I'm Matt Dixon and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast.

The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential.

Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential.

The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.

Hi there, Matt Dixon, and we're going to call this day zero of our alt-route coverage.

Yes, here I am. I'm in Hotel Winstminster on the Promenade-D-Engle in Nice and literally just hours away from setting off on this adventure with 600 other cyclists,

800 kilometres of cycling through alt-route Alps. It's going to be, well, let's call it an adventure.

But it's been an adventure up to this point, I promise you.

The seven of us arrived from around the world into Geneva,

had a very nice dinner to welcome it,

but we were also met with the rain, torrential rain.

So we decided to crack on.

We skipped out on our planned early morning ride,

and instead we started to venture on down to Nice.

Of course that involved quite a bit of packing of the van.

Seven big guys plus Ian, our support vehicle and team from Lefuga.

We got into that van, seven bikes, luggage for 20 because of course we always have to over pack,

and some rather sweaty

men as well. It was a little bit cramped, but it was all good, seven or eight hours heading

down to the cot d'horsal. But of course, us being so paranoid about our hydrationals, we cracked

on and we had rather too many pee stops along the way, of course, dragging the journey

out a little bit as we went.

...