Inspired by this I bought myself a half decent Raleigh "Kellogs Tour of Britain" bike and pottered around the country side around Maidenhead. But like many armchair (or in my case exercise bike saddle) sports fans my enthusiasm petered out after a while. However I did remain a fan of the TDF via the C4 coverage. In 1991 our family embarked on our own French tour as we went to live in Strasbourg. This rekindled my enjoyment of biking for two main reasons. The first reason was that we found ourselves in a country that loved cycling and cyclists and was perfect to enjoy the sport. We lived in the city of Strasbourg but near a "piste cycable" that ran for 15 miles out into the countryside. (Note for those living in Britain. This was a real cycle route i.e. a separate road only for cyclists, not just a bit of white paint on a busy pot-holed road). Once in the countryside the roads were smooth, with a village every 5 miles or so and a bit further afield were the Vosges hills/mountains that went up to 1300m if you fancied a spot of climbing. During summer the evenings were long and warm. So I had every chance to dust of my Raleigh and ride. The second reason was that the company I worked for happened to have 3 factories near to Strasbourg, one NE, one NW and one SW of it. Each year the "Triangulaire" took place in September, this being a cycle ride that started at one of the factories and followed a triangular route to visit the other two then return to the start. Depending on how the organisers were feeling this meant a ride of 140km to 170km plus some climbs in the Vosges. After spending a while in France I decided to enter one year and this meant getting in some semi-serious training so as not to embarrass myself as the only Brit in the field of keen French/Dutch. So I started riding 3-4 times a week and ended up taking part for a number of years acquitting myself honourably by finishing in the top third of the field. Doing this amount of cycling helped resolve another challenge of living in France. Each year, by law, if you are working you have to have a medical check up. I had not been particularly fit before coming to live in Strasbourg, the good food/wine and beer (Strasbourg is the brewing capital of France with Kronenburg, Heineken and the majority of French brewers having factories there) meant my weight was going up and my fitness levels down. This meant an annual bollocking from the company doctor. Once I started cycling in earnest I managed to avoid these by losing weight so that by the time we returned to England in 1998 I was 10kg (22lb) lighter than when we left despite all the good living we had enjoyed.
Sadly this trend did not continue once we got back. While in France I had also taken up golf, which was fun but expensive and a bit impractical (my "local" club was a 50 mile drive away). When we got back home the opportunities for golf multiplied, so I pretty much gave up le velo in pursuit of a little white ball. This switch was due in part to the coincidence with the worst times for the TDF in terms of doping/drug scandals. I had always regarded pro cyclists as close to gods in terms of what the scale of what they did, finding out they were getting a helping hand was, as they say in France "une grande deception", especially as my greatest current hero of the tour "Il Pirata Pantani" was one of those who had, literally scaled the highest and whose fall was, ultimately in every sense, the greatest. One of the great things about cycling was that you could, because the tours are on public roads, you could ride the same route and measure yourself against the best. This measure was tarnished by the knowledge the best were on drugs, so I preferred to stick to golf where likewise you can measure yourself against the best but unlikewise the game seemed to remain honest and true to itself.
So my bike went into the garage and pretty much stayed there, only seeing the light of day when it came with us for our yearly holidays back to France. But the cycling bug was still somewhere in my soul, just needing a kick start to see the light of day again. So we come to..
Why am I doing the tour this year?
I am not a believer in divine destiny or suchlike. However I do think that when serendipity strikes it is sometimes fun to take advantage of the fact. And it so happened that a number of events came together in a way that made me decide to tackle this year's tour.
These were
- In 2004 I was part of a small (4 of us) team that did the "3 peak challenge". (This entails climbing the 3 highest mountains in Scotland (Ben Nevis), England (Scafell Pike) and Wales (Snowdon) within 24 hours.) This was far from easy but the hardest thing about it was ignoring all the doom-mongers, potential pitfalls, problems, what ifs etc and just deciding "what the hell, let's just do it". So we did and succeeded with 40 minutes to spare.
- At the start of 2005 I decided I needed to take myself in hand regards advancing age and waistline. So I bought myself a fancy exercise bike, set it up in the spare room and settled down to pedalling, with the sole objectives then of getting fitter and losing some weight.
- I had some time to kill in Chelmsford one day and wandered into a bookstore. I just happened to see a book called "French Revolutions" by Tim Moore, about how he rode the 2000 TDF route in advance of the tour itself. This was inspirational, especially because Tim Moore seemed to be very similar to me in terms of his biking history (right down to watching Channel 4) and fitness level. After reading his book I had pretty much decided that I would ride a TDF route "before I died". The other thing his book did was lay to bed a few of the ghosts I had about pro cycling and drugs. Tim Moore gives a bit of a history lesson on the reality of cycling's relationship with stimulants and his ride was in part inspired as an homage to a cycling hero, Tom Simpson. His death could be seen as making him one of the victims but the reality is more complex and morally ambiguous. This subject is too big to go into fully here but after reading French Revolutions I ended by having more respect and admiration for pro cyclists than I had ever had before.
- Having decided to a TDF at some point I thought I would do a bit of preliminary research last October. My interest in following cycling had declined to the point that though, of course I knew this would be the first tour since Lance Armstrong's retirement, I did not know it was due to start in of all places, Strasbourg, where I had spent many happy years. Not only that the TDF route meant that effectively the first 3 days (prologue + stages 1/2) would be spent in Strasbourg or nearby. Furthermore the route in 2006 has a certain beauty to it in terms of how closely it follows the outline of France. Starting in France the route runs anti-clockwise pretty much following the outline of l'hexagone, albeit with a detour into Luxembourg/Belgium and an airplane jump down the west coast. (In other years things are a lot more complicated, e.g. next year the Tour de France will start in England.) And as a killer (hopefully not literally) the mountain stages in 2006 include most of the peaks of tour legend, Mt Ventoux being the only exception.
- Holiday plans for us in 2006 were up in the air due to having a son too old to want to come with us on holiday but too young to leave home alone. On seeing this I thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to ride the route of the tour this year. I can start in Strasbourg where I have some friends to give me a send-off. Then I can follow a route that is in reality a "Tour de France. And if I time things right I can arrive back in Strasbourg just in time to watch the real tour start with the happy feeling that always comes from watching someone just about to start a really hard climb when you have just finished." I thought I would be fit enough given the amount of training I had already done and taking Tim Moore as an example. Being a bit of an old boy I had sufficient holiday accumulated to give me the time off work should I want to take it. Of course there may be pitfalls and problems but doing the 3 peaks had given me an example of what could be done if you put your mind to it. So I asked permission of my wife and so here I am 2 months to the day of starting my own TDF 2006.
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