Return to La Marmotte - Part 1 Preparation
San Francisco Bay area cyclist, Dana Albert returns to race La Marmotte to challenge his personal record along with 7,000 other riders to conquer  the Col du Glandon. Col du Télégraphe, Col du Galibier and Alpe d’Huez. A report in three parts; Preparation, the Race, Notes and Climb profiles.

By Dana Albert

What is La Marmotte?
La Marmotte is a Cyclo-Sportif, which is a type of race popular in Europe that not only pits riders against each other, but also scores each rider according to his time. The top riders race against each other, while the less sportive aim for a bronze, silver, or gold "diploma." More than 7,000 riders do La Marmotte, many of them simply hoping to finish. The course is a 100-mile circuit over three of the famous mountain passes of the Tour de France, followed by the eight-mile ascent of Alpe d’Huez, for a total of some 16,000 feet of climbing. I rode La Marmotte in 2003 and completely cracked about halfway through, limping for some fifty miles to the finish as rider after ride passed me. I returned to France this July to settle my score with this great race. (You can read my 2003 story by clicking here.)

My Preparation
In 2003, La Marmotte - and specifically the Col du Galibier and Alpe d’Huez punished me severely for overestimating my condition. This year I decided if I trained harder maybe I’d get off a little easier on race day. I developed a standard weekday training ride featuring over 4,000 feet of vertical gain in under 25 miles, with two one-mile climbs averaging 10% and a third climb of two miles at 11%.

I practiced my descending on every ride, and on a shallow downhill (4%) I worked on my leg speed, not satisfied unless I hit 45 miles per hour. When the weather sucked (we had a record 29 days of rain in March alone), I rode through it, or endured a couple hours on the trainer. My new training regimen brought to my mind a notion from the novel The Body Artist by Don DeLillo: "I think you are making your own little totalitarian society ... where you are the dictator, absolutely, and also the oppressed people."1
1From THE BODY ARTIST by Don DeLillo Copyright (c) 2001 by Don DeLillo Used by permission of the Wallace Literary Agency

My standard weekday training ride

Statistically Speaking
In 2003 my training for La Marmotte included only four rides over 70 miles. This year, I did eleven, most of which included Mount Diablo, an hour-long climb with about 4,000 feet of vertical gain. Thirteen of my rides this year featured more than a mile of vertical gain each, and three featured more than two vertical miles each. All told, I did 92 workouts, totaling 212 hours. Not counting workouts on the stationary trainer, I covered more than 3,000 miles (almost twice what I did in 2003), with a total of 315,000 feet (60 miles) of vertical gain. I spent an aggregate of 30 hours above my heart rate aerobic zone (vs. 17 hours in 2003). Across all climbs for the year, I averaged 4,012 feet of vertical gain per hour, and 300 watts. (My cyclometer calculates wattage based on the rate of vertical gain plus my weight, which is fairly accurate for steady climbs.)

Bryan (left) and Dana training on Mt. Diablo, California.

Given more time, of course I’d have trained more; this is far less training than I did when I was racing regularly. Muscle memory helps, of course; meanwhile, I found the motivation to seriously suffer on almost every ride I did. Now that I am a full-time salary man and father of two kids under five, cycling means almost more to me than when I was a bike racer in college, because it is the one thing I do that’s just for me. Some of the best racers I’ve known were mainly motivated by the thrill of victory; as a less accomplished support rider, I always did it for love of the sport itself, and that hasn’t changed. These days, when the rest of my life is a giant multitasking whirl, cycling is a way to achieve complete focus for a couple of hours a day. It’s more than a stress release for me - it’s like a massage, a steam room, and meditation rolled into one.

Moreover, my training for this year’s Marmotte was fueled by my collapse in the ’03 edition. This year, whenever I’d start to tire during a training ride and be tempted to loaf, I’d summon the memory of the God-awful suffering I sustained during the 2003 Marmotte. Suddenly, I’d find the strength to kick my own ass some more.

About the only problem with my training was that most of the time I had to do it alone - a "totalitarian society " of one. My cycling friends were either doing normal races or none at all, neither of which scenario matched my all-climbing program. It didn’t help that I generally rode at dawn, even on weekends, to keep my regimen from cutting too far into my home life. I made a tradition of getting home just as the kids were getting out of bed; often, they’d ask for cycling jerseys and helmets to wear while they stretched out and drank juice with me.

My wife and kids would not be joining me this year in Europe, but my mom and my brother Bryan flew over with me. We met up with another brother, Geoff, who lives in the Netherlands, and drove to France together.

Pre-Race
We arrived in France five days before the race so we could ride some of the climbs beforehand. The proprietor of the Hotel Panoramique in Mizoën, where we stayed, informed us that the course would take a detour this year near the top of the Col de la Croix de Fer, heading instead over the Col du Glandon. (The race took this same detour last year as well, because of a road construction project that still isn’t done.) The detour cuts off a bit of the climbing, while increasing the overall course distance slightly. Not having seen the descent, and looking for a suitable place for our mom to hand up bottles, we drove and rode parts of the course in the days before the race.

Climb Profiles:
La Marmotte Route
Col du Glandon
Col du Télégraphe
Col du Galibier
Alpe d’Huez

2006 Tour: Gruppo on the Galibier.       Photo c. Fotoreporter Sirotti

The descent of the Glandon is trickier than that of the Croix de Fer. The road, while very smooth, is generally narrow and has sharp switchbacks. We heard from a fellow hotel guest that a very accomplished amateur racer died on this descent the previous year, having crashed on a switchback. Our original plan had been for our mom to drive to the base of the Col du Télégraphe before the race started, feed us there, then backtrack on the course when most of the racers had gone by. After seeing the descent of the Glandon, we changed our minds. The more novice among the riders would be descending toward Mom as she drove up; given the narrow roads, nobody liked that plan. We decided she should feed us atop the Glandon and backtrack to Alpe d’Huez from there.

Alpe d’Huez
On the Tuesday before the race we rode up Alpe d’Huez. As I’d done for preparation in 2003, I warmed up for awhile and then rode the whole climb as hard as I could. This climb doesn’t mess around - right away it becomes brutally steep. On each of the twenty-one switchbacks is a sign showing the number (starting from 21) and naming a past winner. My intention was to read all of them, but by the halfway point I forgot all about that.

By the last few switchbacks I barely noticed the numbers. As hard as I rode it, I was really disappointed by my time. In 2003, I rode the climb in 47 minutes; this year, it was 55. After all that training, what could be the problem?

Alas, this practice ride confirmed what I’d been trying to ignore all year: while my endurance was improving, I wasn’t climbing any faster. I think it comes down to weight. In 2003, I weighed 163 pounds (which was the lightest I’d ever been as a 6'3 " adult), and I got a lot of complaints from my wife. (At a dinner party that year, a friend’s father, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from the South and father-in-law to three strapping men, took my wife aside and said, in a tone both grave and incredulous, "Erin, you gotta feed this boy!") This year, the weight just never came off. I’d noticed I wasn’t as veiny as before, but my scale had been broken since spring, and only upon arriving in Europe did I learn I weighed 170.

Return to Valloire and the Col du Galibier
The most miserable of my memories from the 2003 race is of climbing the Col du Galibier. It is a Hors Catégorie monster, more than 11 miles long and climbing almost 4,000 feet to the highest summit of La Marmotte. At almost 8,500 feet, this is frequently the highest elevation of the Tour de France as well. Statistics alone don’t do this climb justice. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s the third major climb of La Marmotte; maybe it’s the elevation; maybe it’s the sheer leg-wringing length of the thing.

Or maybe, I thought, it’s how poorly I rode it in 2003 that made it loom so large in my mind. Whatever it was, I was afraid of this climb. Ron Reade, a former UC Berkeley teammate of mine, read my 2003 Marmotte account, and the next time we raced each other up a climb he took advantage of my psychological scar, getting me on the ropes and then whispering "Galibier! "

Determined to master my fear of this great mountain pass, I rode it with my brothers on the Wednesday before La Marmotte, starting at its base in the little town of Valloire. Since we were tapering for the race, we rode as easily as the grade would let us, snapping pictures and chatting: "Whoah, look! Can you believe we were way down there just a few minutes ago? "

Toward the top, in the last couple of miles, I decided to test my legs and started hammering. Right away my heart rate soared, and the climb assumed its true colors. The top of the climb is the steepest part, averaging around 10%. You can see the top from a good distance away, the switchbacks like ramps in a parking garage. It was cold and windy, just starting to rain ...epic. By the top my power was dropping off dramatically, but it didn’t matter. I was controlling my pace, mastering the effort. The Galibier was, after all, just flesh and blood, like me. Except that it wasn’t. It’s rock, of course, and harder than any man

 
            From left to right: Bryan, Geoff, Dana

The descent from the Galibier starts off pretty steep, averaging 6.3% for 5½ miles. From there, it’s about another 24 miles to the base of Alpe d’Huez at an average downhill grade of 2.5% (with a couple of small climbs along the way). The road surface is good (they patched one section literally the day before the race) and there’s plenty of room, but there are several narrow tunnels that are a bit unnerving.

One problem I didn’t have at all in France, but which I worried about, was an asthma-like breathing condition called bronchospasm that I get from time to time - a reedy, raspy wheeze that severely lowers my air supply. It’s triggered by my hay fever and seems to be complicated by high altitude. It shut me down badly during a cycling vacation last summer in my high-altitude hometown of Boulder, Colorado. To make sure my breathing was normal, every day in France I tested myself using a peak flow meter, which is a tube you blow into to raise a pointer. Of course with my brothers it became a competition and we’d pass the tube around trying to get the high score. To an onlooker we would have looked like stoners passing a bong, but of course this was exactly the opposite.

The night before the race my brothers and I set out our gear, mixing a dozen large bottles of energy drink and dividing up two dozen Powerbar Gel packets. In theory we wouldn’t need all of this, as the race does provide support, but I’d learned the hard way in ’03 not to rely completely on it.

We didn’t bring any energy bars; I’d had terrible trouble choking them down during the ’03 race. Seeking an alternative, I consulted with Eric Zaltas, a teammate of mine on the East Bay Velo Club and a nutritionist at Powerbar. He advised me that during intense exercise, the body just needs calories, and simple sugars like in the gels are in no way inferior to complex ones. He also explained how many I’d need: the body can absorb 200 calories per hour, the rough equivalent of one large bottle of energy drink or two gels. Because the body is also getting calories from burning fat, caffeine helps, and many of the Powerbar Gel flavors are caffeinated. I have long believed caffeine improves my performance and thus didn’t need any convincing there.

All Photos (c) Dana Albert
2003 - Riding La Marmotte by Dana Albert
Return to La Marmotte - Part 1 Preparation
Return to La Marmotte - Part 2 Race Day
Return to La Marmotte - Part 3 Notes & Climb Profiles