Tuscany Cycling

The cycling portion of our trip ended last week and we were very sad to leave Lecchi in Chianti. It is a special place that we’ll think of often and hope to return to someday. 

Before talking about the experience with inGamba cycling, it helps to know a little bit about Lecchi.  This is a village of 80 residents with one main street. The coffee shop/restaurant and small market are owned by a man named Paolo. Everybody in the region knows Paolo and most of them stop by for a caffé at some point during the day. We never saw the locals pay for food or drink when they ordered it but we did see Paolo, during a quiet moment, open a ledger and record what each customer purchased, their accounts presumably to be settled later. In Lecchi, smartphones exist but the locals don’t walk around staring at them and the coffee shop is for human interaction. 

Lecchi also has a castle that was built around 1,000 AD. That sounds impressive until you realize that nearly every town has one. Lecchi’s castle was used by Florence as an outpost for soldiers in their battles with Siena between the 13th and 15th centuries. Today, you and five of your closest friends can rent the castle for a short-term stay.

There’s a daily rhythm to life in this area. Quiet mornings give way to locals gathering  at Paolo’s, talking about grape vines, olive trees, and any other news that needs to be shared. Laundry gets washed and hung outside to dry. Dogs get walked. Porches get swept. Vineyards and gardens get tended to.

We chose to ride with inGamba for the “be treated like a pro rider” experience. There are plenty of cycling tour companies in the Tuscany area but after riding across America in 2017 and moving from Best Westerns to Holiday Inns every day, we wanted a different kind of trip. 

Upon arrival in Lecchi we were greeted with big hugs from Inga, the house manager for Borgolecchi, the bed and breakfast that would be our home for a week.  Inga and her team of two made certain that we had everything that we needed. All of the food – breakfast, lunch, and dinner – was home cooked from local ingredients. Some mornings we caught Inga bringing in fresh herbs that she had cut from her garden, two doors up the street. If we came down to the kitchen at 6:30am, Inga would have croissants in the oven and oatmeal cooking on the stove. Coffee would be made or she’d prepare us an espresso, a cappuccino, or a caffé latte.  There was yogurt, homemade jams, prosciutto, cheese, bread – anything we wanted.  Inga cooked eggs to order, all while telling us that we needed to eat a lot to fuel for our ride. Lunch and dinner always included homemade pasta, a second course (always a protein), and desert. The wine, from the local winery, Castello di Ama, flowed freely at both meals. And did I mention aperitifs before dinner? 

Between breakfast and lunch, we cycled. When we arrived in Lecchi we received inGamba cycling kits (jersey, shorts, socks, and cycling cap), personalized rain bags to put extra gear in, and two personalized laundry bags (one for cycling gear and one for casual clothes). Each morning we put on our cycling gear and walked down to the service course, where our bikes would be waiting. There, we put on our shoes and helmets and gathered up. The mechanics handed us our bikes with the course preloaded on Garmin bike computers. When we rode off, the support team retrieved our rain bags from the service course and loaded them into the inGamba van. If we needed to strip apparel or retrieve an extra layer during the ride, we only needed to flag them down along the route. Every ride included a coffee stop, where the guides bought pastries and coffees. Our rain bags were set out at the coffee stops in case we needed to change apparel. When we finished riding, a mechanic took our bikes, another person handed us a chilled recovery drink, and our rain bags were in our service course cubbies. The mechanics washed our bikes every afternoon and made any minor adjustments.  Inga took our dirty cycling clothes and returned them washed and neatly folded by the end of the day. Inga is inGamba’s secret ingredient.

We had two guides for seven guests.  One was a former pro cyclist, André Cardoso. He rode for some of the biggest names in cycling and competed in both the Beijing and Rio Olympics on the Portuguese cycling teams. He is the most exceptional cyclist we’ve ever ridden with. He had speed, endurance, and bike handling skills that we can only dream of. He knew how to perfectly pace us and if we heard him yell “go go!”, we put it into race mode and hung on behind him. This was cycling, but not as we’d ever known it.

Our other guide was Giorgio, an Italian adventure athlete and guide who has been around the world multiple times, mostly on chartered sail boats. He was a strong rider and interesting character.

A critical part of any cycling team is the soigneurs. In short, a soigneur is an assistant who is responsible for feeding, clothing, massaging, and transporting professional bicycle racers and generally assisting the team. The term comes from the French for the “one who provides care.” We had two Portuguese soigneurs on our trip, Sampaio and Joao.  They rode in the van with both mechanics every day, handling our rain bags and setting out food at every coffee stop. Their most important job was our daily massage. These were like no other massages we’ve had before because soigneurs specialize in restoring cyclists for another day of riding. Sampaio is a former pro cyclist who, when he raced, was called the boss, the enforcer, and the hammer. They say he ruled the peloton with an iron fist. Now he’s a big teddy bear who used those massive hands to rehabilitate  Bev’s sore muscles. Sampaio doesn’t speak a bit of English but that didn’t keep Bev from wanting to take him home with us.

There are so many stories to share about the entire week but for now it’s enough to simply say this was a slice of cycling heaven. 

(Special thanks to Alan Freedman for some of these great photos. You’re a good friend!)