Epic Trans Alps Cycling Trip - Part V

Introduction

Wow, five blog posts in a row on the same topic? Well, yeah, if that’s the only way to keep my readers from having to wade through a single 15,000-word post. Look, you’ve had a week now to recover from my last report. Besides, what I recount herein is the tale of the hardest day yet: a route so brutal, it was used for Stage 11 of the 2022 Tour de France, ending on the very climb where Tajed Pogacar had his hopes dashed. Did I suffer the same fate as Pogacar? Well, now, hang on … who said I’d ever had any hope(s)?

(If you’ve fallen behind, Part I of my French Alps series is here, Part II is here, Part III is here, and Part IV is here.)

Breakfast

According to the cold cereal industrial complex, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Even so, I usually skip it, and in my reckless youth I’d even do 80-mile rides on an empty stomach. But in France, breakfast was one of life’s great pleasures and I’d have chowed down even if I were planning to spend the day at the library. As it turns out, even a buffet seems impossible for the French to screw up.

Not that it didn’t have its quirks. There was still no butter for the bread, most of the time; there was usually some weird porridge I didn’t have the guts to try; there were so many types of cured meats I’d have had a heart attack if I sampled them all (or at least wouldn’t have been able to mount my bike); and one day Craig went to peel a hard-boiled egg only to discover, messily, that it was raw!

That’s right: at a French buffet, they provide raw eggs and the tools necessary to boil them yourself. Look at the bang-up job K— has done on his. I mean, it’s perfect. And look how beautiful that bread is. And—WTF!—he even managed to find butter! I really need to pay more attention when I’m travelling (and to fire my albertnet fact-checker).

The route

As I mentioned before, our route on Day 6 was very similar to Stage 11 of last year’s Tour de France. (For an awesome 8-minute video recap of that, click here.)

The only difference was that we actually started out heading north to the first climb, and after it we headed way back south like the Tour stage. That’s right, we started out in the opposite direction of our final destination. Why? Because Lacets de Montvernier. This civil engineering masterpiece is well worth going out of the way for: it’s a Category 2 climb, only 2.3 miles long but with an average grade of 10.6%, featuring 18 switchbacks in under two miles. Check out how it looked on the cycling GPS app on my phone:

The crude display on my bike computer provided an even stranger representation:

Here’s a nice stock photo of the Lacets:

K— was feeling his oats (okay, his eggs) and tapped out a sweet tempo. If memory serves, he totally dropped the rest of our East Bay Velo Club cohort.

Here’s Ian, in his stealth non-EBVC cycling costume, savoring the grade as I peer over a switchback.

Craig cruises through a stone-walled section, then stretches his legs while taking in the view.

One of the guides snapped this pretty amazing shot.

Oddly enough, I can’t say it was a very hard climb. For one thing, the weird pain in my gluteus whateverus had finally subsided. Also, we took it really easy, knowing how much we still had ahead of us. After a glorious twisty descent we headed south over rolling terrain, toward the Col du Télégraphe.

Col du Télégraphe

After some time we reached the base of the Télégraphe, a Category 1 climb, and I wisely set out at my own solo pace, having learned the hard way twenty years before not to ride this one too hard. Here’s a nice shot from pretty early on.

Here’s my next and final shot of the Télégraphe, fifteen minutes later. Just look how far down the valley floor is … yet we’d been there so very recently. That’s the Alps for you.

We had a brief picnic at the summit before the 3-kilometer descent to Valloire, where the Col du Galibier starts. This is the oddly difficult descent where Team Jumbo-Visma attacked Pogacar and caught his UAE Team Emirates guys napping, as I recounted here.

Here is one of many excellent cow sculptures we encountered during the week. The French seem to really celebrate their cows, and based on the lovely cheese we’d been eating, I’d say they have a lot to celebrate.

Col du Galibier

If the photo above were higher-res, you could zoom in and see we had 17 kilometers (almost 11 miles) to go. The good news is, we had a very strong headwind.

Oh, wait, did I say good news? It was terrible. The first few miles of the climb aren’t that steep, but sufficiently so that our Epic A group broke apart right at Valloire. There was one dude in our group who had soloed right away. He is a big, strong guy, and it would have been good to have him around when facing that wind. So, I was stoked to realize I was slowly catching him, and figured we could work together until the steep section.

The trouble is, this guy wasn’t having it. All week he’d been kind of the “lone wolf” of the Epic A group, tending to do his own thing. For example, the rest of us had stopped to pee and get food at the base of the Télégraphe but he’d forged on ahead alone. So now, when I passed him, I eased up a bit to let him get my wheel, figuring after he’d drafted a bit he’d naturally return the favor. But instead, he slowed his pace to let me ride away from him. I’ve never seen such a thing. Clearly he just didn’t want company. Okay, fine. I pushed through the wind on my own. It was a cold, strong, biting wind and these miles seemed endless.

“My god,” I thought, “I am actually facing a headwind on the Galibier.” As you can read here, one of my most soul-crushingly brutal and wrenching experiences ever on a bicycle came on this godawful hard Hors Categorie climb … so to have a headwind into the bargain just seemed way over the top. This experience will forever serve me as a useful metaphor: next time I’m up against some quotidian difficulty and am tempted to feel sorry for myself, I can just think, “Hey … it could be worse. At least I’m not facing a headwind on the Galibier.”

The wind got stronger as I very gradually approached the first 180-degree switchback. As I cranked on the pedals, leaned over as aerodynamically as possible with my forearms on the tops of my bars (a position now banned by the UCI), I felt like the switchback was actually drifting away from me, perhaps on a tectonic plate. Finally I got there, took the 180-degree hairpin, and felt the thrill of the wind now at my back, pushing me along the first really steep section of the climb. It was thrilling, perhaps like surfing or being shot out of a cannon. In what seemed like no time at all, the valley floor was way down below me.

Of course, a pure tailwind like that couldn’t last, and the climb was long and steep. And long. And steep. As the road curved this way and that, the wind did everything it could to torment me, just short of spinning me around like a pinwheel. Needless to say, the temperature dropped steadily as I gained altitude. The sun went away for good.

It’s not exactly postcard-pretty up there but the views are impressive.

This is the part of the report that gets really difficult: conveying exactly how much this climb wore me down. Reading is such an easy task; so is writing, for that matter. I’m searching for a suitable metaphor for my dwindling power. You know how when you use a bar of Ivory soap, it gets smaller and smaller until it’s just a sliver, and not only is the sliver small but it’s spent, and just doesn’t deliver suds anymore? Or think of a pencil lead, or the tip of a crayon, that just gets blunter and blunter until it can’t write, it just makes kind of a blur on the paper. Consider a ball point pen that has somehow hung around so long it’s actually running out of ink, and puts frustratingly faint, broken marks on the page, so you shake it violently (like God seemed to be doing to me) to try to get it to work. Oh, here’s another one: think of trying to use a teabag a second time, so that the resulting drink is just weak and bitter. Such was my ineffectual plod up the mountain. Yes, I did keep the pedals turning, but this process seemed to affect the motion of the bicycle less and less.

I saw a random cyclist up ahead who had dismounted and was peering at the sky with binoculars. He was watching birds. I took them to be circling vultures at first, a perception obviously based on my morale. But they didn’t look like vultures, and they were darker than hawks, and their wings were different. I asked the binoculars guy what they were, but in my oxygen-starved state I made the offensive error of asking in English. Grasping the point of the guy’s blank stare, I tried again: “Excusez-moi, mais quel type d’oiseaux sont elles?” Now the guy looked excited, because (I suspect) he was a birder first and a proud Frenchman second. He leafed quickly through a little book (either a bird book or a dictionary, I guess) and it’s a testament to how slowly I was approaching that he had time to do so. He hurriedly said something completely nonsensical, like “They are Canada war knives.” I can’t remember the exact phrase; though I’d really tried to shunt it, my brain was cold and the synaptic signals sputtered and stopped. I nodded vaguely and kept riding, and the guy flipped through his book some more, and then jumped back on his bike and pedaled madly to within hearing range and called out, “Golden eagles!” Ah, so they were, and there were at least half a dozen of them up there, wheeling and cavorting in the wind. I didn’t have the presence of mind to reply, “Oh là là!” but I murmured my approval. I don’t know what was more impressive, actually; the birds or the birder.

On and up I rode. As I periodically looked back down the road, trying to cheer myself by noting my (albeit gradual) progress, I noted that Lone Wolf was gradually reeling me in. I had to hand it to him, he was tenacious, and strong. It took another couple of kilometers, but about three fourths of the way to the summit he finally came by. This time, I decided, I wouldn’t offer to take turns pulling, since he obviously wasn’t into sharing, but I was going to suck his wheel for as long as I could or unless he told me to stop. But there was just one problem: he was riding on the wrong side of the road. Not just a few inches from the center line, but spang in the middle of the oncoming lane! I couldn’t figure this out. I watched, bewildered, through a couple of switchbacks to see if he even had the sense to hug a right-hand embankment to escape the wind, but he didn’t. He was firmly committed to riding on the left.

Others had mentioned this mystifying behavior of Lone Wolf’s in previous days, and now I was witnessing it. My best guess at his reason for doing this is simply that he was embracing his divine sense of privilege. He’s probably a guy who made a lot of money, probably in tech, without needing to collaborate with anybody, and is very proud of that. Thus, he doesn’t see why he should cooperate with other bicyclists, or with traffic laws, and is just determined to do his own thing at all times, on principle. (This might explain why twice during the week, on descents, he made no attempt to hold his line and totally chopped other riders, almost taking Ian out at one point.) Needless to say I stayed on the right, and kept my distance, and eventually Lone Wolf dropped me.

Near the summit the mist increased, and it was blown around cinematically by the wind, and the terrain became even more desolate. It was oppressive but impressive, severe but sublime. And I suppose I should take a moment to point out that I was having a grand old time. Yes, I was seriously suffering, but after all that is the point. I chose this sport, and I chose this vacation, and every difficulty was within spec for a weeklong adventure that was supposed to be epic.

Finally I reached the junction where, with one kilometer to go, you either head left to the summit or go straight to a tunnel that we’d been warned not to take. The fog now was so thick I couldn’t even see the tunnel.

I took the left turn and started that long final kilometer, which averages 9% and—without anything left to provide shelter—I was fully in the wind. Somehow I made the summit. There was no picnic set up. It was frigid up there. The conditions were, to quote Lorrie Moore, “fit for neither beast nor vegetable.” I climbed into the warm van, found my backpack, and started putting on all the warm clothes I had. Here’s my only photo of the summit, taken through the van window.

Ian had joined us and, like Superman, was suddenly all ready for the descent and waiting for me. “Hang on,” I drawled lugubriously, “I just need to find my gloves.” Ian seemed to panic. “I have extras, take them!” he all but shrieked. I’m not sure what his rush was, other than it looked like it could storm at any second (and this was the forecast, actually). I found my gloves and we set out. (Ian lampooned his own impatience later, before I had the pleasure of doing so.)

OMG, what a descent. The road was wet and I didn’t want grit in my eyes so I kept on my sunglasses, though they were all steamed up. Between that and the fog, I could barely see … just the dark road between the white lines. But after a few miles of this, the fog lifted and blue sky appeared, the sun having finally decided to show his face. Everything was suddenly brilliant and the remaining globs of distant mist were tumbling and turning in the wind even as they dissolved. It was so improbably beautiful that I actually started laughing, tears in my eyes. The descent just got sweeter from there and soon we arrived at the little down of Le Monêtier-les-Bains, and stopped just a few blocks from the hotel we’d be staying at that night. The crew set up our picnic here, and we contrived beautiful sandwiches with cheese, cured meat, and great bread which we enjoyed in a glorious spell of sunshine. I was trying to pretend that soon we’d just head over to the hotel, but I knew we had one more climb to go.

Col du Granon

Look, I know this is already a very long post, over 2,500 words so far, which would take (me, at least) well over five minutes to read. Well, boo fricking hoo. This was a long-ass day on the bike, and it takes a lot of text to make a proper report. Just bear in mind that this day’s ride took me something like 20,000 pedal revolutions, and I didn’t get to leave off whenever I got bored or tired or listless. So if you feel like this is just too hard and you can’t go on, fine, go take a bubble bath, call it a night, come back later. Or not. Whatever. I’m not going to break this into two posts because it was all one day and that cumulative effect is what made it so hard.

As we started moving toward our bicycles (I’m tempted to say reluctantly, or was that just me?) it started to rain. We discussed whether it actually made sense to ride another 27 miles in this weather, after all we’d already been through. It was starting to sound like we had a consensus that we should just bag it, and then someone said, “Okay, let’s go” and we found ourselves rolling out, down a shallow descent into another headwind. It seemed like madness, but I’m nothing if not a follower. We continued, our trusty guide driving the pace on the front for us, Craig taking a pull here and there just because he’s a strong and generous guy and actually loves this kind of weather. (His spirit animal is a sled dog.)

We’d been given the basic stats about the Granon: 10/10/10, meaning it’s ~10 kilometers long, climbs roughly 10-hundred meters (that’s 1,000, for the less math-inclined readers out there, which is about 3,300 feet) and averages (needless to say) ~10%. In fact, the tour organizers rank it the fourth-hardest climb of the entire week. For some reason, I was ignoring these stats and pretending this climb would be no big deal, just a little tacked-on thing like the Lacets de Montvernier. I guess I was in denial. At least the weather improved a bit … the rain went away and it was mainly just cold. We reached the base, stopped to throw our jackets in the van, began pedaling again, hit the climb proper, and once again our group fell apart, or at least I fell out of it. Here’s a picture from pretty early on, before my hands became too cold to bother with photography.

The Granon is like being sucker-punched. It’s not that famous, not that scenic, and   isn’t anything I’d psychologically prepared for, but it’s simply relentless. Once it gets going, it never, ever lets up. We’d grumbled good-naturedly earlier in the week about how the road up the Col de la Loze would sometimes dip down, meaning even more leg-wrenching steepness to come, but at least we’d gotten a chance to rest our legs, our backs, our butts. No such respite here. Imagine if your workweek were all Mondays, or all your meetings lasted eight hours. Or imagine going on a walk and every step you took was barefoot onto a Lego. Oh well, at least it was nice and cold up there.

Wait, did I say nice? Damn was I sick of the cold and the wind. Give me 90 degrees and heat any day. At some point, for lack of anything else to help pass the time, I decided to photograph a guidepost, perhaps to show how every one of them casually declared that the next klick would also average 10%. Here’s what I got.

It’s actually not that easy to get a blurry photo with a smartphone … the image stabilization is remarkably good. But right as I hit the shutter button (not the elusive touch-screen one but the physical button on the edge of the phone) a giant shiver went through me. I’ve included the photo anyway because it might do the best job of all in capturing how I felt on this climb.

I’d started out with my vest unzipped, and for a good while I argued with myself about whether to try to zip it up. As much comfort as this would give me, it didn’t seem possible to actually get it done. If I stopped, I feared, I might not ever find the resolve to get going again, or my punch-drunk foot would fail to get my cleat engaged with the pedal and I’d tip over. On the other hand, it seemed implausible that I could ride no-handed long enough to get that zipper engaged, with my cold, numb, barely prehensile hands and this constant steep pitch. What is the minimum speed at which a person can even ride no-handed? I’m no slouch at bike handling—I can actually tie my shoe while riding—but this seemed like the wrong day for a new PR. Still, I could take the wind no longer and decided to have a go. I furiously pumped the pedals, sat up, secured the flapping ends of the vest (here I drifted into the left lane like Lone Wolf), managed to get the zipper end engaged, and zipped that bad boy all the way up without even jamming it. As I slumped forward I even managed to catch the handlebars and get the bike under control again, and back in the right lane. This may have been the finest moment of my life, and if I ever decide to go to grad school, I’ve got the kernel now for my personal essay.

As a victory lap I spent a minute or two, a bit later on, extracting my phone from my pocket and snapping a non-blurry photo of a guidepost. See? The vest works!

Finally, the summit. It was starting to rain again and I didn’t even look for the summit/elevation sign. I leaned my bike on the van, climbed in, and allowed my sinews and skeleton to dissolve the rest of the way until I was just a bag of spent flesh wrapped in clammy Lycra.

Fortunately, only Craig seemed interested in riding back down, across the valley floor, and up the shallow climb back to the hotel. (Our guide, of course, was required to accompany anybody who felt like pushing on, and had a great attitude about it, as though nothing would please him more than continuing the ride even beyond what the Tour de France riders had done.) Did you see what I did just now? In those parentheses? I made it seem like it was completely normal to wimp out and not actually finish the ride. Yeah, what can I say. I suppose you could conclude I’ve fallen prey to the modern practice of self-compassion. But actually, it’s just that I didn’t want to make Ian, M—, and Lone Wolf feel bad by showing them up. Yeah. That’s it.

Dinner

The hotel was gorgeous and we relaxed in the lounge with some recovery beers. (I generally define “recovery beer” as either a watery lager, or a 25-cl serving, but after this brutal ride it meant “whatever we feel like we wanna drink, gawd!”) Then we walked maybe ten steps to this incredibly long table, built from a very thick slab of wood, like we were at King Arthur’s court or something, but in a non-Disney way. A new friend we made on the trip, KR, visited the concierge or chef or somebody and negotiated a bottle of what he declared a very good local red wine, and although I am generally suspicious of epicures, especially in the realm of wine, it tasted really good to me. And then we were served this delicious corn gazpacho.

Who knew gazpacho could be made with anything, not just tomatoes? The French, evidently. In other news, it turns out a couple of riders were missing from dinner and someone had the brilliant idea to lie and say they’d be arriving shortly. So I inherited a second bowl of soup. The evening was just getting better and better.

Then the main course arrived and it was almost too pretty to eat. OMG, did I really just type that? Nothing is too pretty to eat, and we were starved. This was amazing. Even the carrot.

KR noted, with a tinge of concern, that his chicken looked pretty seriously undercooked. I have to say, he was a really good sport about it … no sign of outrage or anything. I pointed out, to his great relief, that the pinkness was because it was stuffed with (what else?) cured meat (ham or prosciutto, I can’t remember, and with my memory dimming it’s a good thing I didn’t wait even longer to write all of this down). The chicken was also stuffed with some fancy French cheese. I could have died right then and been satisfied with my life, even if (perhaps especially if) I were to be drowned somehow in a vat of that delightfully rich sauce you see above.

That would have been a shame, though, because we hadn’t had dessert yet. It wasn’t anything that original:

That said, I’ve tried a couple times to make flourless chocolate cake and both times crashed and burned, so it’s nice to see (and taste) it done well.

The only slight blight on this delightful night was the tour director coming around to see who still planned to ride in the Epic A group the next (and final) day, given that the forecast was for persistent drizzle, if not rain, all day long. I was sorely tempted to step down and sign up for the shorter route, knowing I’d completely (and satisfyingly) destroyed myself on this brutal day, but my pals promised to hang back with me on Day 7 (at least until Alpe d’Huez). And so, with a heavy heart I committed once again to Epic A. So watch these pages in a week or so for the final chapter of my Trans Alps epic.

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From the Archives: Return to La Marmotte Part II

Introduction

This is the Part II of the heart-racing (for me) tale of racing La Marmotte, a 108-mile cyclosportive race in the French Alps. This was my second attempt at this race after my disastrous effort three years before.

Where Part I left off, I was a bit more than halfway through the race, and about three quarters of the way up the infamous Col du Galibier, a brutal 11-mile climb to a summit of almost 8,700 feet. I hadn’t cracked like in 2003, but I was really tiring out. My legs were getting heavier and heavier. I was having trouble keeping up with a Belgian guy I’d ridden with the whole race, who was smooth and consistent and whom, not long before, I’d actually suspected of holding me back. Ha! As if.

Return to La Marmotte Part II – July 8, 2006

We passed a guy who had cracked—I could tell by how he was slumped over the handlebars, and by his sunken face, and by his expression. Poor bastard. He looked miserable, and hateful. He hated me for passing him. He hated himself for having cracked. He hated the mountain for what it was doing to him. My heart went out to the guy. Thinking back three years to my first horrible trial on the Galibier, I knew exactly what he was going through. I thanked my lucky stars I hadn’t blown up this year. At least, not thus far…

Three kilometers from the summit the Belgian was incredulous. “How long does it stay this steep?” he asked. For some reason it gave me some relief to say, “It actually only gets harder from here to the summit.” I guess I was reassured to know that everybody else on this mountain was suffering too. Of course I’m dying! Everybody’s dying! That’s just what you do on the Galibier, you die! That’s what it’s for!

But even if my spirits were restored slightly, my legs were as bad as ever. Gradually I began to slip back from the Belgian. I was on the ropes. But I still hadn’t cracked … thank God I’d been pacing myself. (Looking at my performance graphs later, I see that I hadn’t really slowed that much. My power went from 242 watts on the first half of the climb to 232 on the second; my heart rate dropped from 154 to 151. Not huge losses, considering the cumulative effort and the sheer altitude of the Galibier.)

About a kilometer from the top (I was thinking in metric units now, probably because they’re smaller), the Belgian had a clear gap, but he looked back, saw me, and slowed up a bit. I’d been completely wrong earlier—he was stronger than I, after all—but I was also right: he knew he’d benefit from my help on the descent, and now he was willing to lose a few seconds on the climb to get it.

We crested the summit and I checked my stopwatch: almost exactly five hours. In terms of our goal of finishing in under 7 hours, we were fifteen minutes behind schedule. But who said it takes an hour fifteen to get to the base of Alpe d’Huez? It was a friend of the Belgian’s who’d said that, and he was probably a climber, meaning a smallish rider. I knew full well from team time trailing that the biggest guys are best suited to flat or downhill terrain. I wasn’t ready to concede my goal of seven hours for the race—not here, forty miles from the finish. I decided to hold nothing back on the descent, and then take my lumps on Alpe d’Huez.

We flew along the road, beautifully carving up the corners. The Belgian was fearless, and—better yet—skillful. We started passing guys, and they latched on. We took a sharp right after the summit of the Col de Lautaret and the grade lessened. I hammered at the front of our group to keep the speed up. Very few guys in our group, which numbered about ten, were willing to help. I gestured, silently exhorting the guys to take their turns, but largely in vain. The Belgian and a couple others took some pulls, but I was driving most of the time. I wasn’t bitter: I didn’t think anybody was taking advantage, per se—they were just fried. Besides, it didn’t really matter; if I could rest even a quarter of the time, that was a huge benefit. My legs felt really good. Not counting a couple of short climbs, the average grade was only about 3%, yet we averaged about 28 miles per hour.

But that second short climb . . . ouch. It really slapped me down. It was only about three quarters of a mile at 4%, but I almost got dropped from the group. My legs were burning and alarms were going off in my head. I was right on the edge, trying to keep from getting gapped, when the Belgian came by. (He’d actually gotten dropped from our group earlier, and had had to claw his way back on.) “Don’t give up,” he said. I dug deep and stayed with the group. Thankfully, I was fine again once we resumed descending.

Through the last tunnel, I forgot to put my sunglasses up. It so was poorly lit in there, I couldn’t see a thing, and to stay in my lane I had to sight along the headlights of oncoming cars. A big gob of sludgy water dropped from the ceiling of the tunnel right through a vent in my helmet, and oozed over my head like a cracked egg.

Shortly before the base of Alpe d’Huez, we caught a large group, at least twenty riders. As I’d seen before, on the flat section before the Télégraphe, nobody wanted to pull hard. This time I didn’t mind—I appreciated the short rest before the big climb. I certainly hadn’t held anything back; the question now was, how much would I have left in the tank? We turned right, to begin our final climb. I looked at my stopwatch: 6:02:00. We’d made up a ton of time.

Before I could attack Alpe d’Huez, I had to stop to refuel. My bottles were empty and I’d eaten all eight of my gels. I don’t know how the guys in my group had managed to save anything in their bottles, but almost all of them, the Belgian included, blew right past the feed station. I never even considered doing that—it would be like ignoring the oil light on my car’s dashboard. I handed my bottle over and asked for Coke. It was handed back filled with about two inches of Coke and six inches of foam, and I had to beg for more. I got my other bottle filled with water, and, hands shaking, poured in powdered drink mix from a baggie I’d brought along. The stop took me less than two minutes but felt like a lot more.

Right away I knew I wasn’t going to make it up Alpe d’Huez in anything close to an hour. My legs were toast. I couldn’t get my heart up to 150. Still, I didn’t have the sensation of having cracked. I was like a flashlight when the battery is slowly dying and the bulb burns orange instead of white. The important thing was to hold out hope, to keep my head together, to fight off despair. I thought back to my last Marmotte, and how for the entire Alpe d’Huez climb I had Ravel’s “Bolero” stuck in my head—that plodding, repetitive prison sentence of a song—and now I searched around my brain for something more upbeat, more energizing, more inspirational. I came up with Soundgarden’s “Like Suicide.” There is of course nothing suicidal about bicycle racing but this song had the right energy.

It’s hard to describe the rush that comes from being an American amateur getting to race on a legendary French climb like Alpe d’Huez. I suppose it’s like a Little League baseball player getting to play in Yankee Stadium. The problem is, it’s like that Little Leaguer is also batting against a professional pitcher, swinging wildly at a ball that’s going 100 mph—yeah, like I’m going to hit that! After three other brutal climbs, getting past the first switchback of Alpe d’Huez felt like enough work for the day. And I had twenty more?

Still, I wasn’t beaten yet. Occasionally my spirits were lifted when I’d need to shift into a higher gear. After each switchback, the grade eases slightly, and if you can overcome the instinct to rest on these sections, you can shave some time and increase your speed slightly. Shifting up really helped my morale, by reminding me that I still had some control over my pace, instead of simply trying to survive.

There were a lot of spectators. Not the mobs you get at the Tour de France, of course, but it’s impressive that anybody at all turned out to stand along this sweltering, exposed road and watch a few thousand amateurs flogging themselves, with nothing on the line but their pride. I was also struck by the low-key response of this audience. Though the event was enough of a spectacle to bring them to the mountain, it wasn’t enough to draw them into the emotional swelter of the racers’ collective psyche. It’s a real contrast to what I’m accustomed to; American spectators scream and yell and clap, no matter who or where you are, as though they’re conditioned to do it. At La Marmotte, spectators seldom yell; they seem to be quietly witnessing the athletes’ progress up the hill, occasionally clapping softly and murmuring appreciation (I heard one man say “Chapeau”). If spectators were pets, Americans would be dogs—barking, jumping around, tails wagging—and the French would be cats, coolly observing from a comfortable perch.

The entire time I cranked up Alpe d’Huez I felt I was on the verge of cracking. I wasn’t even thinking about seven hours anymore; that milestone came and went without my notice. Every few minutes I passed somebody; a little more often somebody passed me. The oppressive heat gradually subsided as I gained altitude.

[The photo above is at the penultimate switchback, about two miles from the finish. Note the spectator kicking back in the lawn chair.]

Finally I passed the last switchback sign and started the final slog. When I saw the last uphill section, there were three or four guys struggling up it, and I poured on as much power as I could muster, passing them just before the top. Now I’d done it—I’d have to hammer the flat stretch to the finish to stay ahead of them. I put it in the big ring and sprinted along, riding on fumes, trying to will the home stretch to come into view. I was more than blown, more than knackered. I’d had the stuffing knocked out of me. I was . . . rendered.

I hit the downhill, fenced-off section and felt like I was flying, until I came around the final left-hand turn. To my surprise and horror, the final straightaway was slightly uphill this year, and I could barely keep the big ring turning. I was underwater. I heard my mom cheering, and I crossed the line.

I looked at cyclometer: my riding time was 7:18:00: about five minutes faster than the last time. A bit better, but just a bit. Then I looked for the patch of grass I’d collapsed on last time. But everything was changed around. I found a plastic chair and slumped into it. My mom came and found me. She was excited; I was relieved. For well over an hour I’d felt like I was going to fall apart, but here I was intact. No tears like last time; no medical tent.

I had no idea how I’d finished. Of course I’d hoped for a faster time; the question now was, given the detour in the course, was this even an improvement? My mom was convinced I’d finished higher; she guessed around 150 riders had come through before me. It was a long time before I found the gumption to go check the results.

I had butterflies in my stomach as I approached the postings. I scanned down the time column, looking for 7:18:00, and found my name. My mom’s guess was darn close: I was 155th. That’s 34 places higher than I’d finished before. Not bad. I scanned up the results list, honing in on the “pays” (country) column, looking for “ETA” (Etats-Unis)—and, happily, not finding it: no American had beaten me. Being the top American had been one of my goals for the race.

Turning from the board, I encountered a fairly large cyclist, vaguely familiar, grinning from ear to ear. He thrust out his hand. “Great job,” he said, in an accent I couldn’t place. “I was one of those guys you towed along on the descent and I wanted to thank you for all your work.” Man. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me, or why. We shook hands and parted, and now I had a big grin of my own.

Still, I was surprised that after all my training and my greater knowledge of the course, my result was so similar to the time before. My official time was 07:19:42, vs. 07:27:23 in 2003. Three minutes of this improvement was a simple logistic matter of getting to the start line earlier and avoiding traffic. Pondering this has settled me into a fatalistic view: I could probably approach my conditioning for such a race, and my pacing during it, in any of a hundred different ways and chances are, with more or less pain or anguish, I’d achieve about the same result—a result that was predestined by my genes, and by the circumstances of the first thirty-seven years of my life. I guess I can live with that.

My brothers were a long time in showing up: not long after I passed the grizzly crash scene on the descent of the Glandon, the Marmotte organizers had shut down the race for an hour and a half so they could get an ambulance up there. Geoff and Bryan had been stuck behind the road closure. But now they arrived intact and in great spirits. We all had stories for days about our ride in the French Alps….

My Stats 

• Placing: 155th out of 4,134 finishers (62nd in my 30-39 age category, out of 1,295); about 2,000 riders dropped out
• Diploma: Gold
• Real time: 7 hours 18 minutes 0 seconds rolling time
• Real average speed: 15.0 mph
• Official time: 7 hours 19 minutes 42 seconds (includes stops and time spent getting from my staging area to the official start line)
• Official average speed: 14.7 mph
• My climbing stats:
• 3,565 ft/hr on Col du Glandon (262 watts, 0.35 horsepower) at 157 bpm;
• 3,381 ft/hr on Col du Télégraphe (264 watts, 0.35 hp) at 158 bpm;
• 3,002 ft/hr on Col du Galibier (237 watts, 0.32 hp) at 153 bpm;
• 2,941 ft/hr on Alpe d’Huez (226 watts, 0.3 hp) at 147 bpm
• Time heart rate above 160 bpm: 19 min (compared to 1 hr 44 min during Marmotte ’03)
• Average heart rate: 152 beats per minute (80% of maximum), not including descents (vs. 153 bpm, 81% in ‘03)

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From the Archives: Return to La Marmotte - Part I

Introduction

I used to be an occasional contributor to the Daily Peloton . A few years ago, server problems took the magazine offline. Since then it’s come back up, but all of their archives are gone. I don’t know if these will ever be restored, so over time I will re-post my Daily Peloton stories here. What follows concerns my return visit to La Marmotte, a brutal bike race in the French Alps that crushed me like a grape my first time out. (Update: Part II now posted!)

What is La Marmotte?

La Marmotte is a “cyclosportive” (like a granfondo), which pits riders against each other but also scores each rider according to his or her time. The top riders really race, while the less sportive aim for a bronze, silver, or gold “diploma.” Many of the 6,000+ riders are just hoping to finish. The Marmotte route is a 100-mile circuit over three of the toughest Alpine passes of the Tour de France, followed by the 8-mile slog up the legendary Hors Categorie Alpe d’Huez, for a total of about 17,000 feet of climbing.

Previously…

I rode La Marmotte in 2003 and completely cracked about halfway through, limping for some fifty miles to the finish as rider after rider passed me. I returned to France this July [i.e., 2006] to have another crack at it. (You can read my 2003 story by clicking here.) I finished that report with this declaration: “Now that I know the course, and what not to do, it seems a shame not to put that knowledge to use … so I hereby resolve to return to France one day to settle my score with La Marmotte…”

My Preparation

In 2003, this race punished me severely for overestimating my condition. This year I decided if I trained harder maybe I’d get off a little easier on race day. I developed a standard weekday training ride featuring over 4,000 feet of vertical gain in under 25 miles, with two one-mile climbs averaging 10% and a third climb of two miles at 11. I nicknamed this ride the “Hill Climb Extravaganza,” or “HCE” for short, and a number of my teammates either adopted the format, decried it as needlessly difficult, or both.

When the weather sucked (we had a record 29 days of rain in March alone), I rode through it, or endured a couple hours on the trainer. Several times I was turned around by snow on Mount Diablo. My new training regimen brought to my mind a notion from the novel The Body Artist by Don DeLillo: “You are making your own little totalitarian society ... where you are the dictator, absolutely, and also the oppressed people.” (Quote used by permission of the Wallace Literary Agency.)

Of course I had to keep my regimen from cutting too far into my home life, so I made a tradition of heading out just before dawn. I’d get home just as my kids (age three and five) were getting out of bed; often, one would bring me juice and stretch out with me on the living room floor afterward.

This time around two of my brothers joined me for the race, and our mom came along to support us.

Recon

We arrived in France five days before the race so we could ride some of the climbs beforehand. We learned that, due to roadwork, the course would take a detour near the top of the Col de la Croix de Fer, heading instead over the Col du Glandon. The descent of the Glandon is trickier than that of the Croix de Fer. We heard from a fellow hotel guest that a very accomplished amateur racer died on this descent the previous year, having crashed on a switchback.

On the Tuesday before the race we rode up Alpe d’Huez. In my training run prior to my first Marmotte, I rode the climb in 47 minutes; this year, it took 55. After all that training, what could be the problem? Alas, this practice ride confirmed what I’d been trying to ignore all year: my endurance had improved, but I wasn’t climbing that well. I was a good seven pounds heavier than in 2003, and felt it.

Determined to master my dread of Col du Glabier, the mythic mountain pass that so destroyed me last time, I rode it with my brothers the next day. For the most part we road easy, but near the top hammered a bit. It was cold and windy up there, and just starting to rain . . . totally epic. By the top my heart rate climbed precipitously even as my power was dropping off, but it didn’t matter. I was controlling my pace, feeling like I was in charge instead of the mountain. Maybe the Galibier was just flesh and blood like me, I thought. Oh, but wait—of course it isn’t. It’s rock, and harder than any man. I was making no sense. Must have been the altitude.

The Race

Race day: July 8, 2006. I slept poorly the night before, because my brother Geoff was snoring. He slept poorly too, because I kept hitting him. After a pasta breakfast we made it to the start good and early. Based on my top-200 finish in 2003, I got to start in the third group, numbers 400-2,000. (My brothers were way farther back in the 4,000s, so I wouldn’t see them until the finish.) I waited around in the cold for an hour. You’ve never seen such a frigid bunch of low-fat racer types. Goose bumps, shivering, chattering teeth….

The race started, and I went out hard. At the base of the Col du Glandon, I could see the leaders, minutes up the road, led by a car with flashing lights. Well, maybe I could catch some of them.

On the Glandon, I kept in mind what a couple of Marmotte veterans had advised me: keep your heart rate about five beats lower than you normally would. I did about 157 bpm, putting out 280 watts, instead of 162 bpm and 300 watts. The riders were fluid around me as I passed some and were overtaken by others. Some guys I’d see several times, like they couldn’t figure out a good rhythm.

I came upon a rider who looked especially accomplished. His pedaling was fluid, his back straight, his posture relaxed, and above all I had the sense he was holding something back, not straining himself. I rode behind him awhile, judging how consistent his pace was. Sure enough, my heart rate and power were totally steady. It was like cruise control. I figured I’d pace myself on this guy.

We passed a couple of spectators who called out encouragement. We both said “Merci,” and the guy looked at me. In that one word I’d showcased my terrible French pronunciation. “Nederlander?”  he asked me. In a way, I was flattered. Being recognized as American is, to me, somehow like being recognized as a tourist. I paused. How to answer? In French it’s “Etats-Unis,” but where was this guy from? “No, America,” I answered. I immediately wished I’d said “United States.” I felt like a redneck saying “Amer’ca.” The rider didn’t seem to care, though. We chatted a bit. He said he was from Belgium, from the Dutch-speaking region. “Like Boonen,” he grinned.

The Belgian and I kept the same pace the whole way up the Col du Glandon, and though I had the strange sensation of loafing, I held my position and felt I was still pretty close to the front of the race. I’d followed the five-heartbeats rule … was this holding too much back? I wasn’t too worried—the rest of the course would give me plenty of opportunity to use up any “extra” energy.

Toward the top, despite the surprisingly thick mass of spectators, I spotted my mom right away in her bright orange East Bay Velo Club jersey. We’d forgotten to practice passing up the musette bag, but it went without a hitch. I was so relieved—there were so many things (e.g., parking, congestion) that could have prevented my mom from making it up there. I stuffed my pockets full of gels and put fresh bottles in my cages without losing a pedal stroke. I heard my mom call after me: “Go, tiger!” Where’d she get that? I guess it had been about twenty years since she’d watched me in a race. (My mom would go on to have her own Marmotte adventure, rocking out to Pink Floyd while threading past throngs of cars and straggling riders and navigating a shortcut to Alpe d’Huez that took her over a road barely wider than the car, with a sheer cliff on one side.)

I got a slow start to the descent as I put on my jacket, and lost contact with the Belgian. Coming around one of the early switchbacks I came upon a chilling sight: a rider had crashed and was sprawled on the side of the road. He wasn’t moving, and blood pooled beneath his head. A couple course marshals were attending to him. The race was pretty split up at this point, as lots of guys had grabbed food or water. I passed a number of racers on the winding road, and though not all of them were going blindingly fast, everybody looked confident and capable.

I pushed on, and after a while had the strange sense of being utterly alone. Nobody in sight ahead of me, and nobody behind. What the hell? Had I taken a wrong turn? It was eerie.

Eventually I caught a few more riders, a really fast guy caught us from behind, and as the road flattened and straightened we started to gather into a small pack. At the bottom of the descent, near St. Jean de Maurienne, we caught a very large group, at least sixty guys. Oddly, they weren’t going that fast. I realized why: we had a bit of a headwind, and there was little incentive for anybody to drag this giant group along by himself. Nor was it easy to motivate a small number of guys to pull hard. Say I got five guys to hammer with me: we’d each do a fifth of the work for the next ten miles, getting us only incrementally closer to the unknown number of riders ahead. Then we’d hit the base of the Col du Télégraphe with sixty daisy-fresh guys behind us. But going it alone would be even worse. I tried riding off and opening a big gap, hoping some guys would jump across, but nobody did.

Once I resigned myself to rolling along at 20 miles per hour with the group, it was pretty fun. It wasn’t hard, of course, and I got to hear idle chatter in half a dozen languages. This brought home the fact that I was actually racing in another country, in a truly international field—exactly the kind of thing I’d fantasized about as a kid. I’ve never really gotten over the notion that what we call bike racing in the U.S. can feel like a facsimile of the real sport as it’s practiced in Europe. Sure, we have our big races, like the Tour of California, but those are for the pros. The average amateur event in the U.S. is a rinky-dink criterium in a business park, with nobody in attendance who isn’t himself racing. Sure, it’s fast, and hard, but you never feel like you’re involved in something big. We have our epic courses, of course, like the Death Ride, but those aren’t races. People start whenever they feel like it, most just hoping to finish. It’s hard to feel like an elite racer when you’re passing some guy on a mountain bike who hit the road at 5 a.m. What the U.S. needs is a cyclosportive circuit, and maybe 10,000 more superb riders. Then I wouldn’t have to cross the Atlantic to get this rush.

Just before the start of the Télégraphe, I came across the Belgian guy again. We started the climb in the front of the group. “This is good,” he said. “Just keep an even pace, and most of these guys will fall away.” Sure enough, as the climb progressed our group thinned out until we were basically alone, occasionally passing somebody and occasionally being passed.

We discussed our strategy: he, too, had been advised to ride at five bpm below his normal level. We both had the same main goal: to finish in seven hours or less. This was his first Marmotte, but he’d discussed the race at length with an experienced friend who said that it takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to get from the top of the Galibier to the base of Alpe d’Huez. Leaving an hour for that climb, we’d have to reach the Galibier summit at hour 4:45. We weren’t sure how long the Galibier would take, but by the top of the Télégraphe we both had the feeling we were a bit behind schedule.

I still had a full bottle of energy drink, and had been diligently eating my gels. We both stopped to fill a bottle, losing no more than ten or fifteen seconds. We flew down through Valloire to the base of the Galibier and started to climb again. I was feeling a bit stressed: it didn’t look possible to reach the summit by 4:45. Was I going too easy? I felt great, like maybe I’d held too much back. Maybe it was time to pick up the pace. On the other hand, my goal of seven hours was somewhat arbitrary; who ever said I could achieve that, anyway? Maybe I was pacing myself just right; after all, last time I’d done this race I went out too hard and paid dearly. What to do? I took it up a notch. My heart rate immediately began to climb. Was I being foolish? I wished I had some Yoda figure to come to me in a vision and tell me exactly how to proceed.

Instead, I heard from the Belgian, right behind me: “Not too hard. Keep it even.” I paused. Who was this guy, anyway? Sure, he was smooth and everything, but how could I know he wasn’t just taking advantage of me? Maybe he just needed my size for the descent. He wasn’t one of those tiny little climbers (the Dutch call them “pocket climbers”) who can’t roll downhill worth a damn, but neither was he big enough to punch through the wind like I could. (We’d both noted this on the short descent to Valloire.) What if he realized he wasn’t as strong, and that his best bet was to get me to hold back, just enough for him to keep up? On the other hand, maybe he was smarter. I finally decided to hold back. I wasn’t going to crack again and limp along for the rest of the race. Not again.

Well, a lot can happen on a long climb like the Galibier. Ten or fifteen minutes after my tactical crossroads, I found myself struggling to keep on the Belgian’s wheel. He hadn’t sped up—he was as consistent as ever. I was simply tiring out. My legs got heavier and heavier and I no longer felt like the master of my pace. The mountain was getting the better of me. I took the lead again—a psychological game, fooling myself into confidence. (After all, I told myself, how could I be weak when I’m leading this guy?) I tried every trick in the book to shore up my psyche. I tried to smile, like Ivan Basso and Chris Horner (and George Mount before them). But doubt kept creeping in. Not despair—I was still in the game—but serious doubt. A climb like that can really crush your spirit.

With about five kilometers to go I was really worried: how far would my performance slip? I really needed a race radio with Johan Bruyneel reassuring me: “Come on Dana. Come on. Okay, Dana, don’t panic, don’t panic, eh? You can do this. You’re the best, eh? Okay, 5K to the summit. Very good. Very good. Come on. That’s it. Yes.” Instead all I had was my own inner voice: “Who said you could climb? Look at you. You’re huge. You weren’t made for this. What are you doing here, anyway?” I was having an epiphany on the mountain: I was going against nature—the Galibier, to be precise, which was the evil Mother Nature of the margarine commercial.

We passed a guy who had cracked. I could tell by how he was slumped over the handlebars, and by his sunken face, and by his expression. Poor bastard. He looked miserable, and hateful. He hated me for passing him. He hated himself for having cracked. He hated the mountain for what it was doing to him. My heart went out to the guy. Thinking back three years to my horrible trial on the Galibier, I knew exactly what he was going through. I thanked my lucky stars I hadn’t cracked this year. At least, not thus far….

To be continued…

Check back next week for the second half of my tale: the heart(rate) of darkness!

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From the Archives - Riding La Marmotte - Part II

Introduction

This is the second part of the heart-wrenching (for me) tale of racing La Marmotte, a 108-mile cyclosportive race in the French Alps I did in 2003. For the first half, click here.

La Marmotte Part II – July 5, 2003

At the halfway point, the race seemed to be going just about perfectly: after my audacious full-throttle ascent of the Col du Télégraphe, my heart rate was back down to a sensible 162 bpm, my average speed was 16.7 mph (seemingly on track to best that of the previous year’s winner), and I found myself in a small group of very elite looking guys, exceeding my own expectations.

There was just one problem: it was here that I cracked.

Something had given. Some bodily threshold had been exceeded. Something had gone wrong with the human machine. There was no sound of the transmission dropping out and landing on the ground, but I did feel that sudden loss of power your car suffers when, say, the timing belt breaks, leaving you just enough juice to get over to the shoulder if you’re lucky. But I wasn’t lucky: I had half the race to go.

Perhaps one day sports medicine will have everything figured out, and the exact cause of such a meltdown will be easily and precisely diagnosed. It wasn’t a blood sugar crash; I’ve had that and know what it feels like. This was different. I found myself struggling just to keep going. The short descent to the feed station at Valloire had become long, and felt like a climb.

Had I missed it? I asked a couple of guys in the group where the food was; actually, I tried to ask, but in my turmoil couldn’t form the sentence properly in French. Or maybe the words were right but the volume was too low. Finally a guy seemed to understand: he motioned toward his mouth and said “manger?” I think French wasn’t his first language, either. I nodded. “One kilometre,” he said. It ended up being two, and very long ones at that.

The feed station was a couple of card tables. The guys working it kept asking if I wanted water. They’d evidently not heard of Gatorade, the word I thought would best convey the idea of caloric drink. I started shouting, “Sucre, sucre!” and one of the guys finally got the point. He filled my bottles with a liquid the color of weak lemonade or dirty water. I grabbed a few handfuls of dried apricots before pedaling onward, beginning the bleak climb up the Col du Galibier. I cannot recall feeling more despondent, before or since. Where was my body, the good one that had worked so well? What was happening to me? And how could I possibly make it all the way to the finish, with the fearsome Col du Galibier and Alpe d’Huez still to come?

The energy drink was so weak I thought it might be water. I plodded along, already in my lowest gear, not quite believing what I still had to do. My legs were now impotent Wiffle bats, and either my heart wasn’t being asked for more than 145 beats per minute, or it couldn’t fill a bigger order. Everything had gone slack; pedaling hard was like trying to pluck a broken guitar string. I started getting passed by my competitors. Finding the road ahead too depressing to contemplate, I stared miserably down into the ravine off to my right, and saw an actual marmot down there. It was running, half tumbling, and I was surprised how big it was. Shaped like a groundhog, it was the size of a dog. It finally tumbled through a hole in the ground into its underground lair. Where could I go?

I ground my way up the climb, looking down occasionally at the switchbacks below, seeing rider after lone rider, the original packs having exploded long ago. Though many of my competitors looked as wretched as I felt, others had doubtless been pacing themselves, biding their time, and would finish strong. Occasionally I would marvel at how quickly I was gaining elevation—the Galibier forces you to—but at other times I would look up at the mountain ahead, the dizzying switchbacks, the increasingly stark landscape, and feel despair beating at my door.

It was an amazing road, very exposed, rather bleak but oddly pretty against the backdrop of formidable snow-covered peaks. As I passed above the timber line, vegetation became sparse and the air grew chilly. Though it had been hot on the Télégraphe, there was still snow up here. I ate apricots as often as I could (even in the cold air, the sweat leaching through my jersey had completely rehydrated them), and kept working on my bottles until they were empty.

The road narrowed. Signs posted by the race organizers taunted me with the number of kilometers remaining. The remaining switchbacks, of which there were quite a few, were all laid out before me, in plain view, a scaffold of fiendishly steep roads, like a parking garage, and I began to bitterly resent the very idea of subjecting humans to such a thing. This climb is sick, I thought. The whole enterprise seemed an abomination.

My calf muscles started cramping up, for the first time in my life. They threatened to go from pliant muscle to useless stone. Each time a calf hardened, I had to back off and let it recover, over and over. I was on the verge of panic, fearing my legs would lock up and I’d tip over.

Toward the summit, spectators began to appear. There is a certain breed of French spectator—maybe not even a breed but a single one, though I noted his presence often enough to assume a whole race of men—who is a connoisseur of suffering, who studies it intently like a sommelier sampling a fine wine. I encountered one such fellow, a small man with a dark beard, on the last kilometer of Galibier. To say he cheered me on isn’t exactly right: he saw right into me, touring my pain as if exploring a dark cave. To borrow from Poe:

Deep into that darkness peering,
long [he] stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams
no mortal ever dared to dream before.

He made a gesture, holding his hands low, palms up, fingers curling and uncurling, and murmured gently in French, making a throaty rumbling sound like the burbling coo of a pigeon. It was encouragement, to be sure, but scaled to the nature of my endeavor, so much more attuned than someone shrieking “Go, go!” or “Allez, allez!” I don’t know that I felt inspired, but at least I felt appreciated, that I hadn’t suffered unseen. 

The very top of the climb finally came into clear view, and I realized this was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen, on as perfectly clear a day as could possibly be. The distant snow-covered peaks looked like you could reach out and touch them. The atmosphere, completely free of glare, fog, and mist, seemed to shimmer somehow, and sparkle. And yet, I couldn’t enjoy it—imagine trying to take in a masterpiece of landscape painting while somebody strikes you repeatedly with a hammer. As I crested the summit, cheered by a large handful of what seemed, at least in my quasi-delusional state, to be a group of old French peasant women from the countryside, I felt that I would weep, if only I had the energy.

Once I began the descent from Galibier, I felt like a bike racer again. For maximum aerodynamic advantage, I didn’t put my jacket on. Sure, the air was frigid, but what’s a little cold when your entire body is screaming out in anguish? I took the curves good and fast, and though I only passed a couple of guys, I’m sure I extended my tenuous lead over many of the riders behind me. Moreover, I was going fast, and for awhile could forget how weak I was. I didn’t kid myself that the resting would do me any good—that would be like “fixing” a TV with a burned out tube by letting it sit awhile. But as the road flattened out somewhat and a group of six or eight guys caught me, I was able to do my share of the work and we were making good time.

It’s close to 30 miles from the top of the Galibier to the base of Alpe d’Huez, and I was relieved to be in a pack as we were fighting a stiff headwind. One of the guys in the group was massive—I reckon he was a Dutchman—and he and I took up the bulk of the work. Since powering on the flats uses different muscles from climbing, I was riding fairly well and my spirits improved a bit. (Going through tunnels in a group, by the way, is kind of a trip. Needless to say you have to have complete trust in your fellow riders; you can’t see each other too well in the dark and have to be very smooth. I enjoyed the visual effect of seeing only the silhouette of the rider ahead of me, like a paper cutout against the light at the end of the tunnel.)

Around 10 miles from Bourg d’Oisans (my grasp of distances, in fact of numbers in general, was shaky at this point), we hit a small climb steep enough to require the small chainring. To my horror, I threw my chain. A guy in the pack pushed me along while I tried to shift the chain back on. A nice gesture (if also pragmatic), but it was in vain. I had to stop to put the chain back on, and watched miserably as the group rolled away without me. Fighting the headwind by myself the rest of the way to the base of Alpe d’Huez, still with empty bottles, losing even more time to the crush of riders behind me, brought my morale all the way back down to Galibier levels, maybe even lower.

I rolled into the second feed station, drank a big bottle or two of water, and ate a million orange slices while a woman filled my bottle with Coke. This was the same woman, by the way, who served the hot lunch back in elementary school, whom I would watch slopping the food grumpily on the tray on those sad days when I forgot my sack lunch. The intervening decades have done nothing to improve her cheerless attitude. But then what was I expecting, Mary Lou Retton?

I hit the road again, pleased to have, at last, a full-strength sugary drink to help me up the climb. Then I remembered my emergency medical stash: two Tylenol and a NoDoz in my jersey pocket. I reached in there and felt around, and all my fingers found was a paste of completely dissolved tablets. I considered smearing this into my mouth, but it was hot now and I’d probably hurl.

Just before the road started to go up, a large pack of riders, maybe 10 or 12, passed me at a good clip. It was a menacing reminder that, poorly as I’d been riding, I still had a vast number of racers behind me and a potentially decent position to defend. My ride time at this point was a bit under 6 hours and 15 minutes. If (hypothetically speaking) I rode Alpe d’Huez as fast as I’d done it in training, my goal of 7 hours for the whole course was still within reach.

But of course I wasn’t going nearly as fast as before. It was a slog.

I can’t recall exactly when I got Ravel’s “Bolero” stuck in my head. Normally my brain chooses rock music as accompaniment for cycling. A short climb on a training ride might invoke the guitar solo from Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”; on a particularly fast team ride recently my mental deejay chose Beck’s “Loser” (perhaps for ironic effect); and on the Col de la Croix de Fer earlier in this race I’d somehow dug up “Gates of Steel” by Devo. I almost never get classical music. But the utterly repetitive, plodding dum-de-de-de-dum, de-de-de-dum, de-de-de-dum-dum-dum foundation of “Bolero” matched my cadence and my eternity of rote suffering pretty well. In fact, my fried brain left out most of the more interesting melodies laid on top of this backdrop, and created a new extended dance mix of just the dum-de-de-de-dum business. It was the quasi-musical equivalent of a prison sentence, and thus perfectly appropriate.

Rider after rider passed me. Looking for some vestige of athletic dignity, I made a habit of checking their numbers. A low number meant a high finisher last year whom I’d caught and dropped earlier—slightly less demoralizing than a high number, indicating someone who’d not finished high before, maybe a first-time Marmotte rider like me, and moreover someone who may have started well behind me, maybe even minutes behind me, who had paced himself perfectly throughout the ride and would use the entire Alpe d’Huez climb to pass people. The majority of the riders overtaking me did have low numbers, and were obviously classy riders I couldn’t be ashamed of losing to. But among them were also high numbered riders whose form wasn’t even that good, whose bikes were older and lesser than mine, who didn’t have team jerseys—riders I know wouldn’t be passing me had I not completely botched the race by going too hard on the Col du Télégraphe.

The switchbacks on Alpe d’Huez are numbered, in descending order as you climb, so in theory you can mark your progress, like a countdown. But this only helps when you feel like you’re actually making progress, like the distance between switchbacks isn’t stretching out before you.

Alpe d’Huez had a lot more spectators than the Galibier, but many were there to cheer specific riders, and others seemed to be observing the spectacle without really engaging with it emotionally. Sure, a great many did cheer, but I couldn’t help notice others who looked at me with pity. Others seemed to consider me almost contemptuously, as you would look upon a scabby, humiliated dog wearing a giant satellite-dish collar.

Here and there I encountered the connoisseur-of-suffering type, always a small, bearded Frenchman, always making the finger-curling gesture and the rumbling burble of encouragement. (Could it have been one guy, somehow zipping ahead on the course? Or maybe a hallucination?) In most cases what I was seeing was not a lack of enthusiasm, but rather a kind of restraint, as though spectators were thoughtfully letting me die in peace.

One fellow told me, in French, that if I would sit down in the saddle he’d give me a push. Unfortunately my sluggish brain only parsed the sentence some 10 or 15 seconds after the fact, so I didn’t sit down; even so, he did give me as good a push as possible without crashing me. The climb went on and on, and finally after the last switchback I knew I was near the end. At this point I saw two riders in my sights and decided to pass them. After all, I had to feel like I was beating somebody. I managed to get by them, but they weren’t exactly fighting.

Finally I reached the top. Alpe d’Huez had taken more than an hour and fifteen minutes, almost half an hour longer than it had in training. I hit the flat section at the top and began sprinting, not for any particular reason other than to get the last bit over with. There was fencing set up along the sides, and some turns, and thick crowds, and I did have the thrilling feeling of going pretty fast. Not because I was, of course, but because I was finally on a flat road—it’s the same phenomenon that produces the feeling of floating over the ground after you’ve been on a treadmill for half an hour. A couple hundred meters from the line I even had the presence of mind to zip up my jersey. The road was slightly downhill now and I flew toward the line, spotting Erin and my mom right there on the sidelines, cheering me on. I crossed over the black pad that stopped my timing chip, but was so disoriented I didn’t grasp its purpose. For some reason I expected some official to come wave a wand of some kind at my ankle. I tried to pose a question to the riders around me and got nothing but exhausted, blank stares. Finally I realized I was really done.

My family found me right away and my mom conjured up a ice-cold Coke.

I straddled my bike for awhile, trying to figure out what to do. I could barely stay up, but climbing off the bike meant lifting a leg high enough to clear the saddle, and I wasn’t sure that was possible. So I just slumped over the bars and mourned my awful ride.

I managed to dismount and collapsed on a patch of grass. I wasn’t even prepared to deal with the Coke. Erin was excited, figured I’d had a great ride, and had no idea how emotionally crushed I was. She asked me how it went and after I felt I’d regained enough composure to talk, I tried to answer her. But what could I say? “I blew it,” I finally said. A wave of feeling poured over me, something between relief, awe, and despondence. After six months of intense training, burning off more than 20 pounds of extra body mass, and all the psyching up for this one event, I almost had a brilliant ride but instead fell far short. What difference might better judgment have made? I was having difficulty explaining myself, and difficulty trying to eat, and eventually found myself sobbing into some orange slices.

Erin couldn’t understand. I’d looked pretty fast to her, having finished before she’d really expected me to—especially, she said, since the form and physique of the riders who’d come in before me seemed, to her, much better suited to such a course.

I lay back on the grass and Erin held a jacket over me to block the sun. She was a bit concerned. I didn’t look so good.

After I rested awhile I felt better, and after a kiss from my little daughter was able to smile a bit.

Even so, Erin insisted I get checked out in the medical tent. One medic looked me over and then called in another guy, a big bearded dude with yellow teeth and cigarette breath, who explained that my body was having trouble re-oxygenating. He talked for some time, and the odd thing is I understood everything he said, though he was speaking French at a very fast clip. He prescribed pasta. Within half an hour I felt well enough to pick up my diploma and medal, turn in my timing chip, and make it back to the car.

Looking back now, I’m not completely displeased with my performance. As badly as I blew up on the Télégraphe, I did manage to salvage the ride somewhat, and I only missed my (albeit arbitrary) goal by 23 minutes. And to have achieved the fitness I needed even to compete in such a thing is something I hadn’t done in 12 years. Now that I know the course, and what not to do, it seems a shame not to put that knowledge to use … so I hereby resolve to return to France one day to settle my score with La Marmotte…

My Stats

*I don’t have the rate of vertical gain for the Télégraphe or the Galibier... I was too shattered to remember to start and stop the lap timer on my altimeter.

Notes

• The winner, Laurens Ten Dam, was from Holland and finished in 6:07:04, a new course record. [Ten Dam went on to ride for pro teams including Rabobank, Giant-Alpecin, and CCC, and finished 9th in the 2014 Tour de France.]
• The second place rider was also Dutch, and finished only 41 seconds behind. (My wife, driving up Alpe d’Huez during the race, was able to watch these two duking it out.) Third place went to a Frenchman, 3½ minutes behind second.
• The top woman finisher was French, 36 years old, and placed a very impressive 50th with a time of 6:55:19. There were 72 female finishers under age 40, and 36 who were 40 or older.
• The top finisher in the men’s 40-49 age group was a Frenchman, age 42, who finished in 10th overall with a time of 6:29:14. The top men’s 50-59 was age 54, from Andorra in a stellar time of 6:49:35 (31st overall). The top men’s 60+ was 62, from France, in 8:03:04 (496th overall).
• The youngest men’s finisher was 16, from France, in 10:00:43 for 2,475th place. The youngest woman was 20, from Holland, in 10:32:40 for 3,039th place. There were two 71-year-old men, one from Belgium and one from France, finishing in 11:50:47 (4,036th place) and 12:52:26 (4,457th place) respectively. The oldest woman was 48, from Holland, in 13:05:39 (4,486th place).
• The last finisher clocked in at 13:49:40, an average speed of 7.9 mph.

One American beat me: a 42-year-old who placed 91st (20th in his age category) with a time of 7:07:21. I’d hoped to be the top American. But then, I’d hoped for a lot of things.

Here is a breakdown of where the 2003 finishers hailed from. (Not listed: the ~2,000 who dropped out.)

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