Sweat drips from my forehead onto the handlebars and evaporates at once. It's 3.30pm, 42C, and I am struggling, one slow painful pedal stroke at a time, up the flank of Mont Ventoux, the "giant of Provence", rising alone almost 2,000m above the surrounding plains. I feel dizzy, my stomach churns. I focus on reaching the next corner, only to find the reward waiting there is another, even longer, even steeper stretch of road. Another cyclist comes up behind and overtakes, saying quietly between big gasps: "C'est... trop ... dur ..."
Too hard indeed. Cycling is the toughest of all mainstream sports, and the Tour de France, which gets under way in earnest today, is its hardest event - a three-week, 3,500km (2,174-mile) endurance challenge. Crashes are common. Often competitors collapse with exhaustion at the end of a day's stage - Eddy Merkx famously did so after winning the 14th stage of the 1970 Tour, a stage that ran from Gap to a certain Mont Ventoux.
Even deaths are not unknown. Francisco Cepeda and Fabio Casartelli both died during high-speed descents, while Tom Simpson, Britain's most celebrated cyclist, suffered a heart attack and died by the side of the road close to the summit of a huge sunbaked French mountain. That was Ventoux, too.
The Tour is cycling's pinnacle, and Ventoux is perhaps le Tour's most infamous climb. It is "a monument to cycling", says Jean-François Pescheux, the tour's sporting director. "Ventoux overlooks no valley, leads nowhere," wrote Paul Fournel, the French cyclist-philospher. "Its only purpose is to be climbed."
Ventoux has featured in the race 13 times, but this year its role is bigger then ever. Usually, the mountain stages - where the greatest time gains and losses are possible - take place in the middle, but this year the ascent of Ventoux happens on the penultimate day of the whole race, with the cyclists transferred by train afterwards for the traditional curtain call on the Champs Elysées the next morning. This means that on the Tour's 20th day, the leaders will be racing for overall victory up the slopes of Ventoux. "I expect them to go at each other hammer and tongs," says Pescheux. "It's the final throw of the dice."
And so, this year more than ever, Ventoux is a place of pilgrimage for cyclists. On 20 July, 9,500 of them will ride L'Etape, a timed amateur event that follows the same route as stage 20 of the Tour, starting in Montélimar and climaxing, 167km later, at the top of Ventoux. The event was massively oversubscribed, not least because of the boom in cycling in the UK, but that doesn't stop you recreating it yourself. And the surprising thing is that taking on this year's ultimate cycling challenge can easily fit into a long weekend.
Last Friday I took a Eurostar to Paris after work (two hours, 15 minutes), then the following morning caught the TGV direct to Montélimar (just under three hours). I'd cycle on the Sunday, stay in the village of Bédoin at the foot of Ventoux, then ride the 40km downhill to Orange on Monday morning to catch the TGV direct back to Paris. Taking a bike on the train is easy, as long as you've pre-booked. There's no need to dismantle or wrap it up as you would on a plane - on Eurostar you simply check it in an hour before departure and pick it up on the platform the other end; on the TGV you carry it on and off yourself.
But while the travel is easy, the logistics need thinking about. With no support car, you have to take everything with you on the bike. A change of clothes and a squirt of deodorant would be nice after a day in the saddle, but do you want to carry them all day? Instead I opt for so-called "credit card touring" - you buy everything you need along the way, and take nothing but a spare T-shirt, camera, and passport, leaving the bike unencumbered but for a small saddlebag. As I hadn't spent much time training, I also packed every available pocket with the next best thing - a huge supply of energy bars and gels.
In Montélimar I meet my friend Reg, and we spend the afternoon mooching around the pretty pedestrianised old town and visiting some of the 15 nougat factories (thanks to the abundance of almonds, pistachios and lavender honey, this is the world capital of nougat). Possibly less of an enthusiast than me, Reg has turned up without a bike, but he manages to buy one in the town, and then we are free to indulge in one of cycling's few wholly enjoyable elements, the eve-of-battle marathon of carbohydrate scoffing.
We set off at 7am, keen to get some miles under our belts before it gets too hot. The first couple of hours are glorious. We speed on deserted roads past vineyards and fields of lavender laid out in perfect rows. The morning mist hangs in the woods, lit up by shafts of sunlight. If we weren't on a cycling trip, we'd still be in bed and would have missed it all.
We pass through the pretty stone villages of Taulignan and Rousset-les-Vignes just as they are starting to wake up, the boulangeries throwing open their shutters. It's mellow, bucolic perfection but all the while the rocky bulk of Ventoux looms on the horizon. In St Jalle they are setting up a market under the shade of the trees. We wheel our bikes past the stalls, then start up towards the Col d'Ey, one of four mountain passes on the route. As we start to climb, the pain is dulled by the satisfaction of tangible progress over the obstacles in our route. At the top there are moments of light-headed glee, charged with potential energy. Then we whizz down the far side, a guilty pleasure because we know every metre we splurge on the cheap thrill of descent will have to be earned back on the next climb.
We stop in Buis-les-Baronnies, where tourists mill around clutching bundles of lavender, then again in the beautiful hillside villages of Aurel and Sault.
And then comes Ventoux. "Your eyes stay glued on your front wheel, and it's your innards you're staring at there," wrote Fournel. "Ventoux simply feeds back your fatigue and fear. It has total knowledge of the shape you're in, your capacity for cycling happiness, and happiness in general. It's yourself you're climbing. If you don't want to know, stay at the bottom."
Perhaps fearing a devastating moment of self-awareness, perhaps because he is "****ing ****ed!", Reg stays at the bottom, in the bar. So I set off alone along the road that rises slowly at first, passes through the hamlets of St Colombe and Les Bruns, then enters the forest and starts to kick up savagely. I feel my face burning. I lose concentration and my hand slips off the bars, making me swerve into the gutter. I force myself to keep going, promising a break and another energy gel every 45 minutes. Little encouragements take on huge significance - a cyclist flying down in the other direction shouts "Good Luck!" Names of legendary Tour riders are painted across the road, left from previous races, but I take heart most from one that reads in English: "Go Audrey Go - 40 today!"
After 90 minutes I emerge from the forest and onto the bare limestone of the summit slopes. The gradient eases but the heat intensifies. I pass the memorial where Simpson died, covered in offerings of spare tyres and water bottles. After eight-and-a-half hours in the saddle, my brain is numb and empty of any thought beyond the need to keep turning the pedals, so the summit, hidden around a final hairpin, comes as a shock. I'm too tired to look for myself up there, but I do find a massive sweet stall and a glorious 360-degree view above the clouds. And then all that's left is the 20km woosh back down to Bédoin, a beer, and the delicious prospect of watching Armstrong and co on 25 July, struggling up Ventoux in my tyre tracks.
Essentials
Rail Europe (0844 848 4070; raileurope.co.uk) has fares London-Montélimar and back from Orange from £125 including bike carriage in France. Taking bikes on Eurostar costs £20 each way. In Montélimar, Hotel Kyriad (kyriad.com) has doubles from €89; in Bédoin, Hotel des Pins (hotel-des-pins.fr) has doubles from €95. For more on the route see letour.fr and ventoux-stage-france-2009.co.uk. See also ladrometourisme.com and provenceguide.com.
