Grueling experience of riding a Tour mountain stage

The author rode the 118-mile L'Etape du Tour and lived to tell about it. Luisa Rounds

MAILBAG Austin Murphy will answer questions from SI.com users. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

CAHORS, France -- Friday's flat stage was snatched by Sandy Casar, a Frenchman riding for Francaise des Jeux. It was one of those long, flat hauls that set up well for a breakaway by a group of Nothing Burgers -- a colleague's expression for riders who've taken up residence in the southern reaches of the general classification.

Considering the relative unimportance of Friday's stage, the moment seemed appropriate for a real Nothing Burger -- this correspondent -- to share an account of how I rode a mountain stage of the Tour de France. The only casualty was my dignity.

Damn right, I walked stretches of the Port de Bales, the fourth of five categorized climbs of the 118-mile L'Etape du Tour. It was either that, I suspect, or leave a widow. My friends at Velo Echappe (Bicycle Escape) set me up with an entry to this year's L'Etape about 2 ½ months before the event, which took place on July 16 -- the first rest day of the Tour. The timing worked well: I'm usually in France for the final fortnight of this race. Yes, I could have used another month or four to train, but I got in decent shape: by early July, my long ride of the week was five hours and change.

The problem was, at the five-hour mark of L'Etape, I was about halfway done, and starting to glance over my shoulder for the yellow school buses that served as the event's "broom trucks."

I went into this thing with several goals:

• Finish. Plenty of friends and family knew I was training for this. I needed to finish. Or feel shame.

• Tear the legs off (or failing that, beat) Martin Dugard. Marty's a friend of mine who writes a blog for Active.com, and he got me into this mess. It was his boss, Rob Klingensmith, who rounded up our entries to L'Etape. Klingensmith, who's done the Hawaii Ironman, would do the race with us. He warned us that this was not just another century ride to be taken lightly. Last year's L'Etape went from Gap to the top of the Alpe d'Huez, whose switchbacks looked like scenes from a Vicksburg re-enactment: riders sprawled in what shade they could find, suffering dehydration and heat exhaustion, ambulances doing a brisk business up and down the mountain. Only 65 percent of the riders who started, finished.

• Get Levi on the podium.

Marty, by the way, is a former champion high school and college miler and cross-country runner. He's got a bigger engine. I'm more comfortable on the bike. Sounded like a fair fight to me, until I learned that he was training on some zooty Specialized ride from his local shop. The arms race was on. I love my 10-year-old Cannondale, but I if I was going to get over five Pyrenees, I was going to need a triple crank up front -- something with seriously small gears to spin up the mountains without spending the day in Anaerobia.

I sent a discreet e-mail to some guys I know at Felt, makers of high-end road and mountain bikes. They would happy, they said, to arrange a loan, if it would help me complete L'Etape, and defeat my rival. A week later it arrived: A gleaming, 15-pound carbon-fiber Z-1 that weighed less, I believe, than the cardboard box in which it was packed. It didn't have a triple-crank, but "we threw on some compact cranks," Felt's Doug Martin told me. Likewise, the new gears were better suited for the Hautes Pyrenees.

"You're only problem," Doug concluded, "is that you'll have no excuse with Martin."

MAILBAG Austin Murphy will answer questions from SI.com users. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

The summer sped by. I dropped a few pounds training, gained them back tapering. So it goes. I hugged my wife and children early on the morning of July 14, and headed for the airport. L'Etape was Monday morning. Below, in condensed form, my travel woes:

• Connecting flight from Dulles to Charles De Gaulle sits on runway for 80 minutes while geniuses at United figured out "our weight."

• That delay, coupled with one-hour wait for my bike at CDG (baggage handlers taking government-guaranteed Gauloises break,) means I miss my train down to Toulouse. At the TGV station near the airport, I became that person none of us ever wants to be: the frantic, perspiring, luggage-burdened American dashing across the concourse, frightening children, running down the escalator to the platform (try it sometime) while humping, in addition to the bike, a backpack and 50-pound duffel, only to have the doors of the train glide closed, with a close with a mocking, pneumatic hissss on my fingertips.

No problem. I rented a car and drove the 800 km to Foix. Thirty hours after I'd left home in Marin County, 90 minutes after registering in Foix, I found the Velo Echappe hotel outside of Toulouse, and an angel appeared before me.

I was hungry I admitted to Brian Rounds, the kind, hyper-competent director of Velo Echappe. But dinner would have to wait. "Can't ... eat. Must ... assemble ... bike."

"Oh, you're not touching your bike," he said, with a beneficent smile. "We've got guys to do that for you."

While it was embarrassing to think that professional mechanics Jim Maaske and Lance Kidd would see the pathetic, masking-tape carapace I'd fashioned for my derailleur, it was an inconceivable luxury to let them take care of the reassembly. I went directly to dinner and, in keeping with the discipline that had marked my preparation, drank only as much wine as I did water.

The key to rooming with Marty, as I have for six Tours de France, is to fall asleep before he does, or be kept awake by his sterterous, pane-rattling snores. (I did).

Four and a half hours of sleep were followed by a 4:30 a.m. wake up call, a bleary-eyed breakfast, a one-hour transport to Foix, where I stood a kilometer or so from the start line: four thousand or so riders in front of me, four thousand behind. I was relieved not to have butterflies: it's tough to feel tense when you're standing next to a couple of Brits dressed up as gladiators.

One of them -- he called himself Toots Maximums -- did the race in tunic and breastplate, to raise money for the World Cancer Research Fund. We spent the moments before the start coming up with Russell Crowe/Gladiator lines for him to declaim during the ride:

"What we do in life ... echoes in eternity!"

"I will have my revenge, in this life or the next!"

"Are you not entertained?"

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