Today I headed to devilishly-steep Mt Bouquet, but managed to avoid actually climbing most of it by circling around to the north side, where the ramps are only 14% instead of 22%.

If you’re ever in the area, this mountain is a must if you are feeling masochistic. A couple of you will agree because I’ve taken you up it. It’s also a very quiet part of the Gard (my département) and the riding around Mont Bouquet is great.

This week I rode a little over 12 hours, with today being my longest-yet outing (4.5 hours). It was also the most elevation gained (1365m), which is really what this post is about.

As I was ruminating on everything from my retirement plan to intermittent fasting, I found myself doing some calculating about the Tour du Mont Blanc to figure out how much climbing I need to do, as compared with my local training rides. This is when the bad math comes in.

I have a handy way of giving every ride a climbing number, which only works in my brain. It goes something like this: If I ride 100km and climb 1000m, the ride is a ‘1’. This is average for my area. If I do a Camargue ride it might be a ‘.4’, which is only 400 m over that same 100km. Today’s ride – my mostly climby of the season – was 1.4 (rounded up).

The Tour du Mont Blanc is 2.5.

To give you a point of reference or two, La Marmotte is 2.8 (but just a little over half the distance of TMB) and the Mallorca 312 is a measly 1.6.

My vague idea was to increase climbing as the weeks went by, which I’m doing, but now I think I need to use my own personal math and steadily increase my ‘climb number’ till I get to 2.5. This will definitely mean hopping in the car and driving to some mountains, or possibly doing Mont Bouquet repeats.