VentouxMan: Course, Elevation & Route Profile

Course & Elevation

The day starts and ends in the same place. The Lac de Monteux sits at about thirty metres above sea level on the Vaucluse plain: you swim two laps there, the single transition zone stands there, and you finish there after three laps of the same lake. In between, the bike loop runs out through vineyards and villages to the foot of Mont Ventoux, climbs the Bédoin side onto the bare, entirely unsheltered summit ridge and comes back down over Malaucène and the Col de la Chaîne into the same plain.

Two rules shape this race more than any gradient does. Drafting is forbidden on the bike, so you ride the flat approach and the flat run-in alone, into whatever wind there is. And you ride on open roads under normal traffic law, keeping right both uphill and downhill: the Ventoux is not a closed race circuit on this day. In return the clock stops for the descent, and a cutoff on the bike can end your day before the run has even started.

Two contingencies are part of the design. If the swim is cancelled, the race becomes a duathlon opening with a nine-kilometre running loop, and if weather or the authorities rule out the ascent, a replacement course of comparable distances is used. The mountain has already forced the whole event to be called off once. Entries across all formats are capped at 2,000, and the long-distance winners include former professional cyclists alongside triathletes.

Pacing Strategy

Distributing the effort across this day is easier to describe than to do. The 2 km swim costs little time and should cost little energy. Then come flat kilometres to the foot of the mountain, which you ride alone anyway because drafting is banned. That is exactly where most people overspend, because the plain feels fast and the climb still feels far away.

The race is decided on the Ventoux, and by how much you spend there rather than how fast you get to the top. Ride the climb as one long, even and deliberately conservative effort. Because the timing is neutralised on the descent, it is the one free window of the day: eat, drink, dress, ride under control. Treating it as a race section adds risk and buys nothing.

The real trap comes afterwards. The last flat bike kilometres and the lakeside run offer not one gradient to hide an empty tank behind, and the run begins in the hottest part of the afternoon. Judge your race by the legs you carry into T2, not by the time showing at the top.

Training plan for VentouxMan: 12-week build

Expect seven to ten hours of racing. The demand is unusually mixed: a short, aerobically calm swim, then hours of flat solo riding in the endurance range with one near-threshold climb of close to an hour buried in the middle, and finally a flat run on empty legs. Training only long, or only hard, covers half of that.

The key session is therefore the chain, not the parts. Build in two or three simulations that put an open-water swim, a long ride with a climb in the middle and a flat run of 45 to 75 minutes back to back. The order is what matters: running flat after a lot of climbing feels nothing like running flat after flat riding.

Fuelling is a training topic of its own. There are only four aid stations across the 104 bike kilometres with the mountain in the middle, and eight more once you are on the run. You carry most of the bike leg yourself, and you have to be able to eat on the descent when nothing goes down on the climb. Practise exactly that on long mountain rides.

Conditions: the loop spans thirty metres at the lake to over 1,800 metres on a bare, wind-exposed summit ridge and back down, with heat low down and wind and cold up top. With only one transition zone, everything you need up there travels with you from the lake, so solve that in training rather than on race morning. And swim in a lake, not only in a pool: two open-water laps with sighting are a different task from 2,000 metres in a lane.