The Versailles bike course, on the day the race was canceled

Versailles was supposed to be the second of our three 70.3s in 2026, between Honu at the end of May and Redding in August, and we'd built the summer around it. We flew to France with the bikes, and then the French authorities canceled the race over the heat. Michelle has already written what that felt like on the Tri-Cities page, which is the race we found to put in its place, so I won't repeat it here except to say that we had trained for it, we had traveled for it, and we were standing in Versailles on race weekend with two bikes and nothing to do with them.

So on Sunday, July 12, the morning we would have been racing, we rode the bike course. All of it, or as close as we could follow it: about 56 miles by our watches, with a little over 2,400 feet of climbing, on the roads the race would have used through the countryside outside the palace. It took me about three hours and twenty minutes of riding and Michelle about three hours and forty, with stops to look at things, because there was nobody to beat and no run waiting at the end of it. The next morning we went for an easy run through Versailles, and that was the whole race week.

The video is the short version of the ride. It doesn't go on the ledger, because it wasn't a race and there is no timing sheet for two people riding a course on their own, but it was the closest thing to the race we were going to get, and I'm glad we did it instead of sitting in the hotel. Riding a 70.3 course with no swim in front of it and no half marathon behind it is a strange feeling. You know exactly what the day was supposed to cost, and the bike is the only part of it you get to pay.