sixty five years ago, a school friend and I decided we were going to spend our summer vacation (four weeks!) to cycle around Switzerland. With camping gear and rations loaded up, we started in Basel, more or less followed the western border with France, crossed through La Chaux de Fonds and further on down to La Brévine, from there out of the Jura and through the vineyards to Lausanne on the lake of Geneva, then east along the lake shore to the top of the lake.
While we were camping there we began to see the immensity of our undertaking and decided it was going to be too much. Already we were nearing the end of our second week in the saddle and had not made nearly half of our objective.
With this thought, we broke camp and pedaled up the valley of the Rhone as far as Aigle, where we began the short cut, following the road north into the Bernese Alps past Gsteig and Gstad and eventually to the shores of the Lake of Thun, where we took another rest. There, my friend threw in the towel, loaded his bike and his gear on the train and went back home to Basel. My home was in Zurich and, hard nosed as always, back then, I reloaded my iron horse and traveled along the lake to Interlaken, then to Brienz and over the Brünig Pass to Lucern. I'm listing all these names so you can look at the map and appreciate the immensity of this undertaking by two boys in their middle teens. I am still proud of that summer! The distant from Basel to Lucerne along the way I just described is 522 km, or so, not counting the numerous detours from the main line to the camp grounds. sightseeing, etc. the distance traveled would easily come close to 400. My total time in the saddle amounted to some 14 days. Add the profile to this distance. Along our route, the easiest part is the short stretch along the Lake Geneva and along the Rhone to Aigle. All else is either up a mountain or down a mountain, the latter a joy, the former often rather hard. Lake Geneva has an elevation of 373 meters, and the Col du Pillon, where the road crosses the alpine ridge and begins its descent is listed at 1546 meters. To make it easier for you to envision this, the difference of elevation is 1173 meters or 3847 feet. On the long climb from Aigle to the ridge of the alps, a slow truck passed us and without any consultation among each other we both reached for a hold on his back and he pulled us up a thousand feet or so until he turned off our route. Else, we pedaled as far as we could and then pushed our bikes up the road until the grade became a bit more friendly.
But while coasting down that wonderful slope from the Brünig to the lake and on to Lucerne I began envisioning the pressure from the density of the traffic in the 'flat lands' of Switzerland and used that as excuse to give up also. I took the train from Lucerne to Zurich and after I had climed the mountainside from the railroad station to our home in Witikon, a suburb of Zurich, I really had enough.
During the many years following I did not do much biking anymore. There was a short period with short excursions with Iivo and Kaarin some twenty years later but nothing to speak about in terms of athletic performance. As time went on, the physical need for exercise of some sort made itself felt and many were the trials to get back into some athletic routine. but year after year it became more and more evident that some low impact activity was needed. Running went out first and then walking and for a number of reasons, some of them rather disgusting, swimming did not come under consideration any more. The latest evolution around this need is 'the toy' which I presented earlier. With the late winter opening small windows of relatively comfortable weather, I started biking again. I just came back from breaking all records I had heretofore established on this side of life and recorded on Runkeeper. I pushed for this one. I just had to show progress! Listen to this and smile with me: 2.12 miles in 19.46 minutes, having burned 117 calories. I estimate the elevation conquered at about 15 feet. Oh, I'm going to celebrate!