Nuts in June

Rahul was evidently in much discomfort. His feet kept sliding off the pedals and he was swerving around as if the sugarcane juice he just drank had been spiked with a generous amount of vodka. I was trailing closely behind and noticed, to my alarm, that his ears were turning bright red. Either the man was receiving signals from an alien spaceship or he was suffering from severe heat exhaustion.

We, Rahul, Ranjan and I, were cycling from Delhi to Manesar to attend a workshop that was being conducted by the bosses in our ad agency in the misguided notion that it’ll make their employees more productive. It was noon and the temperature was steadily rising on the Jaipur highway. The workshop was scheduled to start at 3 pm, and it turned out that we had chosen one of the hottest days of the year for our little expedition.

Rahul was cycling for the first time since his school days, and to his credit, he hung on gamely, not complaining even once. But now, he was in danger of seriously falling ill.

We stopped at a Haldiram’s on the highway and convinced him to call it a day. He had done about 40 km, a remarkable feat under the circumstances. We made arrangements for him and his bicycle to be picked up by another colleague who was heading to the workshop in a car.

Ranjan and I carried on. We increased the pace, two cocky veteran cyclists who surely can’t be bothered by something as trifling as a 45C heat wave. After a few kilometres, we were slowed down by a winding climb and a ferocious head wind that felt like riding into the arms of a flame thrower. Soon, it was Ranjan’s turn to succumb.

He collapsed under a tree, complaining of headache and nausea and insisted that we go no further. His lips had turned pale and he looked like a man who had come in the way of a Mike Tyson uppercut.

Surprisingly, I was feeling all right, and rather unsympathetically, I egged him on. “No pain, Ranjan,” I said pouring water over his head. “No pain.” The phrase is from Ranjan’s three-year-old son’s favourite movie Rocky, starring Slyvester Stallone. It’s what Ranjan says to his son to stop him crying when he hurts himself, but I don’t think Ranjan appreciated my choice of motivational words now.

I was very impressed with my own performance in the heat. “I have lived for many years in the South and my body is used to all this,” I boasted to Ranjan as he reluctantly got onto his bike again. It was soon after that I got my attack of heat cramps.

We had stopped for a sip of water when I suddenly felt my legs freeze. I couldn’t move an inch and was rooted to the spot. It was like being paralysed from the knee up. I wailed for Ranjan who, gallantly ignoring his problems, came to my rescue and helped me remove the bike from between my legs. I was in a state of panic. I talked hysterically about stretchers and ambulances. The ‘No Pain’ philosophy obviously didn’t apply to me.

The people travelling on the Delhi-Jaipur highway were then treated to the intimate act of Ranjan vigorously massaging my thighs. After a few minutes, the circulation slowly returned to my legs. I discovered that I couldn’t walk for more than a few steps or even stand still for long without getting badly cramped again. The only thing that seemed to work was riding. For the next hour or so, till we reached our destination, we cycled non-stop in the midday heat, Ranjan and I in our different worlds of agony.

We made it to the venue just in time. It was one of those landscaped resorts, the sort of place where families who aren’t really adventurous spend a weekend in the swimming pool and pretend that they went on a real holiday. An exhausted Ranjan was looking forward to a shower and a nap, but I insisted that he first fetch me a glass of water mixed with salt.

I waited for him on my bicycle outside the reception area, going around in circles like a stunt man in a local fair. A couple of gardeners who were pruning the bushes nearby put down their shears and came over to stare at me. I drank the life-saving salt concoction while still riding and got off only after I was certain that I wouldn’t turn into a statue again.

I found the workshop surprisingly tolerable, possibly because I wasn’t on a hospital bed in the heart of Haryana attached to an intravenous drip and attended to by a local doctor fresh from milking his cows.

Our return trip to Delhi the next evening was also uneventful. The weather was better and all we had to do was survive the Jat drivers on the way who seemed intent on mowing us down.

After our misadventure, Ranjan and I have sworn to never attempt anything like this in the summer heat again. Unless, of course, there’s a frightful office picnic on the horizon.

Lance Armstrong vs The French

There are two Texans that no Frenchman or woman would want to be seen dead in a Parisian ditch with. One of them spent eight years in the White House and the other has seven consecutive Tour de France wins to his credit.

While the first, George W Bush, has slunk back into his hole in the Texan outback, the second, Lance Armstrong, has crawled out of retirement to torment France again. No doubt French blood is boiling from Nantes to Nice.

The nation has never really recovered from Lance’s first Tour win in 1999. You’d look pretty silly too if you organised one of the world’s toughest endurance events around your greatest passion, and a brash young foreigner climbs out of his hospital bed after battling life-threatening cancer and wins the damn thing in a canter.

The French coped by claiming that he was pumped up on banned substances though no tests have been able to prove this.

Lance’s return trips weren’t greeted with raucous cheers befitting a defending champion and hero, but with the French people standing around their countryside yelling Dope as he whizzed past, often in a blur of yellow. Leading newspapers like L’Equipe and Le Monde competed with each other to insult the American.

You’d think Lance would take the hint and stay away. Instead, he kept coming back, he kept winning and he kept pissing off the French by testing negative in every one of the hundreds of drug tests.

In 2004, Lance was dating Sheryl Crow and she followed him like a giddy groupie throughout the tour. Imagine going into a French restaurant with your rock star girlfriend when you know that the waiters are likely to spike your drink and Gallic undercover agents are possibly lurking around the restroom trying to siphon away precious drops of your pee.

Lance hasn’t exactly had a lot of nice things to say about the French either. For example, in 2006, during his speech at the ESPY awards, he remarked about the French world cup soccer team, “All their players tested positive… for being assholes”.

Preparations for Lance’s comeback Tour this year haven’t gone too well. He’s already had a run-in with the French anti-doping agency, calling one of their men ‘suspicious’ and refusing to be tested after a practise session. His favourite bike was stolen and he also broke his collarbone after suffering a nasty crash in one of the warm-up races. It’s highly unlikely that any French tears were shed.

Indeed, if there’s one thing that’s going to put the French off their wine and cheese more than a cancer-surviving Texan winning seven Tours is an ageing, retired, cancer-surviving Texan training with a broken collarbone winning his eighth. I don’t know what the headlines in L’Equipe and Le Monde will say but I suspect the word Dope will feature prominently in them.