I am a cycling freak. I love everything about it, from riding any of my (several) bikes to following the European cycling season like a predator stalks prey.

Like all red-blooded bicycle obsessives, the Spring Classics work me into an unmatchable frenzy. Each year the European season starts out with a series of particularly grueling races, many of which were first ridden over 100 years ago.

"Village Fountain" by Simon MacArthur on Zatista.com

The regimen of suffering begins in March with the Milan-Sanremo, Italy’s one-day tour that hurtles hundreds of racers down the best kind of ancient, impossibly narrow city streets and out into the country side at break-neck speed.

It’s hard to describe exactly what I love about these races, but it is definitely grounded in the associated aesthetic–perhaps the aesthetic of asceticism. It all really begins in April when the Classics move into Belgium and France. There, the riders meet the spring rain and the famed cobblestone lanes of the Ronde Van Vlannderen or “Tour of Flanders” and “l’Enfer du Nord”–The Hell of the North–Paris-Roubaix.

These men, professional athletes-all, some how roll everything that I love about Europe into a neat little ball as they grind over the merciless cobblestones. The color palate of the countryside in spring carries the mud brown that eventually coats the riders and the green promise of the crops to come.

"Untitled Landscape #7" by Steven Miller on Zatista.com

The peleton winds its way more than 150 miles through impossibly perfect villages where rabid fans line the street. It’s like an ideal tour of the host nations, only under the least ideal conditions imaginable.

"Dolder De Riquewhir" by Paul Emiot on Zatista.com

Yet “Classic” these races most certainly are.  There’s something noble in the way that the athletes punish themselves year after year, hoping for the prestige of winning one of their sport’s most storied races. The victors join the cigarette smoking, champagne swilling heroes from the black and white photos of yesteryear, but they suffer the cruel irony of competing on 15-pound machines engineer for bone rattling stiffness. A stretch of pave such as this would be deemed remarkably kind.

"Shadows" by Jan Pieter Van Voorst Van Beest

It’s a kidney jarring ordeal complete with spectacular crashes, but everything–the drab gray skies, the wet grass and stones, and the techno-neon bikes and team uniforms–comes together like a painting in motion.

The best part, of course, is that the Spring carries with it vague hints of summer. If it’s time for the Classics, the Tour De France, le maillot jaune and racing in the lavender fields–a composition unto itself–can’t be far behind.

"Le Lavandes" by Edwige Mitterand on Zatista.com