Marika's Tour de France

Stage 09 - Saint Gaudens to Tarbes 160.5

Stats: 160.97 km, 9hr 8min
Average Speed: 17.61, Max Speed 53

June 14th, 2009

Tourmalet Day. Not as scary as stage 07 but the reputation of the Tourmalet preceded itself and I was somewhat worried.

The night before Robert had worked on his bike and was confidant that there wasn’t going to be any punctures today. It turned out that the wheel he had got specially made had not been made special enough and the spoke was puncturing his tyres, which had resulted in the four flats yesterday.

Before the Tourmalet we had to conquer Col d’Aspin. A category one that spanned 12.3km with an average grade of 6.4%. It started 48km into the day, all of those kilometers being uphill. On our way we caught up with Chris, our English friend who had started the tour with us. He’d fallen sick and had to pull out so we wished him luck and continued on our way. We also said goodbye to Tara who was heading back to work.

Col d’Aspin was slow going but not as hard as Col d’Agnes the day beforehand. Again I brought up the rear with the guys ahead conquering the mountain at their own pace. Knowing how far I had to go I timed the distance down to the last 500m where I came around the corner and saw everyone at the top in the distance having a food break.

When I got to the top Dale informed me that Nancy was looking out for me and declared excitedly that she saw me coming, only to retract her statement when she realised that she was looking at a post.

Cows were everywhere again and it looked fantastic, particularly when you surveyed the view while cow bells chimed. A little scary though when you’re descending towards a herd and their heads slowly lift up so that your eyes meet and their look says to you “as if I’m moving!”

We soldiered on to the Tourmalet with quiet excitement (the boys) and dread (me). Robert had decided he was going to see how quickly he could do it. I decided to see if I could do it. The night before we’d met a guy at dinner who talked up what an achievement completing the Tourmalet would be, which equaled putting the fear of god in me, particularly when he directed his conversation at the boys and tended to ignore me. I took this as him disbelieving a girl would be capable or conquering it. So my determination was high.

I took off first in the hope I’d reach the top not too much after the boys. Half an hour later they overtook me and the grade started to jack up. I braced myself and hoped that I wasn’t in for an impossible climb.

Nancoir was my support. She patiently followed behind me and encouraged me, filled up my drink bottles, gave me snacks, yelled out I was doing good, took photo’s for me and kept my spirits high. She even let me know that her speedo was not dropping less than 10km an hour. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my speedo was reading between 5.5 and 7km. At this rate it meant it was going to take me two hours to complete the remaining 12 km.

But I wasn’t deterred. Just a matter of keeping on pedaling as Nance would say. So that’s what I did. And counted down the kilometers. At each half hour I would take a break for a drink (as I was still to master riding and taking a drink at the same time) and some food. About two thirds of the way up we found a ski resort town and I hoped I’d calculated wrong and that it was near the top, but some further signs informed me there was still about 6k to go. Again I started giggling. My computer had been hovering around 12% for the grade reading and occasionally going up as high as 14% and I knew that the last few k’s weren’t going to be much better.


Head down, turn legs, check speedo, still 5.5k’s to go, head down, turn legs, check scenery, check Nancy, check speedo, still 5.5’s to go.

And so on and so forth until I finally reached the top and meet up with the boys and John at about 5.30. It took me two and a half hours to get up the top but I conquered it. Thanks Nance! How about them baguettes Mr. I just talk to male cyclists!




From the top we still had 70km to go but it was mainly down hill so we were confidant that we’d complete the stage. And we did with only a few drama’s. Me and Nance got separated from the group and had to ask the locals for directions, bucks lost a glove and we got stopped by the police for riding on a highway and had to do some cross country trekking with our bikes on our shoulders.

We rolled into Tarbes with 10km to spare and spent the time that John was looking for a hotel riding around the back streets trying to make up the k’s. By the time we reached our hotel we’d successfully completed another stage and were absolutely beat.