UBF Ardèche 2024: a whole département in one push#
Some races you ride for the result, others for the terrain. The Ultra Bike France in the Ardèche, 500 km format, belongs squarely in the second category. Of this département I really knew only the highlands, next door to my training roads; the rest I knew from a map. A 490-kilometre loop out of Privas turned out to be the best possible way to complete the picture: from the Mézenc plateau to the Ardèche gorges, from 1,489 metres of altitude down to 55, with 8,509 metres of climbing in between.
Privas, 8:14 am#
I got there by bike, with a stopover in Tence on the way. I was coming home from a touring trip through the Basque Country, Spanish side then French side, and riding to the start line was a pleasant way to end the holidays: you close a bike journey with a bike race, and everything runs together.
A Saturday morning start. That is a change of rhythm after my spring races, all of which set off at night: here you attack in broad daylight and you know the darkness will come later, once the fatigue has settled in.
Over this kind of distance my rule is simple and admits no exception: I do not sleep. Five hundred kilometres is precisely the format where everything can be linked in one push. The arithmetic is mechanical, twenty hours of continuous effort costs less than a two-hour break that shatters your rhythm and has to be paid for at the restart. The Race Across France had taught me that lesson two months earlier, in the most expensive way possible.
Climbing to the Mézenc#
The route leaves Privas heading north-west and climbs into the Boutières, those narrow Ardèche valleys that rise without ever offering a flat section. By the hundredth kilometre you are on the Mézenc plateau, and the landscape bears no resemblance to the postcard Ardèche. Passing through Saint-Martial, the Gerbier, Les Estables is always a pleasure: those roads are full of memories, and finding them again mid-race gives them a particular flavour.
That is where I met the cattle. The Mézenc plateau is short grass yellowed by summer, fences running right up to the road, wind, and herds that watch you go by without moving an inch. This is Fin Gras country, a beef whose reputation comes from precisely that grass. You ride through the middle of it, between 1,300 and 1,489 metres, with the sense of being on a limestone causse somehow parked at 1,500 metres.
After everything I had crossed that summer (Picardy, the Atlantic, the Pyrenees) that plateau remains one of the most unexpected things I have seen.
The two punctures#
The route continues west, out to the Lozère edge of the Ardèche highlands, then swings south into the Cévennes. That is the hardest sector: deep valleys, gradients that cannot be negotiated, and heat climbing to 33 °C when it had been 19 that morning up high. It is also where the Ardèche imposes its rhythm, strangely pleasant: you drop down to a small river, climb back out, drop to the next one, and so on. With hindsight I even find a little Corsican flavour in some of these sectors, dry gorges and clinging villages you do not expect two hours from Clermont.
It is also where the race was decided without me. Two punctures.
On a twenty-hour event a puncture is not dramatic in itself, a few minutes, a tube, and you are gone. Two is another matter. It is not really the lost time: the gap between my 19 hours 15 of riding and my 20 hours 29 of racing shows I stopped for barely over an hour in total, resupplies included. It is the rhythm that breaks. You cool down, you set off below your pace, you spend ten kilometres finding your legs again, and meanwhile the race moves on ahead.
I finished fourth. Second and third were not far, without those two stops, the podium was there. First place, though, was out of reach, and there is nothing to argue about: some days, someone simply rides harder than you.
The gorges, then the Coiron#
The final part of the route drops due south to the edge of the Gard, then comes back up through the Ardèche gorges. That is the low point of the race, 55 metres above sea level, 1,434 metres below the Mézenc I had crossed that same morning. The gorges at night, with a light, are a strange thing: you sense enormous cliffs without ever seeing them, you hear water below, and the road winds through total darkness.
Then the Coiron plateau remains, to get back to Privas, one last basalt climb you would gladly have done without at kilometre 460.
I finished at 4:43 in the morning, after 20 hours and 29 minutes of racing, an average moving speed of 25.4 km/h and 13,792 calories. The format advertised 500 kilometres and 10,000 metres of climbing; my watch counted 490 and 8,509. On this kind of terrain, the gap between a barometer and a theoretical profile is a constant nobody is surprised by any more.
What I take from it#
Not the result, honestly. A fourth place lost to two punctures files under things that happen, alongside a wild boar on a descent in Picardy.
What stays with me is the Ardèche. A département I had never ridden in full, which in twenty hours showed me a high plateau, a mountain range, the Cévennes, a set of gorges and a volcanic plateau. Few places offer that much variety in a single loop. You simply have to accept riding it without stopping in order to see all of it.