The Valley of the Tears runs through the arid interior of Gran Canaria, in a landscape of eroded volcanic ridges with almost no shade and very little traffic. It has become the island's benchmark climb for professional teams training in winter, and its reputation rests on how badly it is paced by almost everyone who rides it for the first time.
The numbers say twelve kilometres at eight per cent. The numbers are misleading. The opening kilometre averages 14.6 per cent, the second 10.7, and the fifth through the seventh sit between ten and thirteen — and then two kilometres near the top drop to almost nothing, which drags the average down and flatters the climb. The final kilometre is sixteen per cent.
A climb this irregular is ridden out of the saddle as often as in it, with repeated surges rather than a settled rhythm. That is the loading case in which frame stiffness stops being an abstraction, and the case a rider-specific laminate is tuned for.
Photography
Michael Blann
Rider
Adam Mcrae
Every SWI is laid up for one rider — their weight, their power, the way they actually ride. One uninterrupted carbon shell, formed in a single mould, built for a body rather than a size chart. It is the whole reason the same mountain feels different underneath two frames.
Michael Blann
For the people who live beneath them the great European ranges are simply a way of life. For everyone else they are scenery. For a cyclist they are none of those things — they are an appointment with your own limits, and the reason a road that goes nowhere useful is worth riding at all.
Michael Blann has spent years photographing the climbs that made the sport: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Ardennes. The pictures are landscape photography of a very high order, but the book is really about what those places do to the people who ride them — an argument built from light, weather and altitude, with recollections from professional riders threaded through it.
If you have ever ridden one of these roads, or intend to, it is the closest thing to being back on it.
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