The story started quite badly. I had contacted l'Office de Tourisme de Carpentras in May to obtain a list of lodging facilities in the area. They had sent me a fax with that list and we had decided to stay in Caromb, a tow in between Malaucène (the finishing meeting point of the event) and Carpentras. So I had taken a hotel name and had called. When we got there: well... what would be to your worse nightmare for a hotel?? Well, that was exactly it! Horrible bed, that I would not have been surprise if it had been full of bed bugs and cockroaches in the showers. That was it. I called back l'Office de tourisme, and as a French speaking person, I really abused them saying that this was ridiculous. They felt bad enough and suggested that we call a place in Caromb where the people were usually renting a little house for a week. But they accepted to become a B&B for us for 3 days... What a relief!! We were starting to think that we would end up sleeping in the car!
Tuesday 11 July, 5:30 AM, time to get out of bed, with our great B&B getting up as well to prepare breakfast. We rode to Carpentras and got into the line. Gil and I were number 6750 and 6751... this meant at the absolute TAIL of the huge crowd waiting for the start. That crowd on bike was amazingly big and impressive. Few women, some foreigners, and a lot of French chaps. And at 7:30 exactly, the start was launched for the people at the start of the long long queue. We probably got going at about 7:50. Now this was a mess. You had to cleat and uncleat every 5 seconds and watch out not to crash in the person that had crash in the front, or slightly on your right or slightly on your left. We passed the starting gate at probably 8:00 and off we went. The first 20-25 km of the event were pretty flat, and Gil and I tried to stick together in that mess, overtaking hundreds of people. Some were crashing, others were strugling to go up autoroute bridges (and they were coming to climb the Ventoux!). Then the climbing started (Gil and I got separated when a guy crashed and provoked an absolute traffic jam) with the Col de Murs, a category 2 climb that was not that hard. The overtaking was continuing as I was following another of the rare woman pulled by her husband. We then got an extremely nice descent to a valley before attacking the second category 2 climb of the Col de Notre-Dame des abeilles, with a short food stop in Sault. I ate half a chocolate bar because all that climbing was starting to hit my stomach. The climb write after Sault was very steep, much more than the 4% indicated in the map below. I was really regretting the dark poulain chocolate! But I continued to climb. We then had a incredibly long and quite straight descent to the Valley of Bédoin, with a little interuption from la Cote de Mormoiron, classified as a category 4, but incredibly nasty for the legs. They do not state the % but it was big. At first, I thought that this was the start of the Ventoux... well I was wrong. I ate the rest of my chocolate, that was starting to melt, before attacking the géant de Provence. So far, I had an average of 28km/h, which was not bad at all, considering all the climbing I had done. I must have reached the bottom at about 12:30 and I thought, wow, this won't be too long. Well, I was wrong... mon Dieu! Having to climb 22km at a speed of 8km/h is something. In addition, our great male hosts had not thought that there might be some women in their event that would had appreciated a toilet stop! Anyway, I certainly did not get dehydrated!!! So up the géant. I was soooo happy to have a triple chain ring at the front. I was on the small ring all the way up, with probably the third last at the rear. And up you were climbing, and each time you could see a "borne" with one kilometer less to go, you were happy. What was amazing is that we were climbing 100 meters height per kilometer. And then I reached the panel saying: 16km to go! So then you think yes, only 16... and then you look at your computer, see that it is running at 8 km/h and think... s***, this is another 2 hours! So it continued like that for about two hours until I got to about 3km from the finish... and it started hailing mixed with snow. It was just sooo cold... and you had the French chaps all around shouting "Non mais putain, c'est pas humain cette merde!". And I must confess that I was thinking exactly that. So the last 20 minutes of the race were a real nightmare, or at least I thought then. I passed the finish line and they got my "chip" off my ankle and we had to come down in shorts with a temperature below zero and an incredibly strong wind. I thought I would never make it to the bottom. And it is really only because Gil called me that I made it. My hands, body, lips and brain were frozen!! People were stopping at the ambulance because of being absolutely frozen and feeling sick. It was a descent of at least 20km. But I made it and was so glad to see Gil there. We then rode back to our nice B&B in Caromb, ate like pigs and slept like logs. Gil had a time of 5:58 and ranked probably around 300. It took me 7:15 (with a toilet stop and chocolate stop) and ranked around 2300. 1911 people never made it to the top because they had to close the access at Chalet Reynard, 6 km from the finish, at 15:45 because of the bad weather (including Nikki Meston and Greg Lemond). Another 200 abandoned, including Alain Prost. It was a great experience and the Featch did its job of getting me up there!
Official website: http://www.letapedutour.com/ Hélène
