La Bastille

A change is as good as a rest, they say.  I'm not sure I agree.  In moving house, a work offsite meeting, a week in Crete and a few days with work in Grenoble, routine has gone out the window.  Through it all, training is hanging on for dear life.  I haven't done a decent cycle for about a month, and mentally I've abandoned swimming. It's only running that continues to keep me honest.

The early morning sun peeks out from behind the clouds in Grenoble, and around the edges of the blinds in the Park Hotel.  It’s 6.30am, and the alarm goes off with a deafening tone, one that surely would be considered for use as a torture device in Guantanamo Bay.  I switch it off urgently, and fall back into the pillow.  It's so, so easy to allow my eyelids to close again, which they do for a few minutes.  It's cosy here.  I tell myself how much I'm going to enjoy getting up and going for a run, but the body does not believe it.  Eventually, it's only the need to pee that gets me out of bed.  Even then, it takes an awful lot of effort to convince myself not to get back in once I'm done.  By the time I get out the door, it's nearly five to 7, and I haven't left myself an awful lot of time to run before needing to get back for breakfast and the cab to the office. 

Outside, it's a little chilly, but otherwise a beautiful morning.  Right across the street, I into the Parc de Paul Mistral, a green hub in the middle of Grenoble.  On summer evenings, this place is chock-a-block with the sports-obsessed citizens of the city.  Running, football, touch rugby, ultimate frisbee, slacklining, bicycle polo; all get an airing here.  But this morning I'm largely alone. 

I am on a mission - to reach la Bastille. There are easy ways to get up there - the Téléphérique, or Les Oeufs to the locals, can whisk you smoothly and efficiently to the restaurant at the top in a matter of minutes.  It is unfortunate, perhaps, that it doesn't open until 10am, so today I'm running.  At dinner the previous night, my companions told me of a colleague who reached the Bastille in under 7 minutes.  Should take me 10, tops.

Grenoble, "Capital of the Alps", is in fact the flattest city in France.  It really is very flat.  The city sits at the conjunction of three flat-bottomed valleys, forming a Y at the eastern end of the Alps.  The flatness of the city, however, is almost by definition - the bits that aren't flat are so very not flat that to build on top of them would be crazy.  It is on one particularly not flat bit, nestled at the apex of the Y, that the Huguenot chose to build the Bastille de Grenoble.  It floats a few hundred feet above the city, a vast stone edifice built into the mountain.  

I reach the river. On the other side, there is a single road, and a single line of shops and houses, that found the space to fit themselves along the riverbank before the ground rises almost vertically to the Bastille above.  Straight ahead, a path heads through a set of iron gates, inviting people to make their way up to the Bastille.  Looking up, it's clear that it’s not going to be an easy task to get up there.  At least I'm only running - an invading army would surely have handed in their collective notice at this point and gone home.  

Beyond the gates, one hits a set of Escher-esque steps through stone battlements that immediately lift you 100 feet above the river.  At the top of the steps, the zig zag track starts in earnest.  The path is steep but not unbearable, so feeling spritely, I try to keep up a relatively normal pace.   By the third hairpin, it’s clear this is not going to work.  My calves are feeling the burn already.  I plough on, but I'm getting slower and slower.  Another runner appears from another path, and as much as I want to keep up with him, I can't do it.  Eventually I have no option but to stop and catch breath.  Which I also do at the next hairpin, and the one after that, and after that. 

A mile of path and 15 minutes later, I make it to the base of the fortifications, 700 feet above the river.  The final push is up a steep set of steps, which are torture on my thighs and calves.  At the top, the steps turn through the stone wall, and on to an interior balcony, with a large arch looking out over the city.

This was why I came up here.  Down below, the city sprawls out in all its flatness, the closely packed medieval core clearly delineated from the 1960's concrete that grew up around it.  Beyond it, wooded peaks rise steeply to meet the low cloud floating above them.  But the cloud is merely a decorative sash for the mountains behind, that keep drawing your eye upwards to their snow-capped summits.  For a boy for whom the Mendip Hills are high peaks, it’s hard to grasp the scale.  A photograph could not even start to convey it.  At this time of the morning, the sun hits the mountains horizontally, picking out every crevice and rock in sharp relief.   I feel like I could take the pain every morning if this were the reward.