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The Plan
"The best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew -and live through it."- Doug Bradbury
Planning
After considerable research involving the announcement of the Tour route, reading accounts of previous trips and some hastily arranged meetings, we considered the options :
- Take as long as you need
- Cycle it on the day of the Tour itself
- Cycle it over the same duration but a week in advance
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A map of France and a laptop - what more do you need ?
We wanted a careful balance of being a serious challenge whilst remaining fun. We didn't want the hassle of booking hotels in advance, we liked the idea of campervans as support vehicles as well as providing a 'home' and we certainly didn't want to carry all our own things. This ruled out the self-supported option, although plenty of people do it.
Model 1 - Take as long as you need (within reason)
This is the more leisurely cyclo-tourist model, well leisurely if you can call cycling over 2000 miles leisurely, but at least you can have a rest day if you feel like it. Tim Moore did this in French Revolutions although he had a schedule it was at least a little flexible. The Tour not being on at the same time ensures that hotels are not fully booked and to some extent the pressure is off.
But although a serious challenge, it wasn't quite hard enough for us, we wanted a tougher challenge that replicates more purely what the professionals go through.
Model 2 - Cycle it on the day of the Tour itself
This is the Paul Howard 'Riding High' model and involves 3 weeks of being 'chased' by the pros who would effectively be catching you up on every stage. The bonuses are obvious -this is about as close to the real thing as it gets, there would be crowds cheering us on and total commitment is required (ie getting up at 3am and cycling in the dark with no room for error). The bonus of having the roads signposted all the way would be slightly offset by them being closed in front of you if you take too long.
But maybe this is going too far. Three weeks of pre-dawn starts, irate Gendarmes closing the roads and a much higher chance of DNF's and DNS's meant this was probably too tough.
Model 3 - Cycle it over the same duration, but a week in advance
This is hopefully somewhere between the other two and would involve setting off a week in advance of the professionals, trying to complete the route it in the same duration but having a reasonable amount of slack in case things go belly-up for whatever reason. Less pressure and more route finding seems to be the trade-off, the added bonus being that in theory we'd finish to be able to watch the last week of the race.
This is the Le Tour 2007 model