Fireflies Tour 2013: Stage 7 - Le Sauze to Castellane

Suddenly, it seems, we're getting near the end. Last night (a bit late) all the riders had to say why they were riding. Some have done this ride eight times (out of thirteen), others are here for the first time, like me. Many, many of them have – or have had – friends and relatives with cancer. Some of those people have even died during this trip. It was hard to see people you have come to know enough to realise how committed and focused they are about this ride – and how tough they have had to be to keep riding, with torn muscles, a possible fractured wrist and multiple minor and major scratches and scrapes, unable to finish their descriptions.

I managed to say a bit about my own experiences, and also how living in Africa makes you realise that saving lives or 'beating cancer' just isn't an option for the majority of people alive today. The Tour doctor (who has been measuring a few of our patellar and Achilles' tendons) also made the point that non-Eurasian patients are thousands of times more likely to find a donor than Black or mixed-race ones (including his own kids), and put in a plea for everyone to join the Bone Marrow Register. That's not an option for me, I imagine, but please check it out.

Anyhow, we assembled at the usual unearthly hour for a penultimate 140 km covering three lesser-known cols and 3,000 m of climbing. My physio yesterday was great, incidentally. There are two guys from Integra Training attached to the Tour and they use a system called 'Muscle Activation Techniques to 'switch on' muscle groups that have stopped working effectively – in our case probably due to over-use. I was a bit sceptical, but their explanations made sense and it really seemed to work: more power and more flexibility and it's very non-invasive.

Thankfully too, my headset mods seemed to have been successful, and we set off at a good pace on a quiet track for the Col d'Allos – a pretty climb and a slightly less demanding one, though topping out at 2,240 m. There was a good mountainy bar/café at the top and a quite demanding descent after it.

Next came the slightly smaller but steeper Col des Champs (2,087 m) which had a beautiful fir-tree-lined middle section followed by a bleak, exposed and extremely windy top part, with land slips and torrents of mud and water across the road. There were plenty of squeaking marmots too. The descent was better, once we'd got below the wind, and we stopped for lunch (spag bol, yum yum) a little sooner than planned, a bit before Guillaumes.

I'd dropped right back on the previous climb, mainly through chatting to a nice Italian rider about bikes and stuff (he's riding a very pretty carbon Cinelli) but I've been feeling steadily stronger and, on the final climb – the smaller Col de Toutes Aures (1,120 m) I thought I'd push things a bit. We had a good, steady group of about a dozen riding well together for 30 km or so to beat the wind (lots of sweeping bends and tunnels) and I was on the front as we hit the 17 km climb. We all stuck together, but nobody was coming through. Then we started catching a few stragglers, mostly in pairs, and passing the third of these and looking back I could see I'd got a gap.

I carried on, upping my heart rate to a moderate 125 or so, and just slipped away. What seemed like an age later (probably about 45 minutes in fact) one of the support vans shouted that I'd only got 1.5 km to go. This was a lie, of course (it was really more like 5.5 km) but I had a three minute lead at what I thought was the top, and stopped at the van for water. A small group caught up, but I stayed with them to the real top and for most of the descent down to the Lac de Castillon, where the whole Tour took a break and splashed about in every possible stage of undress before a final slightly soggy downhill stretch into Castellane. A very good day.