A year ago I did not know what this Etape thing was. Now I feel like a veteran, thrilled to get a silver medal...

I had some thoughts of my own chosen from many fond recollections.

Never use a budget airline within 36 hours of the Etape. They just dump you. After six months minimum commitment of body and soul, it is scary to think you may never get there. At Stansted there were grown men crying in the departure lounge when they announced the cancellation of the flight to Biarritz.

Don't go too fast at the start, they say. However, that first uncontrolled 30 minutes was in many ways the greatest. Perhaps the nearest thing for a newcomer to real Tour madcap racing.

Do not eat French apricots. They blow you up like a balloon.

Be prepared to lose your sunglasses. The roads were strewn with them. When I lost my own in the last third of the race, I knew I could never turn back with the prospect of adding those few extra metres to the course.

Temper what you read in the press with realism. The cycling press ran a preview of the course undertaken by their own reporters which described the last 60 kilometres into the finish at Bayonne as "fairly flat and straightforward". They probably are if you are in a rental car, which is where I think the judgment was most likely formed, but how untrue. Conversely, Velo magazine predicted that on the climb at Mouguerre within three kilometres of the finish many would be walking as an alternative to abandoning. How right they were. As they put it, at 2.1 kilometres and 7% - that's a Larrau.