Our Tour de France 2006 Cycling Trip

A few of us got together and went on our own Tour de France cycling trip in 2006. We did the actual mountain stages of the 2006 Tour de France (http://www.letour.fr/2006/TDF/presentation/us/profil_10.html) a few weeks before the Tour started. This was the year that Floyd Landis was disqualified due to alleged doping.
This was a brilliant trip for us...we learnt many lessons on how hard the climbs are!! We need to change our gearing from 39/53 front, 12-27 rear to 12-29 rear (after nearly killing ourselves on the 1st serious climb - The Col du Soudet). We were fit and considered ourselves strong climbers.....
This is not the best way to get the correct gearing as it can damage the rear derailleur...but it was the quickest (and cheapest ) way to get the gears we needed to survive the trip!
I would advise any "normal" cyclist doing this kind of trip to use a compact or triple crank. Nutrition is the next important factor; I would burn anything from 6000 to 10 000 calories per day (8-12 hours / ave 140-230 km riding). Energy drinks and gels become useless on rides like this, meal replacement drinks with high protein content are best...I found anyway. A good meal in the evening with loads of carbs and you should be ready for the next day!!

Enough facts and figures...hopefully you'll have a little taste from the slide show of what a brilliant and beautiful experience this was. If you have half an urge to do a ride / trip like this...start planning, it's well worth it!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Tour
• de
• France
• 2006
• mountain
• stages
• cycling
• trip
• bike
• gearing
• cape
• town
• south
• africa

[mjlorton]

@MusicBLM Well....it's a track you can choose from a YouTube audio selection....I've just tried to see what the title is and it's not listed in the video settings.....sorry....but thanks for watching.

[MusicBLM]

What/who's the music?

[mjlorton]

@ChrisRoseTravel Thanks for you comment

[ChrisRoseTravel]

WOW! these guys are real bikers... good job on the video!