The organizers of the Tour du Mont Blanc opened up registration today and, although I wasn’t all that quick about it, got in at the lowest price – first 75 riders. In this amount of time, the Etape du Tour would have sold out 16,000 spots, which tells you how niche this baby is.

In my pre-training training phase, I’m starting to do some longer rides to prepare myself for the shock when the program starts in January. This is good because I’ve baked both a batch of fruitcake and date squares in the past week, plus doing daily trips (by foot!) to the Carrefour Express for cans of Brewdog. I’ll enjoy it while I can.