I get on incredibly badly with winter, so I always look forward to Paris-Nice. The first major stage race of the European cycling calendar is famed for starting in the cold and wet of late winter in northern France and, over the course of the following week, making its way steadily south to meet the Mediterranean spring. For me, it has become as sure a sign of the changing seasons as primroses, frogspawn and chiffchaffs; a realisation that somewhere, not too far to the south, the grimness of winter is almost over. (With impeccable timing, I write this on the day that the penultimate stage, starting in Nice, has been shortened due to the bad weather!)
This year, of course, the race is no longer on free-to-air TV and I have really missed my fix. Five minute highlight compilations on YouTube are too short to build drama and interest, and the subscription fees for sport channels make them unviable to watch one sport alone. And so, perhaps, I will have to start spending more time looking for primroses in future.
I won’t miss Paris-Nice entirely this year, though. I’ll be riding it myself, either a midlife crisis or a big adventure with one of my best friends.
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Over the last few years, my old schoolfriend Graeme and I have gone to France for a long cycling weekend. It’s always a good laugh and a pleasure to be able to spend time catching up with one another, and over the years we’ve covered many of the major routes in Brittany and Normandy. To celebrate both of our 50th birthdays, we thought we’d take on a big trip and Paris-Nice quickly became the favourite option. Some general googling established that it would probably be a manageable 1200km or so, and over the last few months planning has started in earnest.
Paris-Nice itself is, of course, a spring race. Most of the Alpine passes don’t open until June, so the race takes a lower route, avoiding the big passes that the Tour de France traverses later in the year. This was our first decision – do we want to do the big mountains, in which case it’s a midsummer route, or follow the Rhône valley down from Lyon and work around from there? We decided that this might be the only big trip we might make like this, so so we decided to leave the lower terrain at Maçon and then head for Annecy and the Alps. This in turn meant a summer route – and conversations about time off work.
Worries about work time and impact on family life almost killed the trip. I had a perfect vision that the family would fly out to Nice to meet us at the finish, Graeme and I whizzing down from Éze for that amazing view across the bay, racing along the Promenade des Anglais to meet with everyone for celebratory pizzas, bubbly and tales of derring-do. But any school holiday time is peak season for flying to southern France, and this made the flights too expensive for the family to join us, and for a while it didn’t feel like it would be the same without the family being part of it. For a while I was stuck, unsure about taking time off work, fretting about finding the right dates, trying to mediate the inherent selfishness of the trip by trying to keep the family involved somehow. Maybe we should delay for a year, or even do something else completely?
In the end, it was creeping age and the illness and subsequent death of a family member that made my mind up. There might not be a next year. Good health and fitness is an all-too-brief, precious thing; people of our age get sick, develop conditions, lose fitness. And perhaps sometimes you just have to be selfish if you’re dreaming big.
As I write, we’re well into the planning. Our hotel at the finish is booked, as are the ferry and train journeys that will take us to and across France. We have provisional routes planned for every day and an itinerary marking out campsites, route options and even local cheeses for every day. We are talking kit, buying super lightweight tents and putting the final touches to the vintage Peugeot bikes that we hope will haul us up Cayolle and Galibier. And I am putting myself through a daily fitness regime, riding the turbo trainer and avoiding the booze to get my weight down from a New Year high of 90kg to something more suitable for mountain passes.
I love this bit. It’s almost as good as the riding!
I will post more as plans come together but for now you can see our route on the images below. I haven’t quite worked out how I can send updates from the road yet but if you subscribe to the blog you’ll get updates as we go, one way or another.
I have plotted the route using Plotaroute and its excellent premium features, also referring to Google Maps and Michelin’s 1:200000 regional series of maps. Screenshots below are from Plotaroute. You can see the full route here: https://www.plotaroute.com/route/3252946?units=km
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