Epic Trans Alps Cycling Trip - Part IV

Introduction

Well, albertnet used to be a blog about nothing. Now it seems to have become a blog about my cycling trip in France. Part I is here, Part II is here, and Part III is here. One day perhaps I’ll run out of Alpine tales to recount, and meals to describe, but that’s still a long way off. In this post I cover the famous Col de la Madeleine and the relentless Col du Glandon. Is the Glandon also famous, the Madeleine relentless? Yes and yes. Do cured meats figure strongly in this report? Yes!

Col de la Madeleine

Day 5 featured the second and third hardest climbs in the Alps, according to the organizers. We started with the Col de la Madeleine, 14.9 miles long at an average grade of 6.6%. The ride was hard even before the climb began because we had ten miles of gradual descending first, at a motor-pacing tempo behind the tour guide. My pool-cue-to-the-gluteus pain was still there, plus after four hard days of riding I was pretty knackered in general. When the climb started I was dropped instantly from our Epic A group (which had dwindled from ~15 riders initially down to 5, the others having switched to Epic B). Only a kilometer into the climb, my pals (along with some rando you see there on the right) stopped to wait for me at the only intersection, knowing I’m just dumb enough to take a wrong turn.

In this case I wouldn’t have actually gotten lost because a) my bike computer navigation was working fine (see Part II for details) and b) I remembered what the tour leader had said in the pre-ride meeting: “Don’t go towards Pussy!” (Click the above photo and look at the signpost on the right.)

From here I was immediately dropped again and made my slightly dejected, slow way up the mountain. There were lots of switchbacks, and tree-lined ravines to stare blankly into. The cement guardrails were the perfect height to flip a cyclist over the bars.

After some time I came upon Ian and Craig, stopped along the road. Craig had punctured and Ian was hanging out during the repair. I left them for dead and continued on up the road. This gave me the opportunity to watch their gradual progress, switchback after switchback, as they reeled me back in.

They eventually, inevitably, caught me and we rode together for a while, and then with about 7 kilometers to go they sailed off into the distance again. I slogged along solo, and a bit later came across a bunch of cows, their bells making a pleasant sound. Cows and cowbells normally buoy my spirits, but then I saw something kind of disturbing: many of these cows had weird plastic things attached to their snouts.

They looked kind of like the thick plastic ring-thingies you get with expensive four-packs of craft beer. What the hell were they, and did they have to be plastic? For some reason this brought to mind the frightening plastic-faced children in the train tunnel scene of “Pink Floyd: The Wall.” I was starting to kind of dislike the Col de la Madeleine.

That said, it sure was scenic. Check out this view, with Mont Blanc at the left edge of that range there.

I made the summit and enjoyed a brief picnic with my pals. I made a sandwich of good French bread with olive oil, guacamole, and these weird cigarette-sized sticks of cured meat; the package said simply “Galibier.” This weird creation was oddly tasty, under the circumstances. By the way, there tended to be a tub of guac at every picnic, and it was never very good … pretty much whatever you get in a tub at Costco. But then, we can’t expect the French to be great at everything and it’s nice to know the U.S. can still be better at something. (After all, the tub guac at Whole Foods is better than this, albeit more expensive than cocaine.)

Here’s the photo-op. I know “Altitude 2000m” might not mean much to my American readers. It equates to 6,562 feet elevation in Imperial units (or, as my brother calls them, “Freedom units”). Of course those of us who have conquered Mount Evans, with its summit of 14,270 feet, might have a harder time thinking 6,562 is any big deal. But the Madeleine gains over 5,000 feet and it has cows with weird plastic nose things, okay? Take my word for it, it’s grueling.

We had another glorious descent. Permit me an aside here on the topic of risk management. During my nights of poor sleep throughout this trip, as I tossed and turned, I often contemplated the danger of descending and the high stakes. “Oh dear!” my wussified, disgracefully declawed middle-aged psyche would say. “What if I crash?” Probably this interior monologue wasn’t actually about bike safety at all, but was based on some generalized anxiety that needed something specific to latch on to … basically an excuse to fret. Whatever the case, I as I lay there having these self-defeating thoughts I would resolve to take it super-easy on the remaining downhills. Fortunately, this soul-degrading inner voice was somehow vanquished during each ride as my normal, justifiable confidence reasserted itself. That is to say, the descents were glorious affairs, grand and sweeping and flowing and perfect. To paraphrase Faulkner, middle-age might have kilt me but it ain’t whupped me yet.

So, according to the tour organizers, the Madeleine is the third hardest climb in the Alps, and the Col du Glandon—which was our next climb of the day—is the second hardest. That’s a lot to throw at us, particularly the day after we conquered the very hardest climb, Col de la Loze. I had some butterflies heading into the Glandon, which were somewhat assuaged by this amusing sight:

We ultimately decided to brush this praying mantis off of Ian’s jersey, because what if this little insect hitched a ride all the way to the Glandon summit, out of his element and far from his kind?

Our group broke up right away, and I went straight out the back in accordance with what seemed to be the new status quo. I didn’t really mind; I have a talent for resignation (which serves a cyclist well). That weird pain in my gluteus maximus (or perhaps gluteus medius—what am I, a doctor?!) was still bedeviling me. But one of the great things about cycling is that there’s scenery to enjoy, even as you suffer. Prizefighters, for example, don’t get to look upon landscapes like this as they’re being pummeled.

After a few miles I caught up to M—, my roommate on the tour. We paced each other and chatted for a good while until I found myself in a strange dilemma. Riding in the saddle, my glute hurt. Standing on the pedals, I got some relief. But the very low gear on my rental bike (35-tooth chainring, 33 rear cog) was so low, pedaling out of the saddle felt lame—mincing, ineffectual little pedal strokes that barely move the bike forward. My ego couldn’t handle it. So I had to shift up before I could properly ride out of the saddle. Obviously this increased my pace and thus my labor, but burning legs is the proper kind of pain, the kind caused by hard work, as opposed to this blunt stab in my glute that suggested injury. The upshot is that I gradually dropped my pal and thus faced another endless Alpine climb solo. But I’m used to it. Bernard Hinault said once, “No kind of progress will ever overcome the loneliness of the long-distance rider,” and he would know.

As the climb progressed, the scenery changed from what you’d see on a postcard to something more spare, sparse, even kind of bleak—or maybe this was just my psychological state filtering what I saw. All the trees disappeared, and the grasses had a cropped, stubbly look, their green turning to a mossy yellow, suggesting (at least to me) a pallid, wan lack of health, as though the plant life couldn’t get enough oxygen. More and more, the rock seemed to be winning out, beating back the flora. The views were impressive but not exactly pretty. In the final kilometer of the climb (which averaged 10%) a guide dropped back to pace me along.

It was a relief to be near the summit because, as disciplined as I try to be, it’s hard to stop negativity from infiltrating my thoughts, sometimes even of the “can I even make it?” variety. Normally, as discussed here, I am good at stomping down this negative self-talk, but the sheer leg-wringing length of these Alpine grades can start to wear down even the most stubborn resolve. That’s where decades of accumulated suffering start to pay off, with a deeply resigned attitude that embraces the fatalistic notion that there is no choice, no alternative, just the reality of serving out your sentence. There’s almost a comfort in this, eventually; as Dostoyevsky wrote, “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!”

Even as I reached the Glandon summit I had this other quiet voice gradually insinuating itself, with a message I knew was important but didn’t want to hear. We’d been briefed that the Glandon wasn’t our final summit, that we had to head from there to the top of the Col de la Croix de Fer, which I’d been up once before, twenty years ago when I first raced La Marmotte. The Croix de Fer summit isn’t far from the summit of the Glandon, and it’s not a steep pitch, but nothing seems trivial this far into such a brutal day of riding. I pushed the matter out of my mind until the end of the Glandon when it could no longer be ignored: I had another three kilometers to go. I dragged myself the rest of the way and eventually reached the true high point of the day, at 6,782 feet. The iron cross you see on the left there may or may not be the croix de fer. I didn’t have the energy to investigate.

A picnic was waiting at the van, and a staffer volunteered to make me a sandwich. What service! He sawed a couple slices off a perfect French bâtard (proving in the process that the expression “greatest thing since sliced bread” is way off-base). He added olive oil, and can I just interrupt this post for a moment to say how much I hate it when a menu at an upscale restaurant employs the abbreviation “EVOO” for “extra virgin olive oil”? When I see that I almost want to head for the exit. Below the menu item “Herb-crusted beef medallions” you see the accompaniments, “Tomatillo-garlic salsify, braised parsnips, EVOO hummus.” Pretentious fuckwits. Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, so some oil, then groovy French cheese (what type? doesn't matter), prosciutto (of course), and the albeit mediocre guac (and again, who cares because this isn’t a chichi bistro). Oh yeah.

If I ever open a restaurant I’ll serve this (with proper guac, of course, or maybe just avocado) and call it “Le Glandon.” I won’t explain the name on the menu and the description won’t say anything about “EVOO.”

There was a corny picture frame thingy up there and I tried haplessly to do a selfie with it. A German motorcyclist intervened and got a passable shot.

As you can see, the day’s effort has both grown and deepened my crow’s feet. Too much more of this and my face might just crack.

We started the descent but abruptly halted because we didn’t have everyone. I took the opportunity to snap one more photo, and as I did so the missing guy showed up and everyone sailed by, so I was chasing like a madman after that. The photo came out well, though, so it was worth it.

The little town of St-Jean-de-Maurienne where we finished up does not have a fancy hotel, so we were at a Best Western next to what looked like a rock crushing plant. It was the nicest Best Western I’ve ever seen, with little bicycle pictures all over the wallpaper. It had no restaurant so we went to this greasy-spoon type pizza joint, all Formica and linoleum, of such barebones tacky aspect it even had advertisements on the menu. In the U.S., this would be your sign to flee immediately, but we’d heard this place was good. The menu was entirely in French which led to some confusion. I almost ordered a pizza with “thon” on it, before learning what thon is: chunk light tuna, like out of a can. If memory serves tuna was a topping on the pizza they called “California,” though I may be conflating this with the Dutch frozen pizza line “Big Americans.” Anyway, I was able to find a pizza with no thon, though I think all the pizzas had some form of cured meat. The food ended up proving out my theory that the French are simply incapable of doing a bad job, even at their greasy-spoons. The pizza was excellent. Fun fact: in France, they don’t cut up the pizza for you. You have to hack away at it with a fork and knife. 

Some of the guys around me made the shock-and-awe move of ordering dueling entrees, such as a pizza and a calzone. It’s rare for me to be out-eaten, but I’d had a big-ass snack right after the ride in accordance with the glycogen window principle of sports nutrition, which has been scientifically proven by my daughter.

Ian ordered profiteroles and they were majestic.

All who know me understand that a) I have a massive appetite, b) I have no fear of saturated fats, c) the idea of “guilty” pleasures or “sinfully” rich never enters my mind, and d) I absolutely love free food. Since I’d already paid for this trip (it’s an all-expenses-included deal), all signs pointed to me ordering a dessert or two. Reader, I did not. I’d had too many gels, too much energy drink, too much chocolate milk, and too much Coke that day to even contemplate any more sweets. This is how you can finally begin to understand how difficult cycling in the Alps truly is.

Check back soon, because I will be reporting on Day 6, the hardest one yet....

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Epic Trans Alps Cycling Trip - Part III

Introduction

In accordance with my new “all French Alps cycling all the time” blog format, this post continues the tale of how I gradually burned myself down to the filter via a week of cycling in the beautiful Rhône-Alpes mountains. Part I is here and Part II is here. Today’s post, covering Day 4, features the fearsome Col de la Loze.

About the Col de la Loze

Simply put, the Col de la Loze is the hardest climb in France. But don’t take my word for it; that’s the ranking given by Pjamm Cycling, a website devoted to the topic. The Col is 14 miles long at an average grade of 7.5%. A quarter of it is above 10%, the steepest bit is 24%, and the top 6 kilometers are a fricking ski run that was recently paved. This is where Tadej Pogacar totally cracked during this year’s Tour de France (click here for footage). My pals and I were kind of dreading this, obviously, but at least it was the only major climb of the day.

Here we are rolling out, a nice mist tumbling around in the distance but the previous day’s rain all gone, thank goodness.

Something was wrong with my butt. I know that’s a strange thing to say, but from my first pedal revolutions I had this strange pain like somebody had bashed my butt cheek with the blunt end of a pool cue, kind of high up on, what, the glut, I guess? Perhaps it was some kind of muscle strain, maybe from the cold the day before and that final, frigid, clenched-muscle descent. Whatever caused it, this pain dogged me all day.

The Col de la Loze is a savage climb, no doubt about it, but at least we weren’t racing. Ian and K and I rode a mild, conservative tempo just to play it safe. Craig put the hammer down and was long gone, with just one other guy from our group with him.

Now, I don’t know what happened, and Craig doesn’t seem to want to talk about it, but partway up the climb, the guy Craig was riding with started to dissolve. I guess the Col de la Loze will do that to you. Check this out:

Weird, huh? I never did find out if this dude got his flesh back.Now, this next shot I was pretty excited to get because it’s really tricky snapping photos while climbing a crazy steep grade:

So yeah, 23%, impressive, sure, but check out my speed: 3.5 mph. That’s just sad. I think once I put away my phone and stood on the pedals, I was able to bring my speed up around 3.6 mph on this stretch.

On and on the climb went, the kilometers very gradually ticking by as we oozed our way up. With 3 kilometers to go, we learned that the next kilometer averaged 12%.

See how easy it is to read all this? And you can imagine how easy it was to type that last sentence. If anything, you may find this account tedious, but man, that’s just because I can’t convey the actual difficulty. Even the photos flatten everything out. Perhaps I could express it better with a formula, which we had seen on the road earlier in the climb:

The funny thing was, my poor brain was so oxygen-deprived when I saw this, I couldn’t perform the calculation. Imagine that! “Climbing stupid” indeed! But you know, it’s the damnedest thing: I still can’t work my way through this equation. Could the climb have permanently damaged my brain somehow? I’ll bet you’re having a chuckle at my struggle here with such a basic Physics formula. I’ll have to find a Tour de France rider to explain this to me.

Here are a few more pics:

Nearing the end, Ian, K—, and I agreed that the grade would surely let up a little, and that the last kilometer wouldn’t be more than 8%. I don’t know why we thought this. We reached the last guidepost and it said 11% … sonofabitch! Well, it didn’t say the “sonofabitch” part, we did—or rather, we said something even more profane. Here we are tackling the final bit. (One of the guides must have snapped this photo because we’re all in it; that’s me at the back, unsurprisingly.)

We made it, needless to say. Here we are chillin’ at the summit.

It was pretty cold up there at 7,559 feet elevation but I’d worked up a good sweat anyway. I have long enjoyed the pleasure of squeegeeing the sweat out of my helmet pad. I managed to capture this in a photo:

I froze my ass off on the descent, being underdressed, but then it warmed up and we had a really good, fast trip over the Cat 2 Champagny-en-Vanoise climb. The group splintered right off the bat, and Craig and Ian destroyed everyone with a blazing pace. We regrouped and then proceeded to a final, uncategorized climb, which we all rode together. Here’s one of those “meta” pictures, K— snapping a photo of himself being photographed.

The day wrapped up with a wickedly fun, twisty descent to our next town. The staff set up a nice picnic next to a roaring river and guess what? There were cured meats involved! Check out this “raw quesadilla” that I whipped up to chow down on (with a chocolate milk chaser, bien entendu!).

Weirdest dinner ever

Our strange hotel (see my last post) was the only we stayed at for two nights, and after the “veal nut” the night before we weren’t that excited about another dinner there; meanwhile, we had something to celebrate (which doesn’t happen to be any of your business). So we made a reservation at the highest-rated restaurant in town. At least, we thought we had a reservation—there were some crossed wires. We headed up there anyway, hoping they could take us as walk-ins. It was in another wellness spa hotel, and although Brides-les-Bains feels like a ghost town, their dining room was booked solid. The helpful concierge, who spoke excellent English, said, “It’s probably for the best because they are serving a prix-fixe diététique menu tonight and you would not like it.” OMG, diététique … I felt like we’d dodged a bullet! It could have been a squash nut with a side of quinoa mist.

The concierge made a phone call, had a brief dialogue in French I couldn’t follow, and then told us, “My favorite restaurant can accommodate you, but they are only serving one thing tonight which is raclette. It is cheese and there is ham and potatoes.” I immediately knew what she was talking about—or, I thought I did. I confused raclette with tartiflette, a dish popular in the French Alps, which is like scalloped potatoes on EPO. (You didn’t think I was gonna say “on steroids,” did you?) Everyone agreed raclette sounded great.

We headed to the place which, coincidentally, was the dining room attached to the pub we’d gone to for recovery beers earlier that evening and the day before as well. So it was kind a full-circle trip (the inefficiency of which bothered me as a tiring cyclist, but pleased me as a curious tourist). The waitress spoke no English but there was no menu anyway … she just carried over this bizarre metal contraption and set it down on our table. It looked like a cross between the scary waffle maker at a crappy motel, a SodaStream fizzy water machine, and a miniature version of the hugging apparatus Temple Grandin built. I was completely mystified until the waitress brought over a giant wedge of raclette cheese, cut from an enormous wheel, and attached it to the contraption (impaling it on something at the base, I believe).

Oh boy, I thought. This is going to be delicious but will take a very long time. It would be very different from tucking into tartiflette, which is as simple a comfort food as macaroni & cheese. I was starving and I’m sure my pals were too; fortunately, cyclists are not generally given to fisticuffs as we’re no good at it. 

After a brief nonverbal dialogue between K— and the waitress, we determined it was time to plug in the contraption (which after some light research I have just learned is called a raclonette). The waitress brought us each a plate of—wait for it—cured meats, along with a little salad and some tiny pickles.

It’s possible this stuff was supposed to be combined with the soon-to-be-melted cheese but I didn’t wait around to find out, and immediately scarfed down the whole plate. There was chatter about somebody wanting more pickles, and/or offering up his pickles, but I was in the zone and mostly tuned it out.

Those metal wings that fold down on the raclonette have heating elements in them, and their proximity to the cheese melts it, outside-in. You collect the melted cheese on a little spatula and then drizzle it over sliced boiled potatoes that show up somewhere along the way. Labor intensive, but well worth it. (It strikes me that raclette is the polar opposite of microwave popcorn, which is the dumbest food concept anybody has ever had.) Gradually I descended pleasantly into a cheese stupor. My French is poor and rusty but I managed to order more potatoes for the table. After a good long chow-down, during which we all exercised admirable etiquette (at least, I hope I, too, behaved, despite my baser impulses), we were all topped up and looked upon the fallen soldier that had been our raclette wedge:

We all wondered what would become of that large deformed stump. It would sure be a shame to waste it. Someone suggested it might be fed to children. I thought of asking for a doggy-bag, but a) surely there is no French equivalent of “doggy bag” because the entire concept is unknown to the French, and b) I would have no way to keep the cheese cool, so my luggage would become a Superfund site.

I described the raclette adventure in a text message to my older daughter, who replied, “That actually sounds like a cheese dream fantasy, cannot believe you got to experience it. I want an excuse to eat an ungodly amount of cheese in a socially acceptable way!” She makes a good point, and I hereby advance the notion that the Col de la Loze was a good excuse.

Check back soon because the riding only got harder from here, and the best pastries were yet to come.

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Epic France Trans Alps Cycling Trip - Part II

Introduction

If you’ve been on albertnet lately, you’ll have learned that I recently did a week-long, fully supported bicycle tour through southeast France, tackling most of the Alpine climbs that are included in Tour de France routes. You’ll also have learned that I tend to get sidetracked by culinary matters, which is great news for those who tire of cycling lore. Well, I’m back, and this time promise to focus more on the suffering—mine in particular (your favorite!). As before, this report doesn’t have a very specific structure … it’s more like a highlights reel, because there were just too many rides, too many climbs, and too many meals to worry about sequencing them properly.

Navigation

I’m really bad at navigation. I don’t have much of an explorer’s curiosity, and am happy to keep riding the same training routes over and over again. Even when I did a nine-month bike tour with my wife, we made literally zero effort to plot any kind of route—we just started by heading south along the California coast almost to Mexico, then went randomly east or north until we got to Maine. Let’s be clear though: It’s not just that I’m not interested in navigation, it’s that I lack the mental faculty for it. So my biggest fear with this French Alps tour was that I’d get dropped and then get lost, in this strange foreign land where you can’t even get a normal cup of coffee.

Hoping to have my fears assuaged, I asked K, our supported-tour veteran, if getting dropped would necessarily mean getting lost. His reply was emphatic: “If you don’t download the GPX files, you will definitely get lost.” D’oh!

This is kind of a classic pitfall of modern society: you’re expected to be an expert in the latest technology whether you like it or not. Events and itineraries are now communicated via social media—never mind that these vanity platforms were originally designed solely to increase teenagers’ insecurity. Case in point: the bike tour organizers took to sending important schedule updates via WhatsApp, a platform I do not, and shall not, use. On top of all this, I’m suddenly supposed to know what a GPX file is …. presumably it runs on a Garmin (i.e., one of the expensive gizmos I don’t own).

Well, I found the email with all the routes, downloaded a GPX file, tried to open it on my phone, and was offered two apps to try. One of them I hadn’t heard of, but the other was (surprise!) an app I actually use. It’s Sigma Ride, the workout tracking app for my cheap, weird bike computer that nobody else in America has. Well, the GPX file opened right up, which was a pleasant surprise but not that helpful. After all, it’s not like I want to ride around the Alps peering into my phone the whole time. On a whim, I clicked a three-dot icon and saw an option to beam the route into my bike computer via Bluetooth. And, voilà! There it was, the route loaded in my bike computer so it could give me step-by-step directions … a feature I was vaguely aware it might have but had never before investigated. Sweet! Now I could totally get dropped and all I had to worry about was everyone snickering at my frailty behind my back! (You know, the devil I know…)

Col de Joux Plane and Col de la Columbière

I don’t remember much about our first climb of the day, Cat 1 Col de Joux Plane, other than we started up it immediately, with like zero warm-up. That’s okay, because I was raring to go after a great night’s sleep. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Actually I hadn’t slept for shit, between jet lag, the room being too warm, anxiety about the big day of riding, etc. Plus, my older daughter phoned me in the middle of the night. Why? Well, my phone had gone berserk and had been texting and re-texting her my Wordle result and some trip photos almost continuously, all night, creating the illusion I was awake and insane and already on my phone. At least, that’s what led my daughter to forget the time zone difference. My roommate was oddly gracious about the whole thing; turns out he was wide awake at the time anyway. I’m not the only one having trouble sleeping.

Anyway, the pace on the Joux Plane was fine. The photo above is from early in the climb. The first descent was beautiful and fast and fun, and my rented Felt FR road bike handled very well—so if you stumbled on this blog by searching on “Felt FR,” and are this close to buying that bike, and don’t mind a 73-degree seat tube angle instead of 72, well, shoot, just go ahead and buy it. It’s a good bike that does not hesitate to dive right into the curves.

Near the base of the Hors Categorie (i.e., “too difficult to even categorize”) Col de la Columbière, as if in some kind of harmonic convergence, my East Bay Velo Club teammates Craig and Ian and I all had to pee at the same moment. (As far as you know, we dutifully used a public restroom and any photo you may have seen of any less responsible behavior was surely Photoshopped.) Following this stop we found ourselves off the back of the group, which by this point had pretty much split apart into tiny clumps, pairs, and individuals. We passed them all, like in one of those car race video games. It was super fun. Craig paced Ian and me, which is bog standard for all the rides we do, as though Craig were our super-domestique … except that in the end he always sails off into the sunset instead of us.

Sure enough, about three kilometers from the Columbière summit, where the climb gets particularly hard, Craig accidentally dropped me. He would never, ever attack; it’s just that he forgets how limited my endurance truly is, and after all he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head. Sometimes he realizes I’m gapped and he holds up, but other times I’m too far back and just does his own thing. It’s kind of like a cat playing with a snake, and not realizing he’s actually killed it, and then he wonders why the snake isn’t very much fun anymore.

Guideposts

Did you notice something just now? Something very odd for albertnet? Like, how I used the metric system to specify the distance from the summit? Nice catch. As you know from this post, I’m a proponent of the imperial system of measurement, even if this puts me at odds with the entire scientific community. Well, I haven’t renounced those views; it’s just that in the very specific context of Alpine mountain passes, kilometers have their place. It’s because of these cool guideposts you’ll see on every major climb:

If you click to zoom on the above image you’ll note that that sign gives all kinds of info. It gives the name of the climb (which, believe it or not, you can forget if you’ve targeted several in a day and are severely oxygen-deprived); the distance to the summit in kilometers; the current altitude (alas, in meters, which is still not so useful to me since I can’t do simple arithmetic under physical duress); and the average percent grade for the next kilometer. This info is generally very useful (though at times it can seem to be taunting me, like when the end of a climb seems to never come). Do I wish all this info were in imperial units? Well, almost, except that, kilometers being shorter than miles, this arrangement obviously gives me more signs to look at, and a better sense of progress. So I’ll accept this use of kilometer as the exception that proves the rule.

On the final climb, the Category 1 Col de la Croix Fry, Craig and I encountered some lovely cows, bells a-jangling:

I still had great legs on this final climb of the day, which was so satisfying, I cannot tell you. As I said, I’d worried about not keeping up, and embarrassing myself, and trying the patience of my pals and other Epic A riders, but this is not at all what was happening. My legs were totally up to the job. This surprised me because I knew I hadn’t trained enough for this trip. I just can’t seem to carve out enough time, and I’m getting too old to simply wing it—at least, that’s what I’d assumed, only to end up riding just fine. But this satisfaction with my fitness wasn’t only about ageing well. Let’s just say the last couple of years have been hard on me, so to be doing something bloody difficult, but with aplomb, gave me renewed faith in my whole self (even if my competence is in the largely useless realm of amateur cycling). The scenery was pretty glorious, too.

After a sweet, sweeping descent to our next hotel, and a giant snack there involving cured meats, we wandered around the little town of La Clusaz and noted their brilliant open-air market. Check out what you can get from this little vender:

Not to be unpatriotic or anything, but this sight reinforced my growing sense that farmers’ markets in America are a joke. I think that, as with factory outlet stores, farmers’ markets started off well—an actual farmer could sell truly local, fresh produce directly to consumers—but then morphed into a sham when deeply cynical minds realized that once people had latched on to an idea, they’d pursue it indefinitely regardless of whether there was any value in it. So we have people setting up tables at these farmers’ markets with produce they just bought somewhere (which is sometimes still in someone else’s packaging!) and then they actually mark it up because the farmers’ market seems like a “premium” experience that is worth paying extra for. Sheesh.

Bad weather!

Oh, man, the forecast for the third day was not promising: a 93% chance of rain from 5 a.m. through late afternoon. Sure enough, it was already raining when we woke up, and raining when we rolled out. What a grind. I don’t have a good rain jacket, for the simple reason that—as documented here—I don’t ride in the rain. What I do have is this big puffy thing that doesn’t breathe very well, doesn’t wad up small enough to easily fit in a jersey pocket, and isn’t really waterproof. I think of it as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Jacket.

Perhaps halfway up the Cat 3 Col des Aravis the rain let up somewhat, and I had a nice time riding by a lot of cows, their standard-issue bells making the usual pleasant racket.

The respite didn’t last, and on the Cat 2 Col des Saisies, K and I rode through a downpour of biblical proportions, the rain drumming on our helmets and jackets, the road completely flooding. You know how when you’re in a car wash, you sometimes get the sensation of the car rolling forward though you know it isn’t? Same deal: the water rushing past my wheels gave me the illusion of hauling ass up the mountain until I lifted my gaze again. I wish I had photos and videos of this, but of course you can never get that footage … you’re too busy suffering and shivering. There was thunder and lightning, and K wisecracked about opportunistically riding next to me so he’d never be the tallest object.

Here’s a photo of the summit, where the rain had finally let up. K and I are offering our gratitude, or at least a photo op, to Saint Anne, whom we took from this shrine to be the patron saint of travelers. Turns out (based on some very light research) she’s actually the patron saint of unmarried women, housewives, and women in labor. Whatever.

We warmed up at the van, scarfing Cokes, cookies, fruit, chocolate milk, and of course cured meats. We had a decently dry descent and, during a brief stop at one of those darling French villages, stashed our rain gear in the van for the climb.

We began the final climb up the Hors Categorie Col du Pré. Halfway up, the skies got darker again, and Craig and Ian fetched their (slim, scrunch-able, actually waterproof) jackets from the van to have on hand. I decided to take my chances (which gave me the opportunity to noodle on ahead). The climb was a lot of fun. It’s a gorgeous road with a lot of super steep pitches.

The sky grew increasingly tenebrous as we climbed.

The climb went on and on.

This could have been a great photo if the smartphone camera software weren’t so janky:

I mean, look at how small Ian looks compared to Craig—like a dwarf or something! Craig’s head looks as tall as Ian’s torso! And Craig’s front wheel looks way larger than his rear. What is this nonsense? This is why you want a real camera.

With 4km to go, I got my last photo from the Col de Pré … after this, the skies opened up and the rain just absolutely pummeled us. I was soaked to the skin. At the summit, we piled into the van and went through our backpacks of warm gear. Ian had an extra jersey for me, and after some discussion four of us, plus the guide, decided to forge ahead on the descent while the rest of the crew went down in the van. It was a frigid descent, rain flowing over the road like a water slide at a theme park. A road construction crew, decked out like stormtroopers, stared at us dumbfounded. Ian, riding a bike with rim brakes, eventually thought better of the whole enterprise and pulled off to the side to be picked up. When we reached the town down in the valley, the rain showed no signs of letting up, and Craig reported, with fascination, that my lips were completely blue. With only a relatively unexciting flat run-in to the hotel ahead, we bagged it and climbed in the van. The heater was blasting in there. By the time we got to the hotel we’d all been basically poached alive in our wet gear. I hope there are no pets in the cargo hold of this aircraft, proximate to my luggage, as I make my way home. I have never before encountered such stinky cycling gear, and that’s saying something.

Brides-les-Bains

We lodged at a strange health spa type hotel in Brides-les-Bains. This is where unhealthy people with unhealthy lifestyles go to get cured by the special waters and various spa treatments, so that they can enjoy robust health going forward without changing any of their unhealthy behaviors. Several of these guests regarded us with a bit of the ol’ stink-eye, as if deeply suspicious of our very presence at their spa.

This place had those fancy outward-facing elevators that are like glass cylinders so you can watch the world go by during your vertical trip. They were also among the slowest elevators I’ve ever encountered, with disconcerting juddering at times. Most interesting of all was the sound they made: think of a giant, like the one atop Jack’s beanstalk, groaning, combined with the sound of a whale calling out across the ocean. The noise was nearly constant. At the request of my wife I’ve attempted to recreate the sound:

Dinner got off to a good start, with a salad that was like 70% Serrano ham.

The entrée, though, was a bit on the small and non-starchy side:

The menu described this as “Veal nut with its juice.” Needless to say, this led to all kinds of sophomoric humor (“testicle of a young bull, with…”). The dessert, or “desert” as the menu called it, was a peach clafoutis, which I guess was supposed to be like a cobbler but was practically frozen. We’d have starved except the very good bread was plentiful (though still bereft of butter or olive oil). But then, breakfast the next morning featured the excellent pastries we’d come to rely on, so no harm done.

At every breakfast I had a croissant and a pain au chocolat, sometimes two, along with a big bowl of cereal, some eggs, cured meats, cheeses, and yogurt. This is how I managed to gain four pounds in a week—the same week I rode almost 400 miles and climbed almost 60,000 feet. God bless these Alpine cows and all the butter they make possible.

To be continued…

Well, that seems like enough for this round. I’m getting cold just remembering all this. Check back soon because I’ll be reporting on the Col de la Loze, which is considered the hardest climb in the entire Alps; the famous Col de la Madeleine; and the absolutely brutal Col du Glandon. And of course I’ll describe our caloric intake as well, to include one of the weirdest and French-est dinners I’ve ever had.

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