Our very wonderful Mr Tom Weymes recently completed the Mi-Marmotte, and has been good enough to document his musings. We could all learn a lot from his calm and positive attitude, never sinking into self-pity despite being passed by one rider with her derailleur in her spokes!
The Mi-Marmotte – or Mini-Marmotte, as Orwell folk, inaccurately but not inappropriately, call it – is really not much to write home about, still less take up valuable website page space with. A sawn-off version of the Real Marmotte, it doesn't warrant mentioning in the same breath, and still less is there any comparison with the recent heroic sufferings of our men on the rain-lashed Tourmalet. However, the Website Editor has demanded an account and must be obeyed.
The Mi amounts to only 76 km, though into those is squeezed the same amount of climbing as on the Wicklow 200. However, unlike the Wicklow, which administers death by a thousand cuts (I'm thinking particularly of the final repulsive section between Avoca and Greystones) at any given moment on the Mi-Marmotte route you're either going unambiguously and interminably UP, or gloriously and lengthily DOWN. It's the only route I've ever been on which the downwards bit really does make up for the upward effort. Add in the breathtaking Alpine scenery, and the fact that the two hills which constitute it have high-quality bragging value ('Oh yes, I've been up the Alpe – AND the Galibier') and it's really an attractive proposition if you don't feel like the 176-km, four-hill agony of the full Marmotte. Another motivator for me was the fact that it coincides with the route of the short 2011 Étape, from which I was dragged by the broom wagon when halfway up the Alpe. This represented a sneaky chance to redeem that failure (sneaky, because that 2011 trip also included the Col du Télégraphe – but no way was I going to add that in to the actual Mi-Marmotte route).
After signing on for the gig last November I began to feel uneasily that maybe some special training was called for. I couldn't hack the stern regime that the Real Marmotteers committed themselves to – high- and low-cadence long-distance spins, ever more ferocious Garret-designed hillfests – but in a spirit of self-improvement I did get myself evaluated by the UCD sports science guru. Spurred, or frightened, by the output, I went to the length of buying a spiffy new turbo-trainer, but after that things went downhill, not in a good way. I gave up the effort to get its software to work, so the thing currently has the status of an unused gym sub (except of course that it'll still be there next winter). Likewise for the heart monitor I'd unenthusiastically acquired 18 months previously, which kept telling me I had a rate of 210, and remains un-debugged to this day. The upshot was that training for my renewed assault on the Alpe reverted to the usual random assortment of spins, adding up by end June to 2,500 km, with maybe a few more metres of climb than in other years, and the usual slow-speed trundle round the Wicklow 200 (ten-and-a-quarter on-bike hours, since you ask).
So when I lined up in Valloire, the start point of the Mi-Marmotte, along with Gráinne Coghlan, my only other Orwell companion for the Mini, whose academic commitments earlier in the year had ruled her out training for the full Marmotte, and SportActive's man Thierry, who was to nursemaid us, the only thing I had going for me was the knowledge that in 2011 I had actually got up the Galibier without too much stress. Also the fact that two days previously, emulating Billy Parker's bravado when he did the Marmotte in 2013, by way of preparation and reassurance, I, alone of the SportActive/Orwell party, had cycled back up the 21 hairpins of the famous climb to our hotel in the Alpe d'Huez resort (never mind that it took me nearly double the time).
Billy's account talks about being in 'the company of roughly the same bubble of cyclists... each sharing the same pace and cadence'. Not me – the one unvarying feature of the day's outing was the constant procession of slow-moving cyclists passing me. (It started around Kilometre 3, when Gráinne and Thierry got tired of my – let's say methodical – approach to conquering the Galibier). Billy also refers, and I can't help feeling it's not in an entirely flattering way, to those fast-cadence cyclists whose back sprocket is a 30 'or perhaps even a 32'. In combination with my trusty compact chainwheel, my thirty-two got me up the Galibier and the Alpe, and I won't have a word said against it. And, Billy, I've got news for you – several of the Main Men and Women of the Marmotte group confessed to me separately that they, like me, had similar set-ups: rather than Superpersons, as I'd thought, they were Real Men and Women!
In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that the famed and spectacular Galibier once again turned out quite manageable, even allowing me every now and again a burst of a 28-sprocket, and I was thrilled to arrive non-stop at the SportActive car a kilometre below the summit, a full 20 minutes quicker than the two-and-a-half hours I'd threatened Thierry with. Both he and Gráinne were still there, and we three were in company all the way to Bourg d'Oisans, after an orgy of snapshotting by Thierry at the summit plaque, and having swooped together from the summit down that incomparable 45km of downhill Alpine tarmac that must constitute one of the most memorable amateur cycling experiences in Europe.
The advance guard of the full Marmotte were probably beginning to catch us during that descent – they were well-behaved in general, with only a small minority of hell-for-leather lunatics. I have no problem descending – I enjoy the relief too much – and my only fear in an Alpine sportive is of some clown passing on the right, as happened to Garret, as he told us, in the semi-darkness of a tunnel.
Grainne Coghlan and Tom Weymes
Bourg, of course marks the bottom of the Alpe climb, and hence the last time I set eyes on Gráinne. After our short refreshment break she took off in true Orwell-woman style up the vicious first 3km of the ascent, leaving me to pick my way tentatively upwards. If I've seemed to make light of the Galibier, believe me, nothing could be further from my mind as regards the Alpe. Its sheer interminable relentlessness meant that, even in the relatively moderate temperatures we were lucky enough to catch the day of the Marmotte, there was no way I could contemplate a non-stop ascent. It was as much as I could manage, on either of the two days I did it, to crawl between stopping-points at mentally-designated hairpins, where I slugged on my bottle of dilute grapefruit juice and tried to recuperate my legs. In the morass of dull, slogging effort a few little snapshots stick in my mind: the Hairy Molly that set off across the road in front of my wheel – was there any way it was ever going to make it to the other side through the endless queue of cyclists? The lady who passed me, her derailleur playing a merry tinkling tune on her back spokes. (Pass me she did, for all her lack of mechanical empathy). Dunking my head under one of the vertical streams, somewhere below Hairpin 12, where you can step over a low parapet to get at the water. A last, restful gathering of strength at Hairpin 3, in sight of the town of Alpe d'Huez, and getting the razz from John, an acquaintance from the Étape '11 trip, as he passed on his rapid way to a 9-hour full Marmotte. And finally, on a positive note, after Hairpin 1, on the final approach to the town, passing a guy pushing his bike – probably the only guy I passed all day, apart maybe from a few wimpy descenders.
The organizers have the decency to site the finish on a little downhill within the town, so that however blown you are, you can put on some sort of a show crossing the line. And in the scrum of certificate-claimers round the finish, what a pleasure to bump into the first of the Orwell full Marmotteers, in good heart after their 176-km odyssey. What a team!
Gerry O'Connor, Louise Keane, Colm Egan and Garret Connolly
Postscript
It seems to be de rigueur, in reporting one's Sportive experiences, to supply technical detail on heart rate and nutrition intake. As explained above, I can't do anything for you on heart rate. As regards food and drink, I can only record that for my 6-hour on-bike day I got through 450 ml of dilute juice plus, on the Alpe ascent, maybe 6 plastic small cups of water. Say a litre altogether. Add in a few fingers of tea-brack, which was all I could get down by way of solids. No, I didn't cramp up, and yes, I was able for my dinner that night, along with the rest of the suddenly non-abstemious Orwellians. Probably I'm a physiological oddity. Or I don't try hard enough (217th out of 222 Mi finishers). Or can it be that the nutritionists and hydrationists overstate their case??
Video thanks to Eileen Byrne
