For the last two years, I have been racing Megavalanche. It seems like one of those events you need to ride a couple of years before really doing good, so you can count me in next year too because I really fucked up this year.
The Megavalanche is a mass start race that starts from the top of the Alpe D’Huez glacier. Well glacier would be a compliment because let’s face it, it’s basically a slush slope all the way down where you are trying to ride your bike before realizing that it is not only way slower but also waaay harder than just getting off the bike and pushing/half running, because after all you kind of want to get an alright place in this race. Again, this year it caught me by surprise how long and physical the course was, it’s almost as if I wish I rode more cross-country because there are some serious uphills on the finals track or maybe it just feels like it because you are already firebreathing when you start at the bottom of them.
But well this video is about my qualifying run as you can probably see.And I’m just going to be dead honest with you from the start here, I missed my qualifying run. Now I might have been a bit late, which is not out of the ordinary for me, so some might say I can’t really blame the huge lift queue at the second lift of people whole didn’t have a start time before 2 hours later, but that isn’t going to stop me from blaming them at all. If everybody had just stuck to the recommended lift times we were given, then everyone would have made it in time, instead of people bombing the lifts 3-4 hours before their actual starting time. But well be complaining here isn’t going to solve anything, is it?
So after arriving at the start deeply hoping that they were delayed or something in that direction, it is a bicycle race arranged by Frenchies so delays are very plausible due to both of those facts, but I guess they kind of outruled each other. So my time had started and the official at the top simply said “go!” and then I was loose, trying to catch up 100 riders who had round about a 5-minute headstart. Now I didn’t really have time to think of any tactic other than trying to overtake as many as possible, which probably was the best tactic anyway, so nothing lost there. This resulted in some first class firebreathing along with some fine and some not so fine overtakes.
I will make a longer post soon to kind of guide you through the whole Megavalanche experience with pictures, videos and what not.
See you at Megavalanche next year!