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Part IV. The Col du Galibier

I consulted the Stage 8 course profile once more. Before me was the 5K descent to the village of Valloire, a drop of 170m. Valloire was in full Tour de France splendor, with banners and bunting other displays making it reminiscent of opening day at the ballpark, instead in place of good ol' red, white, and blue the ville was yellow as yellow can be. I went through the town center, passed some ski lifts, and after one last turn the road inevitably pitched upwards. I knew all too well what stood before me, the 19K climb to the Col du Galibier. I faced 1250m in altitude gain, which would bring me to 2650m at the summit. At 8000ft it was the high point of the 2003 Tour. Forget about the fact that I had over 5 hours of ride time in my legs, forget that I'd already punished myself in conquering (ha!) two other Cols  what worried me most was the fact that my hometown sits at about 200ft above sea level, and if anyone out there does the exact opposite of altitude training, it's me.

I left Valloire and began trudging up the mountain. Given that the Galibier is the most climbed mountain in the history of the Tour de France, and given that in name appeal it ranks only behind Alpe d'Huez, it came as no surprise that the roadsides were jammed with cars and RV's for the whole of the 19K. On the lower, warmer slopes gentle grass valleys fell from each side of the road, and tents upon tents indicated just how thick the crowds would be tomorrow.

The first half of the Galibier isn't terribly steep or technical. In fact, I found myself downshifting into a 23t cog and even a 21t once or twice. The devious hallmark of the Galibier, though, is that unlike most climbs in the Alps, rather than reserving its steepest sections for the base of the climb, it starts shallow, and steepens in the final 10K. The trees mostly vanished at this point, and it was easy to crane your neck upward to see just how high the road eventually reached, and the steepness with which it got there. After 90 minutes of climbing I could just make out white flecks about 4 ridgelines above me. It was anything but reassuring to know that in that eternal distance at that eternal height, those were RV's on the roadside, and soon (or not so soon) enough, I'd be passing by.

The complexion of the mountain changes in its upper half. Unlike the tank-top-regaled, beer-swilling, sunburned revelers I'd passed in the few K past Valloire, the spectators this high are a heartier lot. They were dressed in layers to insulate themselves from the ever-increasing chill. They warmed themselves on wine and pastis and a good number of them feasted on elaborate spreads of ski season fare such as fondue and succulently aromatic meats. As my core temperature dropped, my sweat-saturated chamois was like steel wool in my crotch, forcing me to stand up so I could peel my shorts away from my evermore-raw skin. It was a merciless climb  as the gradient increased and the temperature dropped, the lack of oxygen had an eerily similar effect to the way I feel when I play with my three-year old daughter, laying down on my back to let her balance herself on her tippy-toes on my ribcage. Deep breaths were impossible, and any sort of respiration beyond gasping was more work than it was worth. To make matters worse, I was nearly 7 hours into the ride, fueled only by water, soda, tea, and Mars bars. I was bonked out of my skull and I kept my ears wide open as I passed every RV, convinced that if any of them spoke English, I'd offer them $20 for any scrap of food they'd spare.

As I reached the 5K to go milestone, I was shattered. Dead tired after a record amount of time in the saddle, starving for anything that resembled food, and under the spell of a wicked case of altitude-induced nausea, I had to stop. For the previous 30 minutes I hadn't exceeded 8kph. The beautiful spectacle of the impending Tour de France  the fans painting names on the road, the gigantic yellow heart somehow stained into a meadow in the valley below with "Valloire" and "100 Ans" inscribed in it, the wall-to-wall press of people alternately encouraging me and pitying me as I rode  none of it gave me a whit of inspiration. My stinging crotch, throbbing feet, and blistered hands earned the little attention my mind was capable of summoning. Blaming it on everything -- the hunger, the fatigue, and the nausea  I finally had to stop. I clipped out totally ashamed. Fat men on mountain bikes with platform pedals passed me by.

I'd been on the Galibier for over 90 minutes and had an unthinkable distance remaining. It was then that I remembered that in 1998 Marco Pantani summited this very mountain in an elapsed time of 48 minutes. The Stage 8 profile in my pocket had an estimated time schedule on it in which the Tour organizers predicted the slowest time interval for the peloton to travel from St. Michel de Maurienne to the top of the Galibier would be 1 hour 40 minutes. I was already at 2 hours 30 minutes, and I had 5 horrible K remaining. As I clipped back in, it was all I could do to merely stay upright. Every 500m I stopped. I'm so unfamiliar with the ways in which altitude might toy with my body that I crept along completely obsessed with my search for food. The next 4K took me almost 40 minutes. I eyed the feasts laid out on card tables and the ajar doors of RV's with the desperate resourcefulness of a burglar. My saving grace came as my computer told me I had 800m to go. I came upon a bar at the apex of a gigantic hairpin. On a shelf of land high to my right was a congregation of cyclists so dense that it left no debate about the location of the summit. My computer might have said 800m remaining, but to my eyes it looked like miles to go, and the distance was too much to bear. I dismounted my bike and entered the bar on a frantic search of calories. It was a festive scene inside, with dowdy Germanic-looking people chowing down all sorts of comfort food and beer. At the bar was a basket full of croissants. In my exceedingly tentative French I asked the bartender for a croissant and a Coke. It was a sumptuous snack, giving me what could've possibly been the most blissful 90 seconds of my life. I didn't want the moment to end  especially given that I was at least temporarily set free from having to pedal my bike  so I walked back to the bar to get another round. The bartender was pouring port for the two gentlemen to my right, and as he corked the bottle I made eye contact with him. For the sake of a quick transaction, I uttered one of the few French idioms I remember from college French, "La méme chose, s'il vous plait." He turned to the men next to me at the bar with a smile on his face, and the three of them burst with uproarious laughter. It was a Twilight Zone moment. As it stood, I was nearly delirious. Their hysterics capped off the last hour's surrealness. They spoke no English, but thanks to their hand gestures I soon understood that in asking for "The same thing, please," they thought I was asking for my own tumbler of port, as though I needed to brace myself for the kamikaze descent ahead. They quieted, one of them kindly patted me on the back like he understood the exact extent to which I'd bitten off more than I could chew that day. The bartender handed me another Coke and croissant. As I ate I peered out the window in an attempt to appreciate the majesty of the Alps. More than the view, though, my eyes locked in on just how long the shadows were becoming.

I somehow clawed my way to the summit of the Galibier at 7:15pm, within moments of when the final bus for Grenoble departed the Rochetaille stop. I stopped to take a snapshot and put on my jacket for the descent, a 50K stretch of twisting roads, dropping 6000 feet before finally depositing me at Bourg d'Oisans. As with the Croix de Fer, it was a treacherous affair, except now I was pulverized with fatigue, and thanks to the fact that my clothes were saturated with 8 hours worth of sweat, my body shivered with cold. Not unlike my performance on the rare instances I go mountain biking, my hands cramped in pain thanks to the death grip I kept on the brake levers as I overcorrected my speed turn after turn. I pulled over to the side of the road in 5-minute intervals for the first 20 minutes of the descent, giving my body a chance to warm and my hands the opportunity to rest. Whether it was pasture, village, or tunnel  and I rode through plenty of all three  it was nothing short of a freefall descent. The roads were serpentine, so I coasted more than pedalled. Time and time again I felt certain that I'd hit the valley floor, only to peel around a bend and see the road dip downward still.

I plummeted for an hour, with only two brief, shallow climbs to distract me from the thrill, each of which pushed my legs to the precipice of a total lock-up. As I approached ever closer to Bourg d'Oisans, the traffic became quite heavy. Twilight shadows swept through the valley as the sun tucked itself well behind the mountain directly before me: Alpe d'Huez. I soon passed the road at the foot of the climb where a scene of sheer bedlam was playing out. Wall-to-wall people were funneling up the road in a motley procession unlike anything I've ever witnessed. Cars, motorcycles, buses, RV's, cyclists and walkers crusaded in the direction of the infamous switchbacks.

My watch said 8:45 and I had at least 50K to go to Grenoble. I knew it would be dark in 45 minutes, and I finally broke into panic at the prospect of riding in dense traffic on unknown roads in darkness. It wasn't as though I was capable of anything resembling a hard effort. On a flat road, hitting 30kph would be an accomplishment. And simply making my way through Bourg d'Oisans was an ordeal, since this sleepy ville with a simple 2-lane road splitting its town center looked like rush hour Manhattan times 10. Every sidewalk, every patch of grass, every inch of patio and piece of open space was occupied. Traffic from Grenoble was locked in a total standstill as bikes and motorcycles slalomed Mad Max-style around the stilled cars and pedestrians. As I pushed westward, the traffic was no less relentless, making me that much more unnerved for the remainder of my journey. Like a miracle amidst the frenetic scene, though, I witnessed the most breathtaking sight of the last 9 hours  at that moment it moved me more than fresh memories of vistas of 10,000 foot snowy peaks, it was more beautiful than the crystalline lakes overflowing with pure snowmelt, more profound than the site of the world's most important mountain pulsating with cyclists as madly passionate as me. Before me was an idling taxi cab, the only one I'd seen all day. I felt no need to estimate the expense of a 30-mile cab ride in ruthless traffic, and before I was even tempted to do so I initiated a conversation with the pair of cyclists loading their bikes in the back. They were Canadians and they told me they were heading back to Grenoble. They invited me to split the fare, and I felt like water had just been made into fine French wine. I piled my bike in and saw just how backed up the eastbound traffic into Bourg d'Oisans really was. We cruised along at 80kph, and for over 30K in the opposite direction the jam was so solid that folks were getting out of their car to stretch and walk and take bathroom breaks. The Canadians were quite nice  one lived in Paris, the other in London. and they explained to me that they'd ridden from Grenoble to Bourg d'Oisans, ridden up and down Alpe d'Huez, and they called the cab because they were exhausted from the effort. Their shell-shocked description of the Alpe's toughness was a bit of a surprise to me. On the one hand I felt a bit smug, as I knew that the 14K climb of the Alpe was all but a rest day in comparison to the 66K of climbing I'd just endured. But on the other hand, their emphasis on its steepness unnerved me a bit. I wouldn't describe any of my climbing from the day as steep. Hellishly ceaseless? Yes. But steep? No.

When I stepped out of the cab after our $100, hour-long cab ride, my legs seized up. It was a terrible struggle even to reinstall the wheels on my bike. I dragged myself through the hotel lobby, finally glancing at the computer on my handlebars. 163K ridden, 7 hours 57 minutes of riding time, with an average just a hair above 12mph. The map in my room confirmed what my legs were telling me: I'd just done 10,500 feet of climbing, and with it the promise of another long day tomorrow.

Despite the epic nature of the ride, I slept poorly that night. I was still jet-lagged, my belly was by then full with an exceedingly rare steak, a half-bottle of Côtes du Rhône (I was in the Rhône Valley, for goodness sake), and three scoops of ice cream. Making matters worse was the fact that at about 3:00am a marathon wedding reception erupted into the halls of the hotel. Drunken French proved themselves to be equal to drunken Americans in terms of their loudness and overall obnoxiousness. I dozed on and off for the next few hours, and when I finally coaxed myself out of bed I felt ragged to the marrow. My legs were sore to the touch, my crotch was on fire, my feet ached like hell and I had a painfully swollen 3-inch blister on the palm of my left hand from where my sweat-soaked glove ate into it.