Le Tour Challenge Recap

This year's MapMyRide/Le Tour Challenge competition was a memorable experience and certainly a high point of my summer. Thousands of people around the world took part and were encouraged to ride every stage day of this year's Tour de France and submit their gps data to compete for stage points. Only verifiable (gps) data was considered for stage points, but I suppose someone could mount their Garmin unit on a moped and fake it!

Obviously not everyone took this very seriously, but there were a bunch of us submitting rides almost every day of the Tour. I did this event last year and was the lucky winner of a Polar unit with heartrate and cadence. While I was dreaming of winning something fabulous like a new bike, a carbon wheelset, or a trip to France, my primary goal this year was to get as high up the leaderboard as possible, and while I didn't win anything, I'm pretty pleased with my results.

This year I rode in 19 of the 21 stage days (all solo rides, squeezing my expeditions between family obligations and work), and finished in 10th place overall and 2nd place in the 46-50 age category, accumulating 103 stage points. My highest stage ranking was 4th, a lap around Cayuga Lake in ridiculously high humidity and temperature in the mid 90s. (Stage winners get 25 points.) MapMyRide kept tidy track of my stats, comparing them to the pros in the Tour. I averaged around 19.8 mph over the 678 miles, which obviously pales in comparison to the ridiculous 24.7 mph pace of Contador over 2260 miles and an unfathomable 428,000 ft. of ascent!

My Stats:
Stages Completed 19 (between 7/3 and 7/25)
Total Distance: 677.87 mi
Total Time: 34 hours, 18 minutes
Total Ascent: 29,518 ft

Alberto Contador's Stats:
Stages Completed 21
Total Distance: 2260.34 mi
Total Time: 91 hours 30 minutes
Total Ascent: 428,182 ft

I tried hard to mix it up, taking on the hills during the mountain stages and looking for flatter, faster routes for the sprint stages, since it seems to matter—I don't know if they're relying exclusively on software or if there's a human element used to determine stage rankings, but hills mattered a lot more on the mountain stages and much less on the flat stages. Distance always mattered, so if you took a long ride at a brisk pace, you stood a good chance of winning points. I visited Ringwood and Snyder Hill a bunch of times, suffered through a Yellow Barn climb, rode around Cayuga Lake, and even climbed Bear Mountain on a family trip to Putnam County.

Here are three of my favorite rides over the last three weeks:

Cold Spring/Bear Mountain

Cayuga Lake

Lansing/Yellow Barn/Willseyville

Ringwood twice/Snyder Hill

Now that the exhausting Le Tour Challenge adventure is over, I no longer feel the need to push as hard. After a rest day, I've been back on the bike, looking for hills that I haven't climbed yet and enough miles to make my goal of 3,000 miles before the end of July. With 3 days and 25 miles to go, it'll be an easy goal. Then hopefully, coming in later August, I'll be doing some riding in the Adirondacks and Vermont. Perhaps the 5 finger lakes goal will slip by the wayside for this year...too much time away from the boys.