Race report: 24 heures du Castellane
Andrew Scheyer
As promised, the next installment of 'wacky-shit on bikes: French edition.' This one is long, but so was the race. I've added a few photos, here (note the magazine found in the paddock - French cycling journal covering Milwaukee and ToAD!)
Primer
Les 24 heures du Castellane is, as the name suggests, a 24 hour race. This can be accomplished solo or as a relay (teams of 2, 4, 6 or 8). It takes place on the Circuit de Paul Ricard, which is a 3.8km racing track favored by middle-aged French men with very expensive cars (to reinforce that point, it is immediately adjacent/connected to the Aeroport International du Castellane which exclusively serves private planes - is there anything better than debarking your private jet, tossing your partially consumed champagne on the tarmac, and hopping into your McLaren to rip around a track nestled in the mountains of southern France? Rhetorical because: No. No there isn't.) As the parenthetical tangent mentioned, the track sits high above Marseille (some 480m above sea-level, the zero-point for which I recently learned is actually localized to Marseille), about a 90 minute uphill ride from where I sit, with nothing but forest (and a pizza joint, but we'll get to that later) around it.
The rules of the race are quite straightforward. An individual must be on the track at all times for 24 hours. Teams may share the 24 hours in any way that they want. The pits (or paddocks, to use proper car-people terminology), normally reserved for cars and mechanics, are staging areas in which one can hand off the official ankle-bracelet-bound timing-chip - this is also the one region of the track with a speed-limit (20km/h).
For anyone who has never raced bikes on a track made for cars: do it. It's fucking spectacular. Turns and banks made for automobiles travelling at 200km/h mean that one can theoretically ride the entirety of the track without once touching their brakes. There are no crosswalk bumps, no road furniture, no cars, no errant pedestrians strolling through a crit-course. In essence it's the ideal place for man+bike vs other-man+other-bike.
Pre-race
The race begins at 15h local-time. I am part of a four-man team, having registered alongside another four-man team. Both groups are comprised of friends/riding-buddies as well as people I've never met. All (save for your trusty author) are French, half from Marseille and the others a mix of Lyon and Aix-en-Provence, and one speaks english (which made me the inevitable target of approximately 3,000 "how-do-you-say-that-in-english"s over the course of the 30-ish hours we spent together.
We arrive at noon for the commencement, presentation of rules/regulations and an opportunity to pre-ride the course. This is also our allotted time to set up our "lodging," which varied from a hotel across the street (for the two from Lyon, both of whom brought children and spouses), to an eight-person tent which served as a four-person sleep chamber with a lot of room for eating, changing and hiding from the rain, to my personal set-up: a hammock, a sleeping bag, a paracord-hung tarp and a headlamp. Of course, much of the time was spent in the paddock, so the "lodging" revealed itself to be somewhat irrelevant in the end.
After pre-riding the course, everyone settles in, discusses strategies, and then begins their prep. I've been elected as our team's anchor, so I'll be taking the final rotation. As our initial plan detailed one-hour shifts, this meant that once the race commenced I would have three full hours before I had to mount my bike. Seeing as the race did not start for another two hours, I elected to go for a spin and find something to eat. The track has a restaurant, but being where and what it is, it was both hugely expensive and comprised of about 80% meat and 20% cheese so I elected to leave the track in search of a boulangerie that could provide me with some nourishment. I quickly found, tucked behind some pine trees and a very well hidden trailer park, a lovely wood-fired pizza joint where I would spend the next hour channeling my inner-Lucas and devouring, with short moments to breathe between bites, one of the best pizza pizzas I’ve had in my life. Race-fuel.
The race
I returned to the course in time to watch our first team member launch onto the tarmac. The race began with a Le Mans start, which was great fun to watch. As far as I could tell, of the 189 teams with starters, only a couple of people tripped while running across the tarmac in their cleats, none so spectacularly as one can witness at triathalon transition zones. The paddocks were fitted with televisions displaying a constant feed of standings, given that our timing chip provided lap counts and times. Though 24 hours of riding in circles may SOUND like the most exciting prospective way to spend a week-end, I can assure you it is made much more lively by a regularly updating data stream.
Knowing that our first rider was also our weakest (let’s be nice and say, « least super-fast »), I was not surprised to find that at the end of our first hour we were not exactly ready to chill the champagne. His tour put us in 16th place. Then launched Jéremie, who brought us up to 14th, followed by Ludo who in turn put us in 12th. By half-way through Ludo’s tour, I had put on my much-lauded Jus d’Orange kit (though if I’m being honest I swapped the bibs for SAS knowing I’d be spending many an hour in them), digested most of my pizza, and done some brief leg-openers in the parking lot. Ready to roll.
Tour #1 - 27C is fucking hot. Add the sun, the heat of the tarmac slowly melting below one’s tyres and a complete and utter lack of shade (being on an open track) and you’ve got a veritable sauna. Since we’ve yet to have much serious heat in Marseille, this was actually a huge motivator. I exited the paddock feeling strong, complete with my probation-esque anklet. While the fields were motivated, people were also reserved knowing what lay in store over the next day. I elected to throw caution to the wind and see what my legs could do in an hour. For the next 60 minutes I averaged 39.28km/h, largely alone (as I was unable to find anyone else stupid enough to ride in the red for their first hour), and brought our team up to 8th overall. I also made an invaluable observation during this tour, in noticing that dossards/rider-numbers all began with the first digit indicating what type of team it was (i.e. 2XXX is a two-man team, 4XXXX is a four-man team..etc.). Finding yourself in the draft of someone on an eight-man team was infinitely more promising than a two-man team, given that the former is far more likely to be fresh in the legs.
After finishing my first tour, giddy with having broken the top-ten on the scoreboard, I ate what I could, threw on some compression tights, drank a full bottle and got in my hammock to repose and dig in to what would literature would become my solace for the remaining 20 hours.
Tour #2 – At 21h15 my alarm reminds me to get into some fresh bibs (yes, I brought two pairs and let one dry while I wore the other). Being nearly summer in Marseille, the sun was still illuminating the track to some degree but I threw my lights on my bike nonetheless. At this point we were loosely sticking to our one-hour/turn plan so I was ready to roll in the paddock by 22h. Now the sun had largely set, and given that less than 10% of the track is lit, on came the bike-lights. In the distance I can see solo lights illuminating miniscule portions of tarmac and a handful of small groups appearing like star clusters against the pitch-black of the night in the land of pine-trees. The moon is half-obscured by the incoming barrage of clouds and a few dozen stars are visible in the portions of the sky not yet their victim.
By the time I hit the tarmac it’s started to rain, it’s dark, and the entirety of the track is litered with small groups of 2-3 riders. As with my first tour, I spent the majority of this alone, occassionally hopping onto a group only to find that while it allowed me some rest, it slowed my pace considerably. In the end I finished this tour with 11 additional laps, 4 minutes slower overall than the previous tour. I’ll blame that on the rain.
After wrapping up, I quickly find a place to hang my kit, eat a few more biscotti, throw in some earplugs and try to rest a bit. My hammock has stayed remarkably dry, and the ziploc with 5 pairs of socks glows at me with joy like a Pulp Fiction briefcase. I am dry, warm, and tired and somehow manage about 45 minutes of sleep before my next alarm goes off.
Tour #3 – By this time we’ve moved from our original plan of one-hour tours and into a « go until you’re ready to stop » mentallity, the upside of which is that the competitive spirit extends to the intra-team level and we’re all looking to eek out an extra lap or two. As a result, I spend a bit of extra time stretching (and eating) in the paddock before Jérémie rolls in to hand off a very wet ankle bracelet. The track is slippery with rain (glissant, slippery in French, somehow captures the feeling of wet asphalt better). When I roll out of the paddock it’s nearly 3AM, the clouds and light rain have transitioned to thunder and lightning, alternating between an inundation of water that makes me feel like I’m pedalling through the final turns of an amusement-park log-ride and a steady, hard rain. The temperature has dropped to 11C but somehow a jacket is still too hot so I play the usual mental game of rain-riding : « this is my life now. I am a water person. Embrace the squish of waterlogged shoes. » Repeat ad nauseum.
After another 1h10m tour, I give in to the voice in my head screaming for a cup of something hot, a dry pair of socks, and a hammock in the forest and roll into the paddock. I finish with an additional 11 laps, no more than a ten-second difference from my last tour. The lights are plugged into a wall, knowing that my next tour will still likely be in the dark, or rain, or both. Over-caffeinated, adrenalin-ated and knowing that only a few hours rest until I remount my steed, I sit in the paddock and watch the rain, swapping vocabulary lessons with my team-mates and glancing randomly at the scrolling scoreboard, telling me we’ve moved into sixth place overall.
Tour #4 – With our small overages of time piling up, we begin to hatch our plan for how the remainder of the race will play out. As we figure it, we can each pull slightly longer shifts and end up taking five each, rather than the originally planned six. It’s up to me now to decide how to parce out my time, knowing that altogether over the next two shifts I should be putting in about three hours. As the rain has yet to clear completely, I tell myself to play this one on the easy side and save some gas for the final tour.
With that, I throw on my semi-dry kit, lights and gloves and swallow a few last gulps of lukewarm coffee and head out into the rain. With good fortune it’s not long until I spot a couple of comrades in the not-so-distance who seem to maintain a constant distance from me (i.e. we’re sitting at the same pace). I go full gas on one of the not-so-glissant sections and catch them, and after a quick discussion start a solid rotation. The sun is rising, though it’s hard to tell through the clouds. Our lights illuminate the mist off of the track, which I can only imagine appears to other riders as a small mario-like cloud around our lower halves.
By the time I roll through on my tenth lap, I’m feeling the combination of rain-soaked everything, sleep deprivation and the caloric hole I’ve inevitably sunk into and call it. We’ve moved up to fourth place and I know in the back of my head that between the sun rising, the rain stopping, and the newfound adrenaline of a podium within reach I will be unable to sleep once more, so I go through the motions : hang the kit, eat what I can, find some coffee and put my legs up with a book and a good view of the track.
Tour #5 – A few hours later I’m in it ; that unmistakable knot of tension when one toes the line. Somehow until now the notion of a shared responsibility had taken some of the pressure out of the event. But time was closing in, and we were a mere third of a lap behind the third place team. My first French podium was clearly in my sights and I anxiously tapped my toes on the tarmac ready to empty the tank.
It’s 11h45 and I’ve been at this track in some capacity for just shy of an entire day, working on about three total hours of sleep, a pizza, six biscotti (courtesy of my lovely wife) and an uncountable number of espresso shots. The sun is out, the rain has stopped, save for a few random clouds which open up like overfilled water balloons and dump on the course for a couple of minutes at a time. It’s getting hot. Muggy. And the air smells like summer.
I launch out onto the track, trying to contain my excitement with the knowledge that my brain is likely not in line with my legs, nor anything else for that matter. Reminding myself that I must endure at least 90 minutes in the saddle I try to pace myself. The upshot is this : at 9AM, sometime after my last shift, a second race has joined the track. For those not interested in the masochistic pursuit of a 24 hour relay, there exists a second, six hour event. These teams have only been on the track for three hours so they are fresh, motivated, and passing the halfway point to their finale. I quickly start spotting dossards and find a group of quick soldiers on time-trial bikes. Nestling myself in their group proves easy, and I start taking pulls. We’re holding 40km/h as a six-man group and as I pass the paddock at 12h15 I get the signal that we’ve moved into third place.
After finding out that the podium is in our hands, my mind quickly shifts to securing that position. I launch off of our group and put myself deep into the red. A couple of laps later it’s nearly 1PM and I’m about to finish my final tour. Dig. Dig. Dig. My head is an inch above my handlebars and I’m nearly crying as my legs alternate between a rushing river of magma and absolute numbness. Everything hurts. The edges of my visual field are starting to get that white haze like I’m entering a dream sequence in a bad soap opera. I pass the paddock and raise my hand, indicating I’m coming through after my next lap. Standing out of the saddle, the weight of it all comes crushing down on me – that distinct feeling that someone has filled every crevice of my body with sand, or dark matter. I’m trying to ignore the garmin screen telling me that despite my deepest pedal-strokes, I’m barely putting out zone-two power. If I don’t come through in the time I need to, we’ll drop off of the podium. With every ounce of energy left, I roll through my final lap, hanging desparately onto whatever wheel I can find before it inevitably reaches escape velocity and leaves me once more alone on the hot tarmac. By some miracle, I cross the line into the paddock, slump over my bike which is quickly taken from under me by a team-mate, and collapse into a patio chair, mouth agape and likely drooling onto the hot asphalt. After some unknown quantity of time passes in the sun, I finally muster the energy to take a swig of water, remove my soaked shoes, and look up at the scoreboard. My final tour brought us into second place.
Finale
Our final rider enters the course knowing that following my last tour we’re comfortably in second place – we have nearly two minutes on the third place team and are about two minutes down from first, which at this point in the day is an uncloseable gap. He finds a quickly moving peloton within the track and sits in it as the train of riders move through their final laps. I’ve regained enough consciousness to dismantle my hammock, squeeze the rain out of my clothes, and find more coffee. Three bananas, two additional biscotti and some biscoff cookies later, I’m standing on the side of the track banging my fists against the fence as Ludo prepares for his final tour. He crosses the line with the clock showing 23h59m42s. The rest of the team jumps onto the track and collects him from his bike, exchanges sweaty, delirious kisses and stares in semi-disbelief that the scoreboard.
We collect our prizes (champagne, fois du porc, and cash), collectively shuffle to our cars after exchanging one more round of handshakes, kisses and congratulatory salutes, and close the book on an experience for which there are not enough words : a trying mental journey, feverish and rapturous, peppered with moments of both exultation and self-derision, a melange of delusion and triumph wrapped in a fever-dream, and without question an unforgettable podium.