L'Etape du Tour or 'a stage of the tour' - an opportunity for thousands of amateur road cyclists to experience, first-hand, one of the most legendary annual sporting events of the past 100 years - the Tour de France.
Each year, a different stage of the Tour is chosen to host the L'Etape, and well before the location of the stage is announced (usually a 100+ mile route featuring classic mountain climbs and descents in the Alps or Pyrenees) many of the 8500 participants will have already enthusiastically handed over the entry fee. It's likely that at least 30% of these enthusiastic participants wont make it to the finish (in fact some of them won't make it past the first climb).
So who are Kelly's Heroes (besides Clint Eastwood's band of enterprising WWII soldiers)? Well, it's the imaginative team name for a bunch of amateur - in some cases very amateur - cyclists from depths of Warwickshire and beyond. Basically, on the back of a sudden surge in enthusiasm for road biking amongst my work colleagues, I (I being Mark Kelly - see what we've done there?) suggested we enter L'Etape du Tour 2008.
The suggestion was half in jest, half in the hope that I could persuade others to accompany me on this folly (It's something i'd been thinking about for a while, but wasn't massively keen on entering by myself). Much to my surprise they all agreed, and so in August 2007, began the months of bike training, cyclosportives, lunchtime visits to the 'bike shop' and more importantly: un-ending 'big talk'.
