Originally Posted by
Joe Voelkel
I don't know what the grade was on MacKenzie, but were told some stretches were 15%-18% (no idea if that is correct!). In the Cyclist's Guides to Canada's Ocean Playground, Gary Conrod's says that a hill past North Mountain drops 365m in 3.2 km, but that North Mountain is the fastest descent on the Cabot trail (no elevation changes given)
I can't speak for the Swiss Alps directly, but if they are not a lot tougher than the Cabot Trail I will stop watching the Tour! We hope to visit your beautiful country someday.
It certainly sounds like rain and fog were the main factors causing your braking problems.
MacKenzie certainly doesn't have any 15-18% sections, maybe a few brief 10% sections, but most of it is a pretty constant 7-8%. North mountain has long stretches of 10-12% on both sides, maybe 15% on the inside of some bends, but not sustained. The steepest section on the trail is on Smokey, which gets over 15% in some corners, and is also above 10% for a decent length, but the total elevation change from bottom to top is no more than 250m, so it is not as hard as North, which is certainly the hardest on the trail (this is true when doing the trail in either direction).
Most of the climbs that the Tour de France guys do in the Alps average 6% or 7%, with only brief sections that are steeper than that (e.g., the first 4km of Alpe d'Huez is 9-10%, but then it eases off to 7-8% for the remainder). The climbs in the Pyrenees are known to be a bit steeper than those in the Alps, but I haven't done any in the Pyrenees. Steeper and harder climbs do exist in the Alps, but they tend to be on much smaller roads that the carnival of the Tour de France cannot easily negotiate, and so they are not used, which is a shame. The Giro d'Italia is much better in this respect. In general, many climbs in the Italian Alps are steeper than those in the French Alps, and the organizers of the Giro do everything they can to make it more of a spectacle, and so often include some seriously steep and challenging climbs. I therefore often prefer the Giro's route to the Tour's, because there are fewer boring flat stages, more mountain-top finishes, and the climbs are even steeper; the last couple of years the Giro has even had more time trials than the Tour. Unfortunately, it is only for the Tour de France that ALL the big guns come out to race, rather than there only being a subset of them at the Giro, which is what still makes the Tour the better race even though the route and the stages are not as exciting as in the Giro.
Anyway, if you have ridden up either side of North Mountain, then you wil have ridden 4 or 5 kms which are at least as tough as any 4 or 5km in the Tour de France in recent years (as far as I can recall). Racing at the speeds that the guys in the Tour do it (sustaining 20kph up 8% inclines, and putting in surges faster than that) and doing it day after day, and sometimes doing climbs that have a total height gain of 1,500m or 2,000m is what makes the race hard, but the difficulty is rarely caused by the steepness of the gradient in any individual km. Also, an 8% gradient at 2,000 or 2,500 metres altitude is noticeably harder than an 8% gradient at sea level (where the Cabot Trail is).