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The race started, and I never saw Toots again. He finished a couple hours ahead of me, tunic, breastplate and all.

The grind up the Col de Port was about 1,300 vertical feet -- a little shy of climb I trained on in Marin (up the backside of Fairfax-Bolinas Road from Bolinas to Ridgecrest Road, a byway so gorgeous you would recognize from any number of car commercials). On my toughest training day, I climbed 7,500 vertical feet. On this day we had 14,300 feet to ascend.

The Col de Port was followed by an early dessert: a fast, gradual, 30-mile descent into St. Girons, which sits at the confluence the Salat and Lez, whose "vivacious mountain torrents," we are told by the Tour's Guide Touristique, made it "ideal for treating paper pulp," St. Girons also marked the spot where the road turned so slightly uphill.

Time again to be the ugly American. Facing 12 miles of gradual ascending before the next full-on mountain, I stowed away in the slipstream of a group of stronger riders to whom my L'Etape motto soon became obvious: I never pull.

Next up: the Col de Portet d'Aspet, which I first drove over in July of '95, shortly after a young Motorola rider named Fabio Casartelli had been airlifted off the mountain. Casartelli had crashed headfirst into one of the little stone teeth that serve as guardrails. He wasn't wearing a helmet, and died on the helicopter. Helmets are now mandatory in the peloton.

Klingensmith and I stopped at the Casartelli memorial, a stunning, white marble statue down the road a bit from where he actually crashed. Like a lot of riders, we were heavier on the brakes after that.

The profile shows no flat whatsoever between the Portet d'Aspet and the Col de Mente: one ends, the other begins, so there is a moment, it seems, where your back wheel is one on while your front wheel is on the other. I recall Lance Armstrong telling me this deceptively nasty ascent made it one of harder Category 1 climbs in the Tour (The only tougher category is what the French call hors categorie -- a euphonious way of saying a climb is obscene.)

At 7k with an eight-percent grade, the Col de Mente was where one first began seeing significant numbers of people off the bike, click-clacking ignominiously up the grade in cleated shoes. I worked hard not to judge them. Because the Beast awaited. The Port de Bales (pronounced like "ballet") was around the corner.

It's a new climb for the Tour. Later, entombed in my sarcophagus of pain, I recalled one of the profane lines delivered by Lindsay Crouse in Slap Shot. Paul Newman's Reg Dunlop is explaining to her that a nearby statue celebrates the dog that saved Charleston.

"Well, [screw] him," she says of the dog.

I was feeling similarly uncharitable toward the French, whose idea it had been to pave the road through this forest. It was a 20km climb that saved its worst for last: the last half kicked up an average grade of 10 percent.

It made me feel better a week later, watching the actual Tour riders suffer on the Port de Bales. There was Astana's Serguei Ivanov resorting to one of my tricks -- "the paper boy," where one zigzags, to take just a bit sting out of the climb. True, Ivanov was sitting up to wait for teammates, but his wobble made French news clips, and came to represent the nastiness of this ascent.

I might have made it into the 13th kilometer before I was off the bike.

When you first dismount, you don't walk the bike. You do some ostentatious stretching. You massage your quads, as if to announce, I'm cramping, you see. Otherwise, of course, I would be floating along.

The second time you get off, you do walk, realizing forward progress is more important than one's ego. Besides, there were some very strong riders off the bike -- riders with shaved legs whose club team was splashed across the back of their jerseys. Guys who'd powered past me earlier, looking straight ahead, seldom acknowledging my congratulations. "Vous etes plus fort!" or "Formidable!" It didn't help that this monster arrived at kilometer 140. All but the strongest among us were well tenderized when we arrived on its doorstep.

I don't remember how often I walked on the Port de Bales. More than four times. Possibly six. No more than eight. There were riders sprawled in attitudes of misery and exhaustion along the road, under trees, in culverts. There were riders supine on the shoulder, riders dunking their feet in a nearby stream, riders summoning the van that you called when you'd had enough.

Along the way, French spectators offered us water, applauded, told us how much more work we had to do. Trois kilometres a sommet!

The word I never tired of hearing cross their lips was the Dan Rather-ish exhortation, "Courage, monsieur."

Cou-RAHJ, is how it came out. I must appeared to be in extremis, because I got a lot of those.

One more climb to go: the Peyrosourde is where Alberto Contador put Michael Rasmussen in difficulty in Stage 15, attacking the Dane like a spider monkey on the final kilometers, throwing down four savage accelerations, serving notice that he would be around for the rest of the race. My fellow Etapistes and I navigated those final switchbacks with rather less panache (although I did stand up in the pedals and crank the last 300 meters, like the buffoon who sprints the last hundred yards of a five-hour marathon).

At each of the six Tours I've covered, there have been moments that have left me wanting to cry. Losing my car in Bourdeaux, and missing most of stage in '95. Filling the tank of my rental vehicle with unleaded in '01, before realizing it took diesel. Learning that Alexandre Vinokourov was kicked out of this Tour for alleged blood doping.

I may have actually squirted a few tears on the descent toward the finish in Loudenvielle -- hard to tell. Might've been the wind in my eyes. I was hit at once by several emotions: an appreciation for the majesty of the Pyrenees; pride and joy -- my sluggish pace notwithstanding -- in the certainty that I would finish.

I was in this transcendent place in the final kilometer, and could not, therefore, be bothered to match the acceleration of the guy -- I'd passed him on the Peyrosourde -- who outsprinted me in the final meters. Congratulations, sir, on nipping me for 4,000th place.

I finished 20 minutes ahead of Marty, but it was a hollow triumph. I was proud of him for finishing at all, and happy to have shared this adventure with him. Both of us have done triathlons and multi-day adventure races. Neither of us has ever had to dig deeper to finish a race.

My biggest question, following L'Etape, other than wondering how long it will take to feel normal:

How the hell how do the pros do this for three straight weeks? No wonder some of them go to the dark side.

There is no such thing, I realized, as a Nothing Burger in the Tour. The real Nothing Burger, to paraphrase Flaubert, c'est moi.