Ventoux 2024

-


This was supposed to happen in 2020. But we all know what happened in 2020. 

But then the Blazing Saddles Road Cycling Club, of which I am fortunate enough to be a member, turned a ripe old 15 years old. 

Dave: “Fancy Ventoux for the 15th anniversary?”

Me: “Yes!”

D: How many ways (in one day)?

M: “3? Yeah I reckon 3 is doable”

D: “Drew’s doing it 6 ways”

M: “Ah.”

And that is salesmanship in action. 

So here we are again. I’m not fit (again), I’m a few kg heavier than I’d like to be (again) and I’ve only ridden over 100km in one go once since the turn of the year. Or since last September to be precise. 

So let’s get stuck in: a cycling holiday to Provence with a one day 275km ride climbing 8,800m vertically thrown into the mix.

What can possibly go wrong?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 1: Garmin Gaff

-
Image
It was one of those nights where it finally felt like I fell into a deep sleep 3 minutes before the alarm went off. That’s not unusual for me at the start of a big tour; excitement coupled with a healthy dose of mild peril.  Anyway, we awoke to a beautiful sunny day and headed down to find some breakfast. I had a feeling that the first 70km of today’s ride will be remote, so the breakfast would need to fill us well.  And fill us well it did, with a superb buffet offering which left nothing to chance. We lavishly forked out for a nice hot espresso, mainly because the free coffee was a) nasty and b) cold. I displayed my displeasure through the cheeky grabbing of a boiled egg on the way out though - I’ll enjoy that at later… We were joined at breakfast buy a guy also planning to ride the TNR. Turns out he runs one of the bike hire shops in Girona, so probably a decent rider. Also turns out we’re planning to ride it one day quicker than him. Hmmmm.  After some high level faff...
Read more

Day 4: Decisions Decisions

-
Image
After a decent sleep (me) / not decent sleep (Drew), we woke to sun and blue skies. It was already hot, and even packing the bikes became hard work.  We set off and headed straight for a cafe which we’d found last night and ordered the now fairly standard breakfast of coffee & 2 croissants.  Conversation was pretty much entirely based around 1 subject: which route should we take. There were no fewer than 4 options, which were based around tarmac : gravel ratio. One of the gravel options was described as “hike a bike” which we thought would be zero fun in 30 degree heat. The other gravel option looked quite tempting but added 25km to the route.  We changed our minds 4 times, and then another twice but given that all 4 options required us to first climb the Colle di Sampeyre, we set off to do just that. 16km at just over 8% average in the hot sun, but thankfully shrouded in forest for the most part. The going was slow, but we had become accustomed to the low speeds whic...
Read more

Day 3: Mountain Mayhem

-
Image
After a decent sleep we woke to blue skies, despite a fair bit of overnight rain which got the second day running meant that I’d be starting the ride in wet clothes. Yummy. Of course, being a French campsite, we should have pre-ordered croissants. Being stupid, we didn’t. Drew managed to blag the last of the croissants whilst I settled for a couple of pain au chocolates, washed down with some coffee.  I could have stayed there all day but the view from the terrace reminded us that it was time to get a wriggle on. Say it quietly but I’d made a couple of routing errors when planning our journey from the campsite to the start of the Col d’Izoard - our first climb of the day.  And so we negotiated dead ends, fields, dogs, roadworks and 15% inclines before finally hitting the lower slopes of the climb.  The sun was out and making itself very much known despite the relatively early hour, and the first few km passed by quite easily. Conscious not to repeat yesterday’s 2 croissan...
Read more