As this short blog post attests, I have been thinking about the Tour du Mont Blanc for over 6 years. When you allow things to stew for so long they can take on a life of their own, becoming bigger and tougher than reality…or in the case of the Tour du Mont Blanc, about the same as reality!

As you know, I’d been fretting about this event for some time, mainly because of the sheer length and elevation-gain of it, and the fact that I didn’t lose those last precious few kilograms I had planned on. I brought that fear to Les Saisies, which was only exacerbated by all the skinny sunken-eyed endurance athletes I met when I signed in on Friday.

But when I awoke the next morning at the ungodly hour of 3:30, I was strangely serene, as the French would say. Our hotel was steps from the start line, so Shoko and I waited till the last moment to walk down. When we got there I learned that Big Mig (Miguel Indurain) was one of the participants. I unfortunately never found him, so didn’t have that wheel to follow. We then heard a long and detailed explanation of safety rules in French, followed by ‘welcome and be careful’ in English. At 5am we were off.

TMB starts with a very long descent in the dark and it was – other than a tad scary – mesmerizing and beautiful. You see a long line of red lights in front of you, framed by the shadowing contours of early-morning mountains, then a combo of red and white when the road takes a turn. Mostly it was scary, though.

TMB is totally back loaded with climbs, so the first few hours are relatively easy. After descending from Les Saisies, you climb a little to Megeve, followed by another descent down to whatever the valley is where Chamonix lives. A couple of small climbs later and you are riding past Korean tourists waiting for shops to open and onto the last two climbs in France – Montets and Forclaz.

My first significant stop was outside Martigny, in Switzerland, at the beginning of our first major test of the day – the insane Champex / Grand Saint Bernard Combo. We are now at a little over a third of the way through (100km+), but nearly 7000m left to climb, I think. I tried not to think of that and ate the baguette pieces + cheese they had at the feed station, got myself into my 32, and puttered off up the Champex.

The Champex climb was hard, at somewhere around 13km and 8% average, but it’s just the appetizer because once you descend the other side you have 26km more to climb to just get out of Switzerland.

It was on this climb up to the Grand Saint Bernard that I started questioning my decision-making abilities, not to mention wondering if I’d make the first time cut-off at the top of the next climb. By the time I got to the top it was after 1pm and I’d been riding for more than 8 hours. I was 150km in and had climbed 4000m.

The descent to Aosta, in Italy, was fast. I even passed a couple of motorcycles on the way. Once in the valley there is a long 30km false flat slog up to the foot of the Petit Saint Bernard – not so petit at 23km long. At some point on this climb I passed 5000m of climbing and started to enter unknown territory. Weirdly, I had a 2nd wind at about this time and had a good climb up to the border of France at the summit.

When I reached the Petit Saint Bernard the day was getting old (after 6pm) and I still had two major climbs to get over to make it back to Les Saisies. Each climb was getting slower and harder, of course, but I was also getting into a familiar rhythm of starting full of optimism, becoming dejected half way through, being unsure of the future at the top, then resetting to optimistic due to the joy of the descent.

It also helped that I met a guy in La Thuile who was on his 10th TMB, and at 62 years old, perhaps his last. As I was having my doubts about finishing, he was just calculating what time we’d arrive in Les Saisies (somewhere around 11pm, he said). He had no doubts at all, or none that I could discern. I took comfort in this and plugged along.

The only feed station I didn’t stop at was in Bourg Saint Maurice, at the start of the Cormet de Roselend climb. The hot pasta was hard to resist, but I also didn’t want it to end up on the side of the road a few km up, so I munched on a bar and rode on past. Bourg Saint Maurice, by the way, is one of the last checkpoints, and I passed it at 21:12. I was not really worrying about cut-offs anymore, but for the record it was 22:30.

And what about pain, you might ask? After all, I was now on the bike 13 hours and had ridden 271km. There was a lot of it, is the answer, but I have found a form of doping I’d never really considered before – ibuprofen! When my big toe started to burn (common on long rides for me) I popped 400mg and then repeated one more time a few hours later. It worked wonders and what pain I did feel was short lived and I really didn’t think about it much the whole ride.

I climbed the Cormet in the shade, watching the light on the high mountains slowly disappear. It could have been depressing, but I had plenty of company on the road and it now felt that I may just finish this thing. It was still a pretty slow 19km climb.

I did the descent without my sunglasses and wearing everything I had with me because it was now starting to get dark. When I reached Beaufort (and took a wrong turn) it was pitch black.

I started the final 15km climb to Les Saisies at 21:49 and at around 23:20 Shoko captured my Mondrian jersey crossing the line. Officially I had ridden 330km and had climbed 8300m, although Strava ripped me off somewhat on the latter.

I’m still digesting this whole experience, but here are a few conclusions that have popped up so far:

• My Zone Two training worked a charm, or at least I think it did. I won’t know what’s best till I try it again with another program.
• TMB is not the hardest thing I’ve ever done, which was a total surprise. I was fully expecting to either not finish this event or have lasting damage because of it. It was a really hard day on the bike, but I can think of many Haute Route stages where I was more wasted at the end. Even La Marmotte and the 5 Etapes du Tour I’ve done seemed harder. I suppose this comes down to ‘race’ vs ‘survival’? It tells me what I knew from Zone Two training all year – riding hard takes much more out of you than slogging it out in the lower zones.
• As Tony rightly suggested in a comment a few weeks ago, the only way you know what something will be like is by doing it. There were so many unknowns with this event that it would have been all too easy to let the sane part of my mind talk the other side out of even starting. We have no clue what is in store for us when we attempt something new, so you might as well just do it and suffer the consequences or reap the rewards, as the case may be.
• Learned lots of years ago and hopefully executed somewhat this year, the most important thing about a training program is actually doing it. There may be better programs than the one you are doing, but none of them will work unless you are consistent with it. Stick with the training principles for your event and you will probably do alright.
• 56 is not too old to do something out of this world, but there will come a day when I will be too over the hill to get over that hill, so I’m now looking for an objective next year before it’s too late. The Tour des Stations is currently at the top of the list.

In the meantime, you’ll find me elevating my legs in my hammock with a much better view of Mont Blanc than riding around it, looking at my stem.