Cycling at France

If you have arrived here searching for something, maybe it is because you, like me, love endurance sports.

In this post I am going to talk about other of my passion, road cycling.

It does not matter if you consider yourself a climber, or sprinter, or even an occasionaly rider who wants to know more about your surroundings.

My passion to cycling came to me in 2014, motivated for an old childhood friend.

Since that year until now I have had the chance to ride in some countries, and climb some of the most iconic and rewarding climbs.

Here I want to show you the climbs I have made in my current country of residence, France.

For many riders France is pretty much consider the king of pain.

The home of the “Tour de France” is one of the best places in the world to pit yourself against gravity in pursuit of sporting greatness, unbeatable views, and utter exhaustion.

Some you will have heard of but never attempted, some offer a fresh perspective on legendary ascents, and others are simply the stuff of cyclists’ nightmares.

Whether you are looking to add a few rides to your bucket list, this plot can help you to find your perfect ride.

You can find from legendary climbs consider true icons, to others that are not very know, but equally hard and beautiful.

Before check the plot, some aspect should be highlight:

The number associated to each climb represent the degree of difficulty, the bigger the number the bigger the difficulty.

This degree is based on the formula given by Juanto Uribarri. A complete description, in Spanish, could be find in this post at Altimetrias website.

This could be a good estimator to compare the difficulty of different climbs, at least from an objective point of view.

Based on this, the climbs are classified in four categories:

• HC Hors catégorie, french term to designate a climb that is “beyond categorization”
• Category 1 120-240
• Category 2 60-119
• Category 3 <60

* Note that in professional cycling stage races such as, "Tour de France", "Giro d'Italia" and "Vuelta a España", this classification differs depending of the organization decision.

For an easy display, only climbings belonging to HC, first and second category are represented.

For many of the climbs, you have several roads to get to the top. For those cases, the side used is specified and its degree of difficulty indicated as well.

To reveal more information for a specific climb, click on the associated point.

The associated information included the length (km), average gradient (%), maximum gradient (%), cumulative elevation gain (m), and the height of the climb (m).

I hope you find this post useful and interesting, and if you decide to ride in one of the detailed climbs I am sure it is going to give you the biggest sense of achievement ever.

“Those who ride a bicycle know that in life nothing is really flat.”
-Renè Fallet