What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

Not every major sporting event gives spectators a way to measure just how great the gap is between what they can achieve and what professional athletes can achieve under the most testing competitive conditions. Everyone who has ever watched the Masters on television, for instance, knows that the greens at Augusta are treacherous, but since no one has ever pulled a fan out of the gallery and asked him to knock in a putt to win the tournament, who knows how hard that really is?

Fortunately for cycling fans, the organizers of the Tour de France are kind, or cruel, enough to allow anyone with a bike and a masochistic streak to take a shot at riding the whole length of a single, mountain stage during each year’s Tour. This annual event is actually a timed race, called L’Étape du Tour (simply, a “Stage of the Tour”), which sets about 8,000 fans loose on one of the hardest segments of each year’s course, just a few days before the peloton of professional racers arrive to ride the same distance along the same roads. Survivors of L’Étape then wait a few days and compare their times to those of the greatest cyclists in the world, competing for the Yellow Jersey.

For reasons that are still something of a mystery to me, I’m entered in this year’s Étape, which means that I’ve got just over a month to get into the best shape of my life and figure out how to ride the 105 miles of mountain roads that make up stage 10 of this year’s Tour de France, which happens to include two of the toughest climbs in the Pyrenees, to the summit of the Col du Tourmalet and to the ski resort of Hautacam.

I’ve also got to do it all in less than 10 hours, since they stop you if you go too slow. (During L’Étape, the whole race is shadowed by a fleet of buses following along behind, called the “broom wagons” because they sweep up any stragglers who fail to meet the minimum time requirements — spelled out in advance — for reaching various points on the course.)

So The Climb is a blog that will chart my attempt, as a 41-year-old beginner cyclist who has never been in a bike race of any kind — and had never ridden even 50 miles in one day until last Saturday — to find out what it takes for an ordinary, not-particularly-fit mortal to survive a single, grueling, mountain stage of the world’s greatest cycling race.

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