Okay, twice.
By G. M. Donley
Halfway up the Col de Romme, a climb of a little over 5 miles averaging just under a 9 percent gradient, I had a flashback to an amateur bike race in Vermont more than 30 years earlier. About 50 miles into the Putney “Tour of the Valleys,” there was a 3-mile climb, and near the top of that hill I looked around at the gasping, weaving, slow-motion parade of other guys who had also been dropped from the lead group and marveled to myself at the cumulative amount of pain we had all decided to endure in order to have some fun on a Saturday morning. If you won the race, you got a gallon of maple syrup. I think it was a pint for second and a box of candies for third.
Back in the French Alps, about 40 miles into the mountains from Geneva, Switzerland, that old scene was reprising itself. I looked up to the next switchback turn just as a guy on a titanium bike stopped dead, and with a loud “aargh!,” toppled over sideways to his left into the grassy ditch at the apex of the corner. Full-body cramp.
My own legs had been shot and threatening to cramp since a few minutes into the climb, and it didn’t seem to matter which of the three lowest gears I used, so I kept switching around on the theory that at least that approach might use slightly different muscle groups. Cyclists use terms like “death march” a little bit too lightly, but this fit the usual definition: unrelenting pain, tunnel vision, voices in your head mumbling “can’t go on” and “must go on.” And this wasn’t even the last “difficulté,” as the French say: one more mountain pass after this one.
The climb led through a tiny village and there on the right side of the road was a natural spring feeding into a big stone trough. The scene was idyllic—shade trees sheltered the spot and a family of locals aided the riders surrounding the spring, handing out cups and filling bottles. Cyclists were sitting or lying everywhere, encroaching halfway into the road. I’m pretty sure I heard angel harps playing in the background. I still had plenty of water, but I decided the time for a break was now. I continued crawling up the road to look for a place to rest. But the road presently emerged from the shade and into the full force of the early afternoon sun: a long, straight section followed, with riders roasting as they cranked laboriously across it. I couldn’t help but think of hot dogs slowly rolling in a truck-stop rotisserie. Finally, a small rock outcropping casting a person-sized shadow over a mossy slope called my name. I stopped, unclipped, and awkwardly lay the bike down so I could hobble over to my new seat. It was wet and full of prickly vegetation and sharp little rocks. It was perfect.
• • •
L’Étape du Tour is an annual event that responds to a passing daydream of anyone who ever raced a bicycle, and to many who never did: wouldn’t it be cool to ride a mountain stage of the Tour de France, with feed zones and mechanical and medical support, and with all the roads closed to traffic? Yes, it would.
Since its inaugural edition in 1993, l’Étape du Tour (“stage of the tour”) has done just that, allowing amateur riders to sign up for a day-long “sportif” event that follows the same course as a mountain stage of that year’s Tour de France. Many former pros including Tour de France winners have done l’Étape—Greg LeMond, Miguel Indurain, Franck Schleck—and many still do. In the early days, the ride would alternate between the Alps in southeastern France and the Pyrénées to the west along the Spanish border, just as the Tour de France itself hits both mountain ranges every year. But as the event’s popularity has grown in recent years, now with more than 15,000 race numbers issued and lots of friends and family coming along for the adventure, host towns need to come up with hotel rooms and services for well over 30,000 people—something the big ski towns of the Alps can accommodate, but not so much the smaller burghs of the Pyrénées. So, most of the time l’Étape takes place in the Alps these days. The event is run by ASO (Amaury Sports Organization), the French company that also runs the Tour de France and a handful of other major European races.
Typically, l’Étape happens a week or so before the pro race comes through. Since the race and its entourage are similar in scale to the Étape crowd, this can function as a test-run for the host towns, which, in exchange for the hassle, take in lots of tourist income and get many of their streets repaved in advance of the events. As during the Tour itself, the roads are closed to traffic, which makes conditions safer but also encourages a certain amount of abandon on the descents, as those with the nerve or the skills (hopefully both) can take the whole road and keep maximum speed through the hairpin turns. And if that doesn’t work out, well there’s a hefty medical presence.
Participants get the full European bike-race experience, complete with families camped out beside the road to cheer you on or hose you off, small town bands playing music as you roll through, and motorcycles with cameras and race officials zooming past. The USA of course has lots of spectacular mountain scenery, but these parts of Europe offer something extra in that they have been settled for so long that there is culture and history everywhere, with little towns and farmhouses tucked into every cranny, and narrow, winding, often vertiginous roads that feel as if they were designed not by traffic engineers but by goats (in truth, they share credit).
The event draws internationally, but historically, very few Americans have attended. According to ASO, about 70% of participants are French, 14% British Isles, and most of the balance from other parts of Europe. Well under one percent are American. Why so few Americans attend is unclear. It’s not that it’s prohibitively expensive (the entry fee went up from 100 to 120 euros for the 2019 edition, less than Americans typically pay to do a local triathlon), and though the race numbers do tend to sell out in the first 48 hours after being announced in October of the previous fall, there’s plenty of opportunity to get in after that through tour companies. Summer is the off-season for the Alps, and accommodations are thus pretty affordable (you can easily find things in or below the range of your typical budget motel on a U.S. interstate). So the big difference between doing l’Étape and taking an adventure vacation closer to home is the airfare. For whatever reason, l’Étape du Tour just hasn’t really caught on with Americans.
• • •
I always rode bikes. In the rural rolling hills of northeast Ohio, it was the only way for a kid to get anywhere without having to bug mom and dad. The little college town where we lived was perched on top of a hill, so there was no way to get home without a big effort at the end, especially if you had to do it on a one-speed banana-seat bike. Later when we got English Racer 10-speeds, we’d defeat the purpose of having low gears and see who could ride up the steepest of the four hills into town—a short wall at about a 15% grade—in TENTH.
When I got out of college, I moved to Boston, and by the next spring I had gotten myself a job in a bike shop in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The clientele ranged from tweedy commuters to serious racers to pricey people buying what we called doctor/lawyer bikes. The shop had a racing team and I joined it, honing my group-riding skills and learning a little bit about racing.
During those years I might have gotten really serious about racing, but I got only half-serious. I did a bunch of races around New England and trained with all the racers, but I was also committed to the shop, where I had become service manager (which meant working most weekends when the races were), and I liked to spend time with my wife doing things like camping and hiking in the White Mountains and going out late at night to hear loud sloppy rock and roll. So I never went all-in on racing.
After some years, we moved back to northeast Ohio, and bought a house in Cleveland Heights, just uphill from Cleveland—accessible by bike to the city as well as to the lovely rolling countryside to the east. Between kids and jobs and everything else, bike racing took an even further back seat. I had fallen in with the local racing crowd, though, and I still kept riding lots of miles with them. When we formed a training/racing club, we called it Square Wheels as a way of managing expectations.
In 2015, my friend Dick, a longtime riding companion, began talking up this thing he was going to do called l’Étape du Tour. His former teammate Chris had gone a number of times previously and said it was the most awesome thing a bike rider could do. He went that year and he came back raving about it, and about France in general. “You gotta go,” he said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.” My mind was still in the mode of the previous 25 years when kids in school and complicated work schedules precluded an excursion like that, so I didn’t really consider the possibility. He skipped a year then went again. “You gotta go,” he said. Repeatedly. My wife Elizabeth (who goes by the two letters “EB”) was there to hear it one time, and she knocked me off autopilot. “That sounds great,” she said, “let’s do it.” Wait, really?
In the fall of 2017, ASO announced the date and route for the 2018 Étape du Tour: July 8, Annecy to Le Grand Bornand, same course as stage 10 of that year’s race. Would I have preferred to have the body of a 25-year-old at a moment like this? Sure, but there were a number of reasons I couldn’t have gone in the 1980s, among them that I was pretty broke then and also l’Étape du Tour did not exist until half a decade later. So I signed up. You take your once-in-a-lifetime opportunities when you get them.
• • •
Ohio has no Alps.
The Tour de France uses a ranking system to try to convey the difficulty of climbs, with Category 4 being the least difficult of the ranked climbs and Category 1 the most difficult. And then there’s a special hyperbolic rank they save for the hills that are even more difficult than most difficult: HC, “hors catégorie,” “beyond category.” Gotta love the French.
The 2018 Étape route had 4 ranked climbs—three Category 1 and one HC, plus a couple others not ranked. First came the unranked Col de Bluffy, rising up from the Lac d’Annecy, sort of a “warm-up” hill of a couple miles, not too steep; then the Cat 1 Col de la Croix Fry, 8 miles at 6.8% average; then a zoom downhill and through the ski town of La Clusaz; then up the HC climb to the Plateau des Glières, 4 miles averaging 11.2% with some sections near 20% and—just for fun—a couple miles of gravel over the top, then what was described as a ”technical” switchback descent before a short unranked climb; then a long flat section along a river valley before the concluding two Cat 1 climbs one after the other with a quick descent between, the Col de Romme (6 miles at 8.9%) and the Col de la Colombière (5 miles at 8.5%).
So that’s like going up Old Mill Road, one of Cleveland’s “benchmark” hills (a little over half a mile at 9%), maybe 40 times in one day, then tack on another 50 miles. The longest climbs I’d ever ridden were in a few road races in New England in the mid-1980s, but it seemed possible that by 2018 the muscle memory of that might have faded. And in any case, I wouldn’t have the time to go driving to the nearest mountain range. So how to train for this close to home? My reality-adjusted training plan was to ride out to our nearby river valleys and string together hills every week, get in at least a couple of rides of around 100 miles, and try to have at least 2,000 miles in my legs by the time we went to France. I managed to do all that . . . now to see if it would actually work.
• • •
On the Friday before the ride we met at the Geneva airport with Ronan Pensec Travel, the tour group we had been advised to use, and rode their shuttle bus to Annecy, about an hour away. The reason to use a tour group was logistical: with different start and finish towns, it was necessary to get all your stuff from town A to town B while the ride was going on. The tour package provided lodging, breakfasts and dinners from Friday evening to Sunday morning in the start town, then lodging, dinner and breakfast in the finish town Sunday night and Monday morning—plus they would move all your luggage and also transport the non-riding members of your group from hotel A to hotel B, somehow circumventing all the road closures. And they would get you from and to the Geneva airport. All of that meant that the rider could just worry about the ride.
Ronan Pensec had been one of Greg LeMond’s Tour de France lieutenants, even wearing the leader’s yellow jersey himself for a while in the 1990 tour, and had parlayed that niche fame into this reasonably priced tour operation that catered largely to English-speaking clientele. A couple of months earlier, Ronan Pensec himself had sent a panicked-sounding email to all their Étape clients that it was STRONGLY ADVISED that everyone have a very low gear (34-tooth small chainring and 32-tooth large rear cog, almost a 1:1 ratio) to make it up the Plateau des Glières climb. For those not well-versed with bikes and their gears, but perhaps familiar with going to the gym and doing some weight work, climbing a long, steep hill in too high a gear would be like setting the leg-press machine at the heaviest weight you might normally use for 20 reps, then doing 30 repetitions of that weight every minute for the next hour. Better (but still not exactly painless) to lift a much lighter weight 60 times a minute. The bike I was riding at home was 2006 vintage and had a much higher (39 x 28) lowest gear—so I decided to rent through the tour company (a Trek Domane “endurance” bike) rather than sink well over a thousand dollars into component upgrades, bike case rental, and additional airline luggage fees.
The riders in our party rode into charming Annecy Friday and picked up our bib numbers at the race village in a park by the mountain-wrapped lake (in the process tweaking the bike setups), met the rest of the group and wandered around the town a bit, and then spent Saturday late afternoon hanging by the hotel pool, where we found out that the famed Tour de France “Devil” character, who always shows up in TV shots cheering the race along from the side of the road, was also staying at our nondescript suburban hotel and evidently spent all day and night in costume. We wolfed down a bunch of pasta for dinner (and a little too much wine), and went to bed, if not to sleep.
• • •
The riders gather at the starting line in waves of 1,000 at seven-and-a-half-minute intervals, beginning at 7:00 a.m. The lowest bib numbers correspond presumably to the fastest riders. When signing up for l’Étape du Tour, they ask you to enter a guess about how long you think the ride will take you, plus info about your age and experience and if you have a European racing license, and the organizers factor all that in along with your finishing time from a previous Étape if you’ve ridden it before. Based on all that, they issue a race number. Mine was in the 11,000 range, so the 11th out of 16 waves. This meant that our wave departed 82 minutes and 30 seconds after the first group, and it also meant that there would already be 10,000 people on the road ahead of us. My compatriots all had earlier waves, having either finished l’Étape before in a time that would suggest a certain wave, or having entered more optimistic time estimates, or both. I’d always been a pretty good climber and had been going well this season (at least by Ohio standards), so I figured I’d see if I could catch any of them over the course of the day.
After a bleary breakfast at the hotel, we kissed our family members goodbye and rolled down to the start area, where separate holding pens had been set up for each wave. Most of the activity from that point until “le départ” was either nervous fidgeting while waiting for something to happen or desperate searches for a last-minute bathroom stop.
The 11,000 group had a lovely staging area on a side lane to the main road, bordered by a stone wall on one side and shaded by big plane trees. Most of the riders were male, but women also lined up, maybe one out of ten. My ears told me most of the gathered crowd were French, with a sizable contingent from England as well as quite a few Scots and Irish. A group of six orange-clad Dutch were gathered just in front of me, a couple of Italians to my left. I detected no U.S. voices in my vicinity. At the race village the day before, we had checked the huge board showing all the participants, and found our names among fewer than 200 Americans.
Soon enough, we were ushered out of the staging area, stopped briefly at the start line, and were off. We breezed south along the Lac d’Annecy shore. Some riders took off flying; others, myself included, settled into comfortable pace lines. We circled the southern tip of the lake and headed back north on the other side, then turned away from the water and began to ascend the Col de Bluffy. I took a quick glance behind at the sparkling lake, then settled into a comfortable climbing rhythm along the left side of the closed road, which was novel because I never got to ride up the left side of a road back home because of the danger of oncoming traffic. I felt great, in and out of the saddle, cruising past slower riders to my right. We topped that hill, leveled off and rolled through a couple towns, then began the ascent of my first real alpine climb, the Col de la Croix Fry. The spectacular views in all directions fueled my excitement. About three-fourths of the way up, my legs were starting to talk to me a little bit and I realized that hardly anyone had passed me so far. Oops. I geared down and eased up a bit. Fans alongside the road shouted “allez! allez!” and held out hands for high-fives from the passing riders.
Cresting the top and beginning the descent to La Clusaz, I was ready for the break. The body heat that had built up climbing the other side quickly dissipated as we swooped down the cold shady switchbacks under steel-and-concrete shelters erected to protect the road from avalanches. Well chilled, we blasted into La Clusaz and over a series of wake-me-up speed bumps. I stopped in the official “zone de revitaillement” at center of town for some revitalization, squeezing through the crowds to pick up half a banana and some nuts. Nothing else looked very appetizing. I had heard there could be great cookies in the feed zones, but the closest thing here were little turd-like rice bars. Maybe the earlier waves had gobbled up all the mythical cookies. I had a few packets of sports energy gel and a couple nutrition bars in my pockets, though, so I could always eat those if nothing else appealed.
Maybe ten minutes outside of La Clusaz, a smaller road branched off to the left and I looked up to see a wall-to-wall traffic jam at the beginning of the ascent to the Plateau des Glières. My thoughts of finding my own comfortable pace quickly became thoughts of just moving fast enough not to fall over. More than once, everything backed up like a clogged artery and then got moving again just before I was about to unclip and put my foot down—which I was extremely reluctant to do because getting going again on a 12% grade among dozens of other people trying to do the same thing without toppling to the pavement and knocking over six other riders would not be easy. One amusing thing that had not occurred to me was that people from the British Isles were used to riding on the other side of the road, which meant that when they hit their limit and wanted to bail out, they would veer to the left shoulder, not to the right as the French and other Europeans (and Americans) would do—the equivalent of stopping in the high-speed passing lane. “Monsieur, a droit! a droit!” the French riders would politely yell. Get to the right!
Finally, it happened. A camera motorcycle squeezed by on the left but then had to stop dead behind a rider standing at the left edge of the road. It was a steep drop on the other side of a low stone wall, so neither rider or motorcycle had anywhere to go. Everything stopped. An impressive barrage of semi-comprehensible Scottish-inflected profanity erupted nearby.
After some minutes, the road uphill from the clot had cleared out, the moto gingerly got going again, and we all began to slowly walk up the hill as best we could on slippery cleats. As the people toward the front got a little clear space, a few would attempt to climb back on and try to shove off, but it was no simple matter and many didn’t succeed on the first or second try, quickly putting a foot back down to the ground before rolling backward. Finally, I found a place where I could brace against the cliff wall on the right side and clip in, and after a few extremely slow, high-tension pedal strokes, I managed to get going again.
The rest of the climb continued at a variable and very slow pace that prevented me (or anyone else) from setting any kind of rhythm, and by the time we emerged from the trees and the road began to level, I was pretty gassed. It was almost noon. I’d been making pretty good time up until the base of the Plateau des Glières, but that was shot to hell now. After a quick bottle fill, I remounted and coasted down the switchbacks to the feed zone in the town of Thorens-Glières. A little oompah band was playing. I ate some nuts and a half a banana and continued on.
The general course description had described a descent all the way from the plateau down to the river valley, but the road seemed instead to be seriously ascending again. An Englishman riding along beside me commented to the general audience, “another bloody French descent that goes uphill.” After that insult to the legs, the road actually did turn downhill for an extended period. I got the impression that sometimes riders would see English words on my club jersey and strike up conversations in English, just as I would look for similar cues. My French was passable for a quick exchange (such as when I expressed displeasure at how many riders were throwing their empty energy-gel foil packets on the road and the woman beside me agreed, “dégoûtant”), but I didn’t want to run off the road trying to formulate a coherent sentence, so most of the conversations I had while riding were in English. I rolled across the long flat section at about 25 mph, sucked along at the back of a two-abreast group of probably 40 people. A mile or two before the start of the Romme climb was a Pensec feed stop (so placed to give their riders a peaceful refueling opportunity at this critical point of the ride roughly three-quarters through distance-wise), where I peeled off for a break. I ate a banana and drank a coke and shoved off again at about 2:00. It had warmed up a lot since this morning.
The official Étape feed zone, which I rolled past a few minutes later, was near a roaring powder-green river that looked like pure glacier melt. The feed-zone mob spilled out onto the main road—good call stopping at the Pensec table instead. Soon after came a sign for the Col de Romme, and the course veered to the right and immediately began scaling a cliff by way of a road blasted into the rock. I thought with pity of all those tightened-up legs setting out from the feed zone, then hitting this thing a minute later. A sheer face rose above to the right and a sheer drop fell down to the left, set off behind a chain link fence that, judging from the bash dents, was there primarily to keep rocks from crashing onto a highway in the valley far below. The sound of the roaring river gradually diminished until all that was left were rasping breaths and the mechanical wheezing of stressed drivetrains. No chit-chat, no room for fans beside the road. The pavement hair-pinned and doubled back the other way, rising far above the road we had just ascended.
• • •
When I arose from my shady respite further up the Col de Romme, I didn’t even try to figure out where I was on the climb. What would it matter? The only choice was to keep going. This felt like the steepest part of the ascent, but eventually it eased a bit to maybe 8%, a little less steep than Old Mill Road back home. Then maybe 7%. Miraculously, a black-and-white checked 25km-to-go sign appeared and not long after that, the banner across the road marking the top of the Col de Romme. Of course, this being France, the hill kept going up for a while after the supposed “summit.” I forgot to look at the clock but it must have been around 3:30: well over an hour to climb 5 miles (counting a rest break, but still).
Fifteen downhill minutes later I got to the feed stop in the town of Le Reposoir in a low saddle between the Romme and the Colombière. I set the bike on a rack and found a place to lie down in the shade. I drank some more water to try to subdue the cramps. It dawned on me then that maybe the cramping was not due to insufficient water, but insufficient food. Most of what had been on offer at the feed stops had been unappetizing and I had simply not consumed anywhere near enough fuel. These extended climbs with so much elevation change would burn through way more energy than a century ride on the rolling hills back home—that was just simple physics. Duh. Sorry legs, my fault. Next time I bring my own food and plan for enough calories. I forced down two gels. Only one more climb. I would get there even if I had to walk. Every rider had the option of stopping and getting a ride in the “broom wagon,” but there was no way I was doing that. What if I never got back here? Only one more climb.
As I made the first switchback up the Colombière, a guy among the crowds alongside the road must have spied my Square Wheels jersey with “Cleveland” up the side and yelled in an English accent “ha-ha, the mountains of Cleveland.”
“Ha-ha,” I said.
Most spectators were unambiguously supportive, shouting “Courage! Courage!” in French, clapping, patting you on the back if you were close enough. That was immensely energizing, and I noticed I was not the only one who would pick up the pace a little bit in response. Then I would sit back down and put it back in the lowest gear. Before today began, I’d laughed at the thought that I’d ever use that 34 x 32. By now I’d probably spent more time in that gear than any other.
The thing about the Colombière is you can see the summit from far, far away. After a few initial switchbacks, the road straightens and the vegetation falls away and you begin this endless slog toward a tiny building up there that gets imperceptibly larger as you grind away. I could feel the cramps returning and I downed some more water and steadied myself out as much as I could, but somewhere tantalizingly close to the summit, a guy in front of me abruptly stopped and my violent motion to avoid hitting him triggered a full-body seize-up. It was all I could do to get a foot down before falling over. I decided to take another little break in the meager shade of the cliff-cut and ate my last bar and swallowed another inedible gel. There was no point in just standing there, so I began to walk slowly to try to work out the cramps and within a few minutes I was practically at the summit, still walking. I took a couple photos then climbed back on to ride under the banner and continued down a series of wide-open switchbacks and into Le Grand Bornand and the yellow banner marking the finish. An hour up the mountain, 15 minutes to the bottom. Coasting down, swooping through the turns, and pedaling only if I felt like it almost made me forget how this had definitely been the hardest physical day of my life, surpassing bike races, mountainous backpacking trips, and even nonstop shoveling during a classic Lake Erie heavy wet snow dump. I was greeted by my wife shouting from the crowd, by a race official placing a finisher’s medal over my neck, and by a beer—a triple delight.
Comparing notes that evening, we found that Dick and Chris and I had improbably all finished within a few minutes of each other in total elapsed time, even with the different start waves and each with our own random breaks. And just to put it all in perspective, Julian Alaphilippe won the actual stage 10 a week later that year, hours faster than any of us. There was awesome video, shot by drone from behind, of him flying over the summit of the Colombière. At least he made it look like he was working a little. We all parted ways the next morning and EB and I spent most of the next week in Chamonix, hiking and staring up at Mont Blanc. “We’re coming again next year, right?” said EB.
• • •
Naturally, I immediately started wondering what I could do differently next year to help the ride go better. It hadn’t been a disaster—not at all, it had been an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience. I’d proven to myself that I could actually ride a kick-ass mountain stage of the Tour de France and not just daydream about maybe doing something like that someday—but, still but it would be nice to do this without having to make any unplanned stops; it would be nice not to have any cramps; it would be nice to go faster.
Clearly, I had screwed up my race-day nutrition, so I would have to pay a lot more attention to eating more throughout the effort. My hydration had been fine. There was no question in retrospect that I had gone out too hard on the first climbs—no doubt the adrenaline of the moment spurred a bit of irrational exuberance. Next time, just chill.
The hiking in Chamonix afterward had gone great and I was flying on the bike the rest of the summer, so I concluded that there had been nothing amiss with the advance training plan. It would be nice to get in a couple trips to the mountains for some longer climbs, but clearly it was possible to do this without actually training in the mountains.
I certainly wouldn’t blame the bicycle for my troubles, but the particular model I had rented had felt like it was absorbing rather than transmitting my energy, and the handling wasn’t exactly nimble. Renting a bike is much more convenient than bringing your own, and often less expensive, but if you’re going to spend all day in strenuous effort, then doing that on your own bike can make a big difference. So, I decided to put together a new bicycle—this would be my first all-new bike since my early twenties—and take it to France the next year. Over the late summer I test rode a bunch of options, looking for an all-around road bicycle that handled great and was eager to go up a hill. My favorite was a carbon Felt FR1, so I got a frame and built up a new racing bike.
• • •
The 2019 course was announced in October 2018 and it was in the same alpine neighborhood as the previous one, a couple valleys over: it would start in Albertville and finish at the highest ski area in Europe, Val Thorens, with an ascent and descent across the gorgeous Cormet de Roselend along the way, among other challenges. The total climbing was even more than the previous year, and the final, HC climb was 22 miles long and finished at over 7,500 feet, the highest Étape finish ever. I registered to participate.
For the first time in my life, I actually wrote down a training plan. The day before the spring time change, on March 9, I got my comeuppance for writing that down when I crashed and broke my left collarbone. The Cleveland Clinic recommended a nonsurgical approach since the break was not fully displaced. I was told to keep it relatively immobile for a few weeks, then gradually increase motion while limiting the amount of weight lifted. Fortunately, road cycling is a pretty good match for that regimen, and I was able to get back on the bike outside quite quickly after some dreary weeks on the old wind trainer in the basement. Had it happened two months or even one month later, I probably would have had to cancel l’Étape, but as it worked out, I felt pretty healed up by June and I had the all-clear for unlimited activity by the middle of the month.
• • •
L’Étape started almost two weeks later this time, on July 21, so we tacked on our hiking vacation the week before l’Étape instead of after. We decided to spend a few days of that advance time in Bourg d’Oisans, base town for the famed Alpe d’Huez climb with its 21 hairpin turns. EB rented an e-bike and we rode up l’Alpe d’Huez so I could be sure my new bike could do a real alpine climb. Check. Then we spent couple days hiking—and a week of the same in Chamonix. I had wondered whether the effect of spending a week and a half hiking before l’Étape would be detrimental to the ride, but if anything it proved to be helpful. Perhaps the activity at altitude helped me acclimate.
We met up with our Étape entourage in Albertille, and this time the group had grown, with Dick’s and my friend Dave coming from Cleveland with his wife Kris, plus a few other additions. A runner and triathlete as well as a longtime member of our riding crew, Dave responded to the challenge by getting himself into his best condition of the past decade; coincidentally he acquired a new bicycle as well.
We had the race-village drill pretty well figured out and went down Friday (instead of the much more crowded Saturday) to get our numbers and shop the merch. The level of buzz was especially high because French rider Julian Alaphilippe was leading the Tour de France, and many people in the village were gathered around a large outdoor screen watching that day’s live coverage.
There was further drama on Saturday night when, after we had all spent a couple of hours in a café across the street from the hotel watching Alaphilippe improbably keep his yellow jersey for another day, five or six bicycles were stolen from the supposedly secure storage area in the hotel basement while the tour group were all eating dinner in the dining room. Fortunately for us, the thieves had gone for the high-profile European brands like Pinarello and BMC rather than locally obscure American makes like Felt. We wondered for a second or two how the thieves could have fled down the very public street with those bicycles without being noticed—then someone observed that there were 15,000 fancy road bikes in town for the weekend: no one would think anything of it. Everyone who still had a bike carried it up to their room for the night.
• • •
Site of the 1992 winter Olympics, Albertville is located in a diagonal valley that runs from Grenoble to the southwest and ends at Saint-Gervais and the Mont Blanc massif to the northeast. Up the slopes along the southeast side of the valley toward the Italian border are famed downhill ski towns like Megève and Val d’Isère and the newer Val Thorens, built about 50 years ago as the highest ski resort in Europe at 2300 meters. The region is also home to many of the iconic mountain climbs that show up in differing mixes and sequences in every Tour de France—names like Alpe d’Huez, Galibier, Iseran, Madeleine, Glandon, Aravis, and many more. The Tour de France had ascended to Val Thorens one time previously, in 1994, a stage won by Colombian mountain goat Nelson Rodriguez.
That 2300 meters isn’t what it used to be. When they dreamed up Val Thorens, one of the ideas was you’d make a facility high enough that you could extend the ski season. But the decades since then have been increasingly warm . . . one wonders if instead of Val Thorens offering a longer ski season than was ever possible, it will soon be known for offering the same length of season the lower resorts used to have 30 years previously. According to the Research Center for Alpine Ecosystems, the average temperature in the French Alps increased about 3.6 degrees during the 20th century, about twice the increase of the northern hemisphere in general. The difference is largely about snow and ice. As air warms, year-round snow cover decreases; snow is light in color and reflects heat, so the less snow there is, the more the ground and the air just above that ground heats up; the more the ground and air heat up, the more snow melts, and so on. The changes in snowpack and increased air temperature also affect microclimates in unpredictable ways, but the general trend in the southern Alps has been less precipitation overall, warmer temperatures, and more frequent extreme weather events.
Near Chamonix, glaciers that used to reach down to the valley floor have retreated far up toward the tall peaks. The famed Mer de Glace “Sea of Ice” in the 19th century inspired the construction of a luxury hotel and funicular railway. Both are still there, complete with old photographs showing the visitors to the hotel looking down at the impressive glacier—only now, there is no glacier, just a trough of rubble. The tip of the glacier is still visible, up the valley to the right, a steady trickle of water flowing down from it. The rubble hints at another phenomenon: at high altitudes, the only thing that has been holding loose rock together has been ice that never melted. When the ice turns to water, there is nothing to hold the rocks in place, and down they fall.
The proprietor of the apartment we rented in Bourg d’Oisans noted that rockslides had become notably more common in the past decade in his area, as long-frozen formations high up and out of sight would thaw and let loose. This would often happen during summer thunderstorms, though he pointed out that his little corner of the world had been blessed by a microclimate that was usually bypassed by summer storms. So be careful when you ride l’Étape, he joked.
• • •
The ride out from Albertville began with a 20km (12.5-mile) jaunt to the cheese-famed town of Beaufort (though I guess being famed for cheese isn’t unusual for towns in France). It’s worth noting that when the organizers say that a section averages a 1.5% gradient for 20K, they mean just that: after 20 kilometers you will be 300 meters higher than you were at the start. It does not mean that there can’t be a few 8% ups and downs along the way, as we discovered.
My goal for this year was modest: finish the ride and feel pretty good. I had eaten an intentionally slow-burning breakfast of granola, yogurt, fresh fruit, eggs, and whole-grain bread; my jersey was packed with energy bars I liked and gels I didn’t hate; and I had some more food stashed in a bag that the Pensec crew would have at their roadside feed zone. The previous year’s ride time had somehow placed me in the 7000 wave along with Dick and Chris, so we all set out together. Chris was feeling a little spunky right from the start, jumping to bridge gaps to the groups ahead, and I went with him at first, but then Dick and I wisely noticed we were going too hard too early and backed off a bit while Chris darted ahead.
The Cat 1 Roselend climb is in pretty woods for the first two-thirds, then emerges alongside a scenic lake. The road circles around the end of the lake, then ascends further via switchbacks through idyllic open pastures (cowbells, gurgling brooks) until it levels off across a wide saddle. Somewhere not long before the lake, Dick and I got separated. One moment we were talking, the next there was someone else beside me. Later, I spied him below as I rounded the first switchback above the lake and looked down (it’s fairly easy to pick out the tall guys). I waved. Sure enough, he was looking up and waved back. Guess I’m easy to spot, too. For the rest of the day, Dick and Chris and I crisscrossed, later joined by Dave, who had started a wave ahead. One would be leaving a rest stop as another arrived, or someone would roll up on somebody else in some random spot, and we’d chat for a while, then, quick as that, we’d be separated again.
At the Cormet de Roselend food stop I made a detour to the mechanical area to get some more air in my too-squishy tires before descending the other side of the Roselend. “Uh, pardon monsieur, l’air s’il vous plaît?” Why didn’t I research how to say these things ahead of time? He gestured at the pump. “Prenez.” Twenty minutes later I would be very glad I did that. I saw Dick starting to head down the hill as I finished up pumping, and just as I mounted, Chris showed up, having just finished the climb—meaning Dick and I had both passed him on the climb without noticing it. We greeted and parted and off I went.
A gradual downhill over open pastures steepened as the road made its way to the edge of the saddle, and soon I found myself going about 35 or 40 mph, pedaling occasionally, but keeping an eye out ahead because I knew the road would transform abruptly from this smooth glide path to a tangle of switchbacks. The point of that transition was famed as the place where racer Johan Bruyneel had been surprised by the first turn and went right over the edge (he climbed back up virtually unharmed), and sure enough, where the road took a sudden left, there was the name “Johan” painted onto the rock.
The descent was cut into a steep, narrow ravine that kept opening up to spectacular views over toward Italy and Mont Blanc, which was dangerous because there was also a lot of much closer granite to pay attention to at the road’s edge. I got into a nice groove through the hairpins—another reason to have your own bike (provided you like descending on your own bike in the first place). When the road straightened out and leveled off through the town of Bourg-Saint-Maurice, there was Dave pulling onto the road from a food stop.
We rolled along easy and talked for about 30 minutes. He was in good shape but his back was acting up a bit, an old ailment choosing a bad time to return. The Pensec Travel private food stop was along this stretch and we stopped there just as Dick was departing. Dave and I rolled off again when we got to the base of the next climb, the Cat 2 Cote de Longefoy, he waved me ahead so he could spin along at his own pace and try to make his back behave itself. Halfway up, I came up on Dick and then lost track of him after I took up a conversation with a British conspiracy theorist about which factories actually made which pro bikes. Actually, it wasn’t a conversation because I didn’t say anything.
The summit banner for the Longefoy came about a kilometer before the actual summit (getting used to this by now), and after a big panoramic turn, we swooped down another set of tight switchbacks and eventually came out on a broad, straight highway down into the town of Moutiers. I got in a little group of five, and since there was a headwind, I got on the front for a little while to pull my share, after which a woman took the lead and hammered the rest of the way down to the food stop. The rest of us were all content to just sit on her wheel. There, I ran into Dick again after I’d used the facilities and refilled water. He must have nearly caught up to me going down the switchbacks. We got out to the edge of the zone and sat down against a wooden fence and ate some snacks. He’d been fighting cramps since the Longefoy and was trying to recover a bit before the 35km Val Thorens two-part climb, which would start a couple miles down the road from here. It had heated up a lot. The thermometer on my notoriously high-reading Garmin said it was 42 Celsius; it wasn’t really that hot I’m sure, but there was definitely a charcoal grill-effect coming off the black asphalt. A few minutes after we left, we passed a medical emergency where a guy was lying on the flat road being attended to by a couple medics. There were no obstacles, no other bikes. It looked like the man had just keeled over.
I was feeling good and Dick was trying to fend off the cramps, so we parted ways at the base of the climb. Somewhere along that section, a farmer had run a garden hose from his house and was just standing there spraying anyone who wanted it. I got in line, filled up a bottle, and invited him to completely soak me (as almost everyone was requesting). That guy got one of the biggest and most heartfelt “merci’s” of my trip.
There was a second feed zone halfway up to Val Thorens, in a little dip just after the village of Saint-Martin de Belleville. A lady was out in the middle of the street in that town dancing and blasting gypsy jazz tunes from the movie The Triplets of Belleville from a boom box. I coasted in to the feed zone and as I was making my way through the crowds, there was Chris. We talked for a minute, then I excused myself to get a coke, then I didn’t seem him until dinner.
Distinguishing this last section were signs alerting the riders going up that this was a two-way road now and to stay to the right of the centerline. I didn’t think too much of that—must be for ambulances or something—but then not too long after I had begun the climb, occasional riders began coming down on the other side. Some of them looked fresh and spry, others looked defeated. I figured out after a while that some of these were people whose hotels or cars were down in the valley and they had just decided to bag it and turned around since the road allowed it. And others had been among the first to finish and were now coasting back down because they had elected not to stay overnight up at the ski resort.
The roadside casualties mounted, with many people sitting and lying along the right shoulder. I watched one guy try to get on his bike, then yell out in agony, grabbing his clenched thigh and falling over sideways. We were well above the tree line here and there was really no place you could get any shade. One exception was a very long, curving avalanche shelter near the top of the climb, which was so full of people that I could barely see out the side of it. Shortly after there I could feel my legs beginning to cramp. I had filled both bottles at the last stop and drank a lot while I was there, but it was almost all gone now. I guess maybe in the back of my mind I had envisioned another savior with a garden hose appearing somewhere along the way, but not this time. I looked up at the resort, maybe three or four long switchbacks away, and decided to go for broke—at this point it would be better to go harder in order to spend less time out here under the broiler. I downed one more gel and the last of my water, stood up, and set a faster pace. The cramps nipped at my heels all the way up, but I kept it smooth and even had enough kick to semi-sprint over the finish line. They put the ceremonial medal over my neck and I moved on to a woman handing out water, who asked me in French why I had ridden standing up “a la danseuse” the whole way to the finish. Simple answer: to get to the top.
• • •
EB and I found each other and kept an eye on the course for people in our crew. The riders who hadn’t already finished trickled in over the next couple of hours. Every one of us finished in a year when rumor had it that 40% didn’t complete the course.
Those who keep track of such things say that a modest goal when you go into l’Étape having done it at least once before is to try to beat your bib number—which would mean that you finished ahead of the implied expectation based on your prior attempts. I finished in the low 6000s, beating my number by about a thousand. Presumably, if I ever did the event again, I’d get a number in the 6000s.
I followed the rest of the Tour de France from home. The day before the stage from Albertville to Val Thorens, violent storms blasted the region and famously halted a mountain stage just as Julian Alaphilippe, still in yellow, was about to do one of his hair-raising descents to reel back in the guys who had dropped him climbing up the Izoard pass. The road was covered with inches of hailstones and a mudslide completely blocked the way. That same storm triggered rockslides that took out the switchback descent of the Cormet de Roselend—the exact roads we had ridden down days earlier. There was no time to fix it by the next day and so the last mountain stage of the tour was shortened to bypass the Roselend and the Cote de Longefoy and became a short, flat valley run followed by the climb to Val Thorens. Bo-ring. This one time, the amateurs did a tougher ride than the pros. Once-in-a-lifetime indeed.
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