Well, the results are in and they aren’t pretty. You might remember I did a little poll last month, asking readers to suggest which Etape du Tour I should do next year. Unsurprisingly, since ‘both’ was on the poll, 65.63% of my blog ‘friends’ went with that. 12.5% suggested I do only Act Two (in the Pyrenees) and a measly 9.38% wanted me to enter only the Alps race (Act One). Interestingly, 12.5% came out as ‘other’, which I’d love to know about, but there is no indication as to what it could mean.

Therefore, at exactly 12 noon today I (and about 14,000 others, I gather) started the long process of getting registered for both long, arduous, and just plain scary races. I think I was lucky to be in there quick because it only took 30 or 40 minutes of windows crashing to get mine done. Others weren’t as fortunate and the Etape server completely crashed sometime around 2pm.

Question: haven’t these people been running the Etape for decades and hasn’t it always been extremely popular? I don’t need any answer, by the way.

Here are all those hills I have to get over. Act One:

And Act Two:

I doesn’t seem to be too late to get yourself signed up, by the way. My last count says they aren’t full yet. What are you waiting for?