Professional bike riders tend to take a very practical attitude to mountains. They will head up ascents across the globe to hone their climbing form, they will sleep at the summits for altitude training and they will drop down into the valleys below for training rides and tests. If you're a resident in Andorra in the Pyrenees, you might even say they combined all of the above in the principality and then live there as well to (in many cases) save a lot of money on taxes.
But ride up a mountain for pleasure? All climbers may have a favourite ascent, for sure. But it's rare to hear of a rider going up a 20-kilometre mountain, widely rated as one of Italy's hardest single ascents, over 30 times a year, purely because they love the climb for its own sake: not as a challenge, but as a place. Unless, of course, their name is Gaia Realini.
