“What’s next Blaise?” 

It was a common refrain on the trip, directed at our French friend and leader, his name pronounced roughly like the English word Blaze, but with an s instead of a z. 

The response came immediately, in his inimitable, guide-casual, french  accent.

“A Leeetle up. Tuk tuk. Boop Bap Bap. Some verrrry steep ‘airpins. Doot doot dot. Over zerrrrr. A leeeettle up, some single, a bit of beauuuuutiful meadows. Blap blap blap. And zen, some verrrry incrrredible shit dudes.  Fucking ‘uuuuge downhill.”

By day three of Breauxdureaux almost everyone in the group had figured out that you could roughly translate each ‘tuk’ ‘blap’ or ‘boop’ from our Chamonix guide's Franglaise to about 250 vertical feet of brutal climbing. In other words that seemingly harmless and somewhat funny sentence meant we were looking at around 2500 feet of hard climbing, both on and off the bike. But we also knew that it meant we’d have at least twice that much downhill as a reward.

At this point Blaise was beginning to occupy a space in our heads somewhere between friend, mentor, and Spirit Animal, and we would follow him anywhere. For day after day after day we had followed him over a crazy, mystical maze of trails that would be unrepeatable without an intimate knowledge of the Alps honed over decades of exploring, plus a photographic memory for maps and places.

It all kicked off in Chamonix, the mecca of sports that worship the mountains and the feelings they awake in us. A couple of us had been there before; the rest had only read about it. Once there, they understood that what they’d read couldn’t do Chamonix justice. Fully grasping the true scale of the place only happens when you’re standing on the valley floor, neck craned, eyes bugging out, looking up at the summit of Mt Blanc 12,000 feet above you. 

From Chamonix we’d head south through the mountains for 7 days, to where the Alpes Maritimes fall spectacularly 4,000 feet into the saturated blue waters of San Remo, Monaco, and Nice. Each night we’d stay in tiny hotels in small towns with names that defy an American’s ability to pronounce French. Guillestre, Puget-Theniers, Lantosque. Chateau Queyras. Sospel, then finally arriving in that fantastical country that is as synonyms with James Bond as it is with Ayrton Senna, Monte Carlo. 

The format was simple. Twice each day we’d pile into an 8 passenger VW van with a trailer full of bikes in tow, drive between three and five thousand feet up a mountain, and set off on a 3-4 hour adventure that was around 65% downhill by the numbers.

In fact the amount of climbing we did, both on and off the bike, was staggering. Climbs so hard that at least once each day they’d make a few of us become not nice with the others. Then we’d hit the descents, plunges whose scales dwarfed anything any of us had ever experienced, and all would be forgiven. 

By the end of Breauxdureaux the numbers we’d racked up were the stuff of Strava dreams. Over 7 days we’d done 25,000 feet of climbing and over 61,000 feet of downhill in almost 200 miles.