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.
As the 24-year-old from the nearby coastal town of Pescara sees it, her connection with the climb – which peaks out at 2,000 metres above sea level – is much more spiritual and emotional than a physical challenge. Or, as she puts it: "I get the feeling that I'm at home there."
The first time Realini went up the Blockhaus – partly deeply and beautifully wooded lower down, but also famous for its wide-open, exposed, verdant slopes higher up with not even a fence or tree on it for miles around – she was 16 or 17, she says. But unlike the elite men's Giro d'Italia, which only ever tackles the first 14 kilometres of the ascent (the last six are pretty much inaccessible to motorised traffic) even back then as a teenager, she got right to the top.
"It felt like I was climbing Everest in every sense you can imagine," Realini tells Cyclingnews. "The first time, I thought I would never do it again.
"But every time I did go back, I got a good feeling and that good feeling increased, more and more. Now, it's as if the mountain is calling me and it's saying 'Come here, come here and see how the climb feels today'."
When Cyclingnews asks her how many times she tackles it each year, she briefly pauses to try and calculate, then says, "In a year, maybe 30 or 35," then she adds, "To be honest, I've lost count."
"The thing is, I know the Blockhaus so well now, if I ended up losing my sight or I was blindfolded, I'd still be able to ride up it without feeling worried."
Realini says the first time she rides up the Blockhaus each year is normally towards the end of January, weather permitting, and she keeps on riding up it until the snowfalls block the route in late autumn or early winter. There are three different approach roads, one easy, one medium-difficulty, and one of them – set to be used by the men's Giro this May, with an average gradient of 10% for 10 kilometres – that's the hardest.
But she opts for the easy or medium routes during the season, explaining that given the energy she has to expend during most races, it's best not to overdo it on her leisure climbing.
As she puts it, "I'm just there to enjoy it." And if she's good at keeping the Blockhaus as her own mental headspace, it surely helps, too, that she's only been up there once in a race, in the 2024 Giro d'Italia Women in support of race leader and teammate Elisa Longo Borghini. (For the record, Realini finished eighth, whilst Longo Borghini all but sealed overall victory there).
Realini says she has never come across another professional bike rider as enamoured of a specific climb as she is, nor yet heard of any pro who might be like that. Her own hero, Marco Pantani, was certainly a rider who gave the impression he enjoyed climbing for his own sake, if not particularly fond of any one climb. However, although Realini says that Pantani's courage in the face of setbacks has inspired her greatly during this last difficult year, she denies that she follows his example in ignoring her power output and data, as Pantani famously used to do.
"Things have changed so much from back then to how they are now," she points out. "Nowadays data is so personalised that anybody who says they don't look at what their computer is saying about their condition is basically a liar, At the same time, it can all get too much, and looking at the numbers all the time isn't ideal either.
"You have to have a good sense of perspective: when I do specific work on the bike, I'll look at them.
"But if I'm just doing a long training ride, then I'll just turn off the computer, put some music through my earphones, relax and enjoy it all. If I'm out there enjoying myself in the mountains at the end of a long day of riding, I can just forget everything else."
Finding a way back in 2026
If Realini spent more time finding her own space on the Blockhaus last year, she'd likely agree that she was certainly in need of it. For the first time since 2020, in what was a severely disrupted season, she didn't do a single Grand Tour and her best placing in a week-long stage races was 71st in the Itzulia Women. For a rider with just two wins in her palmarès, but with a third place overall in the Giro d'Italia and in the Vuelta Femenina in 2023, as well as fifth in the Tour de France Femmes in 2024, that lack of selection for a Grand Tour must have felt like a massive setback.
"2025 really wasn't my year. I started off badly because on January 10, I fractured my elbow. If it sounds like something relatively trivial, it actually gave me a lot of problems during the season and then I got sick a few times as well. It felt like there was always something affecting my performance and races," she explains
"I fought back as hard as I could. But like all riders, I think one 'Year of the No'"- by which she means a bad year plagued with misfortunes – "doesn't harm anybody. In fact, I'd say a 'Year of the No' teaches you way more than lots of "Years of the Yes.'
"So I took it as a lesson, and I'm happy I did that. Because these 'Years of the No' are when you learn to fight the hardest, rather than when you're in amazing condition and you're wandering around thinking 'I'm strong, I'm unbeatable'.
"The moments when there are setbacks, when your legs are bad – that's when you have to ask yourself, how am I handling this? Thanks to the team and the staff, they helped me refind myself mentally, and to come back stronger."
She returned to her example of Pantani as somebody who knew how to fight back much harder, too, and found inspiration there as well. "He had many moments that were way harder than mine, but he got up again and fought again to win," she points out.
"So maybe one of two races can go badly or even a year but if you believe you're good and you have a winning attitude, then you'll get there for sure.
"That's why my objectives for 2026 are essentially first to restore my faith in myself, then aim at some big Grand Tours, either in a support role, or maybe aim for a podium or a stage for myself."
The Giro, being home soil, could be the one which appeals the most, although Realini rather scathingly says "It's not actually the Giro d'Italia, it's the Giro d'Italia Nord [Giro of Northern Italy] because it is all up there."
On the other hand, she says, on closer inspection of the route with a very hilly time trial and the Colle delle Finestre, "It got my adrenaline pumping a bit harder. The route is pushing me on a little bit to get back to 100 per cent, to be able to play my cards right."
Yet that process she insists is in no way something that she will change at all because "Gaia" – she often refers to herself in the third person – "has always done the same things and never had a bad season before. So I want to do it step by step, not be in a hurry and remember I've got nothing to prove to anybody.
"It was a tough year, but I just need to have faith in myself, the same faith that I had before. If I work on that, remember that everything I used to do went well, then I can be more competitive than ever."
But whether things go badly or they go brilliantly, there's only one place you'll find Realini when she wants some space for herself and to disconnect from it all: on her favourite mountain in Italy.
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