Nice Ironman bike course

Next Sunday is the annual Nice Ironman event. I had thought maybe to gatecrash the bike leg and enjoy the closed roads - but it seemed safer to lift the route from their website and do an early reconnaissance.

The course starts on the Promenade and the first 60 km is almost continuous climbing, topping out on the Col de l'Ecre at 1,120 m. Depending on how you classify it, the Col is either a category 4 followed by a category 1 or an HC (hors categorie) viewed in its entirety. Either way it's hard work - 20.2 km and around 940 m climb.

I broke the climb at a cafe in Gourdon. One of the drawbacks of early starts is that sometimes even the bakers haven't finished their work and I had to sit around for 10 minutes until the chocolate croissants came out of the oven. I also asked for a ham sandwich to tide me over for the rest of the ride, and took delivery a crusty baguette full of jambon. Stuffing the foot-long truncheon into the pocket of my jersey I left on the second part of the climb.

Part-way up I was aware of the hot sun, the sweat tricking down my back and passed the time trying to estimate the doubling frequency of bacteria on a dried ham sandwich in a warm moist environment. The verdict wasn't encouraging so I stopped at the top for a photo and ate half of it.

From the top there is some pleasant flat riding through alpine meadows, culminating in a brilliant 10 km descent down the top section of the Gorge de Loup to the village of Greolieres, where there is a convenient drinking fountain to top up the bidon.

Ate a bit more of the, by now even more suspect, jambon sandwich and threw the rest away. From Greolieres the road continues to descend until a category 3 climb takes you back up to the 1,000 m contour at the village of Coursegoules. Passing through the village the Garmin ticked over to 100 km and a total of 1,820 m climb.

Looking back from the Coursegoules climb. The village of Greolieres is just visible on the far right. To the left is the village of Cipriere, visited on a ride last week.

I skipped the detour out and back to the Col de Vence and enjoyed the big down for 25 km to the village of Carros. Rather than drop to the busy valley floor as on last week's ride in this area I contoured around to St Jeannet, experimented with a new descent route to Cagnes and got lost in the middle of this busy resort - not what you want when you've been in the saddle for six hours.

155 km, 2,225 m climb. I'm only glad I didn't have to get off the bike and run four x 10 km laps of the Nice Promenade in the afternoon sun, like the Ironmen will next Sunday.

On the following day the legs still felt good on a ride up Cols d'Eze and Madone. Some minor digestive turmoil, though...