Photos: Gavin Kaps / @ospreyimagery
May 11, 2025
It’s 3pm, somewhere between Arvieux and Briançon. Those in the know will say that I’m climbing the famous Col de l’Izoard that links these two towns in the French Alps. In fact, I’m on the slopes of the lesser-known Col des Ayes, which crosses roughly the same ridge, a little further west. Never heard of it? No surprise: there are no roads here.
After a few kilometres on rough gravel and slopes of up to 15%, I got onto a path. It was impossible to ride. So I resigned myself to walking. At first I pushed my bike, but now I carry it on my back because the path is so steep and broken.
Further up the mountain, I spot Leanne and Guy, who, like me, are taking part in the Alps Divide, a bikepacking race. They’re walking too. The rest is in this video shot by Lloyd Wright. Because of course, the event’s media team chose this spot to capture our experience.
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These images perfectly express my state of mind at that moment in the race. The day before, I was nursing a sore knee. I’d banged it against my handlebars on a rain-soaked gravel descent near the Col de Turini the night before. During the 17 hours I spent on my bike that day (including the mighty Col de la Bonnette but, of course, the gravel version), I think I spent 95% of them reciting this mantra to myself: ‘This f*cking hurts, I can’t see how I’m going to ride another 700 km to the finish’. It was tough.
There is a radical change today: I’m pushing on without pain and I’m enjoying every second. After a night in Embrun and an initial monster climb of 1600 meters to reach Guillestre via the ski resort of Risoul, I made my way towards the Queyras valley and then Arvieux via an enchanted, timeless valley. One of the highlights of my race, immortalised in another home-made video, less beautiful but just as emotional.
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Needless to say, I am in a happy place.
A few minutes later, I meet a German hiker and his wife. Our eyes meet, we say hello and he asks me: ‘You have to explain. You’re the 5th cyclist we’ve seen today carrying a bike on this path’. A little embarrassed, I replied something like: ‘Yeah, we’re doing this race called the Alps Divide. We set off 3 days ago from Menton on the Côte d’Azur and the finish is in Thonon-les-Bains, not far from Geneva. That’s around 1000 km and, well… a lot of climbing’.
He’s puzzled. “This is a hiking trail, not a place to ride a bike!” “That’s right, the organisers thought it would be a good idea to throw in some hike-a-bike sections” I say. He insists. “But… why are you doing this?” At this point, you would expect that my answer would be along the lines of “I want to find my limits” or “Actually, I don’t know”. But other words come out of my mouth: “I understand. For me, this is a break from my daily life. For a few days, I just have to focus on riding my bike and looking after myself. When I go home after the race, I’ll be a better person and the problems of daily life will seem trivial to me. I need these moments.”
He doesn’t buy it and seems to be getting upset (unless it’s his German accent): ‘I don’t understand. OK, I go hiking, but I’m also politically active’. I don’t know exactly what he means by that, but I suppose he thinks that getting involved in public affairs is a more meaningful use of someone’s free time than hiking up mountains with a bike on his back.
As I’m on a high, I just smile. I am not here to win that battle, I have other challenges ahead in the form of some more big mountains to climb. So we say goodbye and continue our respective journeys in opposite directions.
It got me thinking, because you have a lot of time to think when you are on a bikepacking race.. Yeah, why am I doing this shit? Ultra racing is gaining in popularity. Running, cycling… most of the time, people say it’s to push their physical and mental limits. Cultivate their resilience. Find some sort of deeper meaning through perseverance. That’s their “why”.
Of course I enjoy pushing myself, I’ve been doing this for 40 years now on my bike. But I’m not keen to go beyond my limits. I feel I know where they are, I’ve learnt to live with them and I don’t feel like going deeper in the pain cave. That’s why I won’t win these races, apart from the fact that I’m 53 years old and many of the participants could be my kids.
No, what matters to me is managing my resources wisely. Preserving my body and my equipment to reach the finish, my first goal. Being smart, keeping enough bandwidth to be able to overcome the challenges that will inevitably come up: bad weather, resupply, mechanicals… When I’m in a race, I have one job: to keep my dot moving on the race tracker. Which comes down to playing with just three parameters:
- Ride. A lot, but not too much
- Eat. A lot, and some more
- Sleep. As little as possible but as much as necessary.
I also realise that the most important thing is that I’m really disconnected. No email, no instant messages. No time for doom scrolling my social media feed. No multitasking.
It’s an incredible luxury: according to this article, workers (read: you, me) spend 4 hours a day in a state of constant communication, instead of doing their actual job. They keep switching context, at the expense of their creativity and productivity. On my bike, none of that. There’s one context, and that’s the race. And no communication. An introvert’s paradise!
So what’s going on in my head? How do I replace the noise of modern everyday life?
As for noise, I don’t like riding with headphones on: I want to stay in touch with the environment. It’s a matter of safety, especially in traffic, but also because I just want to be in the here and now, this luxury I just mentioned.
OK, I did catch up with The Cycling Podcast’s coverage of the Vuelta between Bardonecchia and the Maurienne. Don’t bother checking the map: there’s no secret road pass between those two valleys either. It was a 3-hour hike, and there I did manage to get bored. But that’s all. The rest of the time, I rode in silence (which is all relative when you have a DT Swiss freehub). The thoughts that kept my mind busy boiled down to:
- Where am I going to sleep tonight?
- How far is it to the top of this mountain?
- Can I reach the next valley before the bad weather sets in?
- How many Snickers bars do I have left?
- Is this knee pain going to get worse?
Bottom line: keep the f*cking dot moving. In between, I sang Zucchero’s “Il Volo” in my head. Like, a thousand times. For some reason, it was my anthem on that race. I was lucky: most of the time the songs that get stuck in my head are way, way worse.
And yeah, as a result, I am a better person when I come back from these races. A better father, husband, friend, son… although my mum doesn’t get it. She thinks I’m torturing her, she who’s always worried to death when I go out riding. 41 years after she signed me up for the local bike club. It’s all her fault.
When I come back, the hassles of daily life don’t seem like such a big deal. As Stephen Fitzgerald says here: “You need distance from the grind to make sense of it, to see it all a bit more clearly. You can’t see the forest for the trees when you’re down in it, but you can see the forest easily from above treeline.” Like, literally in the case of the Alps Divide where we spent an awful lot of time above 2000m.
Of course, this is a rather painful way to disconnect. A meditation retreat might be an easier way to get to the same result. During the Alps Divide, we had 12 hours of torrential rain in a row on the second day. Things improved, I had three pleasant days, then we were hit by snowstorms so bad that the organisers had to reroute us last minute. I finished two days later than planned – and still managed to come 10th. Because everyone else was slow, or just gave up and went home.
At 3am, after a last push through rain and snow to reach the finish on the shores of Lake Geneva, I was a cold, miserable mess. But I swear I was a better person, whatever the German hiker thinks – and my mum.
The second edition of the Alps Divide starts on September 6th, 2025. I won’t be there, but I’ll be dotwatching.
Alain
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