Le Tour 2007

......details on the stages as they are attempted will be placed here, fatigue permitting......

STOP PRESS.......LE TOUR COMPLETED !

Le Tour 2007, an attempt by some international cycling friends to ride the course of one of the toughest events in sport : The Tour de France.

We'll be attempting to ride the entire 2007 route in 3 weeks, the same number of days as the professionals, and just to make it extra tough, without consulting shadowy Spanish doctors.

The raw facts :

Total distance of 3,550 kilometres

- 4 countries
- 11 flat stages
- 6 mountain stages
- 1 medium mountain stages
- 2 individual time-trial stages
- 3 mountain finishes
- 2 rest days
- 117 kilometres of individual time-trials (including the prologue)
- 21 Category 1, Category 2 and hors catégorie passes to be climbed

The road from Gap to L'Alpe d'Huez, July 2006

Of course it is not the first time this has been done, inspiration has come from a few different sources (Paul Howard, Tim Moore and Geoff Thomas amongst others) but mainly we see it is a natural(ish) extension to riding individual stages of the tour......they are a real challenge and so sooner of later you arrive at the idea of doing the entire tour. And then you quickly banish such thoughts as sheer lunacy. The problem is with us they have come back and we are actually doing it !

Being well balanced individuals who have a rich spectrum of interests beyond cycling (increasingly debatable), we aren't a typical group of hardened roadies. Matt is an ex-rugby player and normally weighs over 17 stone (that's a lot of weight up the Col de Peyresourde) and with Amy we have a female rider on the team. Not that that's a handicap - she's probably the strongest amongst us - but we're not sure how many other women have completed the full Tour de France route in three weeks, can't be many if any.

And with the prologue and first stage taking place in England.......it just all seems to add up, we'll probably never get another chance (getting time off work is a mini-challenge in itself).

Anyway, of course it all makes sense after a couple of glasses of wine....the reality is that it's going to be extraordinarily hard, riding well over a 100 miles each day for three weeks in baking sun and up severe mountain gradients. We can forget idyllic notions of ambling along shady lanes, fresh baguettes under the arm. Aching knees, sunburnt arms, constant hunger and weeping saddle sores will be our companions. Just dragging a leg over the bike every morning will be an achievement. When do we start ?

The basic plan is to ride the route a week before the race, followed by a small campervan based support team that will also be lodgings at the end of each stage.

The ride will also be aiming to raise funds for Education for the children charity who are working to improve the education of disadvantaged children in Central America. In this respect sponsors are very welcome and you should check out the sponsorship page for details of how to support this ambitious challenge.

Friends and relatives - if not coerced into driving support vehicles and cooking our dinner - will be able to come and out and join us on a stage or two and enjoy France in the summer (and watch the real tour of course).

 

"It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle."

Ernest Hemingway

 

 

 

 

 

 

contact editor (Mark)

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