Cycling in tandem

The easy way

The cyclist: sedentary, and happy to remain so. At the age of 43, I've never been for a bike ride of longer than two miles.

The "challenge": you're dropped off at the top of a valley in Austria, and take a week or so to coast right back down to the bottom. For "pedals", read "footrests".

The training: the company was called - promisingly, I thought - Freewheel, and its friendly boss, John Lightwood, told me that fitness wasn't a requirement. I decided to test this claim to the utmost, confining my diet to high-cholesterol comfort food - after all, the heavier I was, the quicker I'd go - and cutting out all exercise except strolling to the shop for cigarettes, of which I smoked an extra five a day.

The ride: I'd always fancied a cycling holiday. Only one thing put me off: all that cycling. So, the moment I heaved myself over a bike at the top of a track in the Alpine village of Krimml and pushed off, I loved this. It's one long, exhilarating swoosh downhill, all the sweeter for not having been earned by a scintilla of effort.

On a May morning, the sun glinted off snow that still clung to the peaks high above, but in the valley bottom, the fields were awash with spring flowers and the air that blew back what is left of my hair was warm. As I bounced and trundled downwards, past obsessively fretworked houses and picture-perfect mountain meadows, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of it all. Like a middle-aged, male Julie Andrews, I burst into song, leaving a trail of astonished cows in my wake. This was my sort of holiday.

And holiday is the word. Since you're not spending all your time in a haze of futile masochism, you can actually do nice, leisure-type things: watch the scenery go by, eat the local food, chat to local people, visit fine old buildings, generally find out what makes the place tick.

The scenery, as I've said, was lavish, and the food no less so. The Austrian diet is chiefly composed of cream, meat, garlic, more cream, and chips. Followed by cake (with cream). Taken unprepared, I think it might have killed me. Good thing I'd put in all that high-calorie training.

As for sights, there are some very nice old buildings en route, 16th and 17th-century houses in cute villages such as Neukirchen and Maria Alm, but they're unsatisfactory to British eyes. We like old things to look old: a tottering pile of weather-beaten stone appeals to our sense of the romantic.

The Austrians, with their Germanic passion for Doing Things Properly, keep everything so well maintained, it all looks as if it was put up last Thursday by a Disney Imagineer.

The locals were friendly - it was kind of the old farmer in Hof to tell me that my cycle tour translated as " Radwegfahrt", which kept me smiling for miles - with the exception of the cyclists. The hills were alive with people in multicoloured Lycra condoms and UFO-style cycle helmets, grimly grinding uphill. I'd imagined we might share some two-wheeled camaraderie, but they were terribly grumpy. It slowly dawned on me why. In my baggy shorts and untucked shirt, remains of cream cake on chest, they could see I wasn't taking it seriously. On their terms, I was nothing but a cheat.

The final day's spin was the best, a slow descent from Saalfelden along a narrow, steep-sided valley. The mountains are dotted with gorges, caves and other intriguing geological formations. I love this stuff, and can bang on about it for hours, but I've yet to find a way of writing about it that isn't strikingly dull, so I'll pass up the detail and just say they're fab, and well worth stopping off for.

I actually hit the pedals for a final flourish - well, it's nice to make an entrance - and spun into the last village on the route. It made the perfect finish. If you don't believe this is the laziest cycle trip on earth, here's the clincher: it ends in Lofer. I rest my case. And everything else.

Travel details: Freewheel Holidays (01636 815636, www.freewheelholidays.com ) has the above seven-day tour this summer from £849pp, B&B, staying in three- and four-star hotels, and including bike hire and luggage transfers, but not flights. Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com ) and British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com ) fly to Salzburg.

The hard way

The cyclist: knocking on 40, I have (literally) cobwebs on my bike chain and (metaphorically, but only just) blancmange where my six-pack once flexed.

The challenge: a four-day loop of Mont Blanc, starting and ending in Chamonix - and, if you were to add together all the ascents, climbing the equivalent of Mount Everest - with a final day that takes on almost all of Stage 17 of last year's Tour de France.

The training: 15 hours a week, following a training regime set out by Soho's cycling specialists to the stars, CycleFit, up and down a two-mile, 1:10 road near my home in the Trossachs, stopping only to shove my lungs back down my throat.

The ride: forget what I said about blancmange. Six weeks of training has turned my buns to steel, my quads to iron, my perineum to putty. I am ridiculously fit. I set off for Mont Blanc with faint regret at how easy this is going to be.

Then I get to Geneva airport, and meet my first competitor - sorry, fellow holidaymaker - Rashid. Chiselled of jaw, pinched of cheek, with a flanker's shoulders and a waist that wouldn't disgrace an eight-year-old. "Been to the Alps before?" I ask. "My seventh trip this year," he chirrups. Swallowing hard, I notice the logo on Rashid's fleece: Team Canada Triathlon.

Turns out Rashid is the least of my concerns. There is also Nick (ex-Rosslyn Park first team), Neil (South African prodigy with legs up to my armpits), and Manos, from Athens, who asks me which heart-rate monitor I use. Ominously, there are no women. More ominously still, our guide, Dan, is a professional racer. "So he can really push us along," says Mark, the organiser. What have I done?

We leave Chamonix in a slow, measured, chitchatting bundle. A peloton, no less. But slowly, inexorably, the road begins to climb. The chitchat fades. Minutes later, our peloton is stretched along the valley floor, Neil and Dan disappearing round a corner 100yd ahead.

It is the start of a long, dark day of the soul. We go over two passes - Col des Montets (4,793ft) and Col de la Forclaz (5,010ft) - and despite the training, despite the buns of steel, it really does hurt. It's not just a physical pain, either. It's spiritual. Pushing on even when you want to stop. It hurts your soul.

But it also makes it sing. It's like yoga, a long, sweet pain that most of you prays will end, but some of you hopes will get worse. Amazingly, I am not the slowest. In fact, I reach Champex that night beaten only by Neil and Dan.

That evening, over an astonishingly good dinner, there are dark mutterings about my triple gear. Actually, the mutterings are light and friendly, but the message is clear: I am a cycle cheat. Where Rashid and the boys have only two chain rings to choose from, I have three. It means I can "spin" where others have to get out of the saddle and slog to survive. Injecting EPO would carry less shame. It's called a "granny gear" - and I love it.

In fact, it makes my holiday. On day two, hopping over from Switzerland to Italy via Col du Grand-St-Bernard (8,114ft), we climb for more than 20 miles. It's 5,200ft uphill. Without my granny gear, I'd be walking. With my granny gear, I'm near the front again, able to take it all in without worrying that my lungs might burst my ribcage - the clouds of mist, the monstrous granite blocks, the ghosts of Napoleon and Hannibal. Hurtling downhill to Aosta, sweeping at 40mph past a string of Alpine meadows and needle peaks so arrestingly beautiful, it almost sickens me to glide through so fast, I know that my life has changed for ever.

Day four is the one we've all come for: 93 miles, three Alpine passes, a final climb into Chamonix of more than 2,600ft. But the day dawns horribly: rain bounces off the tarmac and floods the pretty window boxes. Mark's face wears the frown of a man thinking lawsuits and hypothermia: "Sorry, lads, we're gonna have to reroute."

Of course, it is another wonderful ride, up passes splashed with Tour de France slogans ("Allez Christophe!"), down panoramic switchbacks made famous by Armstrong and Vinokourov. I feel part of some new world, elated, but cheated by the weather out of something brutal, something elemental - something more meaningful. Back in Chamonix, over a beer I feel I haven't quite earned, Mark tells me about a trip he's starting up from Chamonix to Nice: 315 miles in four days. With or without the granny gear, I'll be joining him.

Travel details: GPM10 (00 33 6 62 62 90 22, www.gpm10.com ) has the Tour du Mont Blanc for £495pp, half-board, including five nights in two- and three-star hotels, luggage transfers, vehicle support and lunches, but not flights. Fly to Geneva with EasyJet (www.easyjet.co.uk ), BA (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com ), Swiss (0845 601 0956, www.swiss.com ) or Aer Lingus (0818 365000, www.aerlingus.com ).

Equipment supplied by Rapha (www.rapha.cc ) and CycleFit (www.cyclefit.co.uk )