Etape Jitters... Lance was wrong. It’s ALL about the bike. Or that’s how it feels, having recently joined Kingston Wheelers cycling club and signed up for a hellish day of pedalling in the Alps. Never have I spent so much time orbiting the indifferent deer in Richmond Park, or rubbing manically at oily marks on my once pristine bike frame. What possessed me? Not only am I attempting a real 187km stage of this year’s Tour de France, it ends on one of the most infamous and daunting climbs in that strength-sapping race, L’Alpe d’Huez . Do four revolutions round the park at top speed do this task any justice by way of training? I doubt it. Not even repeated ascents of Box Hill’s three mini switchbacks are much good as preparation - and you can’t stop for coffee and a sticky chocolate bun on the Alpe’s Hairpin 15. There’s a word which looms larger as I strain to increase my cadence up Sawyers Hill, ‘hell-for-leathering’ it as best I can, towards the horizon. This multi-syllabled term warns...

The 2006 Etape is less than a week away and - in the Apollo 13 sense - I have a problem. The concept of tapering your training is logical. You ease off in the last days before your event to ensure you're as rested as possible, without stopping practice altogether. With this in mind, I duly 'tapered' from a 120 mile Audax run in Kent and a 60 mile club run the next day, down to a very gentle 30 mile spin round Richmond Park . But this last session was the camel's back-breaker. Within 12 hours I could feel a familiar twinge in my right foot. Two hours into my night shift at work, the foot was throbbing and on fire and my walking was becoming increasingly laboured. It got so bad that I signed off sick for the second shift and sat watching tennis and World Cup football on the TV with a large block of ice wrapped around my foot with a dish towel. I've had tendonitis before and it has kept me out of circulation for a week at a time. I put it down to age (sadly) and over u...