Recent content by Inch Worm

I'll put in another vote for paying a little more and buying through a local shop - so long as you feel comfortable they'll be there for you afterwards. No point if it's just some spiv who's after his sales cut. Assuming it's a decent shop, the extra money you spend will be saved many times...

I'll cheat a little and go the Sella Ring (Gruppo Sella) in the Dolomite. Four great climbs of varying difficulty over a 60km loop. Can be done in either direction. Each climb is different - 33 hairpins through open green fields (Pordoi), steep climbs through pink Dolomite rock face (Gardena)...

Of those climbs I've done, here are the 10 must do climbs: 1. Ventoux (epic and famous) 2. Alpe d'Huez (epic and famous and usually packed with riders) 3. Mortirolo west (just to see if you can get up it) 4. Cormet de Roselend east (beautiful) 5. Telegraph-Galibier (famous, hard and high)...

Unless you flash around a bend and are faced with a herd of slow-moving, ambivalent goats. They graze around the same part of the climb where Lance hit that bag.

Ah yes. I had a surreal experience up there. Had ridden from Ax Les Thermes, up Col de Chioula and over the empty sun-kissed plateau. Middle of nowhere then, hot afternoon. Took a tiny side road south that dropped down fast then shot back up, maybe 500m at 20% and full of bugs. Almost...

Marie Blanque isn't as steep as the road mentioned in the original post, but it would have to be the steepest section of pyrenees climbing that is a TDF regular. There's about 4km toward the top that average ~11.2%.

I think it also depends on how you approach a climb - some climbs can be far more straight forward if you were to, say, chuck it in a triple and just spin up at sightseer effort, whereas others are hard whatever the 'effort'. But when it comes to nose on the bars effort, I don't think there...

I'm no pro, but I've ridden up Ventoux from Bedoin five times over the years. I rate it the hardest climb in France that I've done. I rank it a level above Tourmalet, Izoard, Madeleine, Telegraph/Galibier. I'd rank Alpe d'Huez a level down again, along with Pailheres, Hautacam, Aubisque...

Stage 1: good on paper, won't work in reality. Two very hard HC climbs to start with (Glandon / Croix de Fer being one climb), then Telegraph (Cat 1), then Galibier (HC): Such a hard stage, but it finishes with ~40km non-technical descent into Briancon. No way the first 2 HC climbs are...

The Giro top 10 is often misleading as it's a weaker race, but also because those riders have peaked for the Giro not the Tour and often come to the Tour with different ambitions. But the 2008 TDF might go down in history as one of the weakest modern Tours, especially when you allow for the...

The tour lacked 'racing', and seems GC-neutral for all bar 3 mountain stages and the TTs. Here are five ways to improve the GC racing: 1. Time bonuses for stage wins/placings (20 sec, 12 sec, 6 sec). Some traditionalists are against this but the Tour lacks racing and time bonuses can fix...

Gerrans. Seems very chummy with Lance and Levi (trained with them in the US) and mightn't feel all that strongly about riding for Sastre any more.