All posts by Mike

Tour de France this summer?

Planning for the future is tough with my wife’s cancer raging wildly. Normally I’d already the our routing chosen, and places to stay, and in fact I started getting a really good handle on that right about the time my wife’s health went south. It’s a really tough route to try and see; the TdF organizers chose to make pretty much every stage end-to-end (the next day starts where the prior day ended) instead of a few central locations in the middle of several stages.

Still planning on going, assuming my wife’s health improves enough (don’t even want to think about the alternative), but might have to do something quite different, maybe hitting up a few climbs in Italy, ticking off the box for the Stelvio (a bucket-list climb for cyclists everywhere) and then see just the last two or three stages. That would be quite a different experience, but this has been quite a different year for me.

The Last Rabbit

It’s not like the old days, when it was rare that anyone would pass me on a climb. Those old days were… well, they go back over 50 years now! Yikes. But even today, at 67, I’m still passing more cyclists than are passing me. I’m still seeing people way ahead on a climb and calculating in my head if it’s going to be possible to catch them.

For a while it was almost a science. I would match their pace (from a distance), figure out how many watts that took, and from that know if I could maintain enough wattage to not just catch up to them but keep on going. Because, after all, rule #1 is to never pass someone you can’t stay ahead of.

On Tunitas, I got lucky. Despite it being a pretty slow climb, I don’t recall anyone passing Kevin and I. For the first 2/3rds of the climb I was desperately trying to keep up with Kevin, but the last 1/3rd he was wearing down. The person in the photo? That was the last of the rabbits today.