Although there’s no minimising the challenge ahead, there are a few ways in which being on tour may actually feel easier than life at home. For one thing, your only job for those three weeks is to ride your bike – and to do whatever’s needed to keep the show on the road, such as sleeping, stretching and eating large quantities of food. Everyone around you is either doing the same thing, or dedicated to supporting your efforts. There are far fewer competing demands than when you were trying to balance your training around family commitments and a full-time job.

Inevitably, when you’re on your own in the last throws of training, it’s easy to become preoccupied with the worries of “will I make it to Paris” or “am I fast enough” – and because of these very natural concerns, you don’t anticipate the support, encouragement or shared moments of pain and joy which are as much the experience as the physical kilometres cycled. We think a lot about the feel of the event and there are obvious, and less obvious, things we do to make sure that every rider experiences the positive, joyous feel of riding with us.

We talk about the camaraderie a lot – and what a difference it makes. It’s easy to gloss over the word or be a bit skeptical when you read it in blogs like this! But in contrast to a lot of your training miles, for three weeks you get to enjoy French sunshine, and the company of a fun, diverse, interesting, brilliant bunch of riders and staff. There will always be people to chat to, wheels to follow, and solidarity in your difficult moments, from people who know exactly what you’re going through. It’s not a throwaway word for us; the camaraderie is a huge part of Le Loop and we want everyone to experience our very special bubble.

“I cannot say just how incredible all the staff are, how brilliant the ethos and culture is, and how that manifests itself in how quickly and deeply the group gel together and act as a community. “Friends for life” is an overused expression, however is genuinely applicable to those I’ve met through Le Loop”

Most riders will have a bad day at some point, and there’s no saying when yours might arrive. For some it comes early on, as their body comes to terms with the reality of back-to-back stages and inadequate recovery time. For others it will be the result of a poor night’s sleep, or the third mountain stage in a row. But quite often the toughest riding days come a just before the first rest day – which is why we advise riders not to push too hard during the first few stages, difficult though that may be when you’re in the best shape of your life.

The second week is when riders start to talk about ‘the bubble’. By now the rest of the world feels far away, and life is measured out in the distance between feed stops. Time behaves differently on Le Loop. The days are long, and so much happens to you between leaving one hotel room and collapsing into the next, that you often find yourself recalling a conversation you had before lunch, and thinking “surely that was last week, not just this morning?”

By this point you’re astonished by how much you’re able to eat, and you’ve developed an unreasonable fondness for at least one staff member (Coffee Ian, in many cases). You’ve got so used to following Le Loop’s yellow arrows during the day, that you see them in your dreams. The Tour de France itself has started, and even though the Tour of Tours isn’t the exact same route as the pros, we’ll pass through many of the same locations and you’ll see France come alive with everything cycling related (including Tour jersey bunting which springs up absolutely everywhere!).

It’s a surreal experience knowing that you’re riding a full Tour with real Tour de France stages, knowing that the pros doing the same thing in the same country at the same time.

The curious intimacy you’ve found with your fellow riders starts to become normal, and you find yourself having conversations you never would in everyday life. Sometimes these are absurd, such as when you find yourself developing obscure in-jokes, or enquiring about the progress of each other’s saddle sores. But in many cases riders build up a level of mutual trust that means they feel safe to discuss big life issues that they’d normally keep hidden. As well as helping each other with the challenge at hand, riders quite regularly end up sharing their deepest traumas and vulnerabilities, and many say afterwards that these conversations brought them comfort and clarity they weren’t expecting.

By the third week it’s hard to imagine what’s outside the bubble – and yet, lingering at the back of your mind, is the knowledge that the end is drawing nigh, and your return to real life is imminent. But nevertheless, each stage is such a huge challenge in itself, that even with just a couple of days to go, Paris still seems lightyears away.

Everyone is very tired by this point, but many riders are still in their element, some seem to have got stronger since the first week, and you sometimes catch yourself thinking “hang on, this is easy now.” There are other moments when it all feels too much, and you want to give up then and there – but by now you’ve survived a few of these wobbles and know they won’t last.

You’ve developed strong opinions about the layout of French breakfast buffets and have a post-ride routine that you can carry out in your sleep. (On some days this will be necessary.) Daily gossip centres round who has the best tan lines, and whether there will be Orangina at feed stop four.

By this point most riders don’t even remember what it was they were afraid of before the start. Those who were worried about being slow will have got over that – whether or not they actually are slow – and learned that there is no hierarchy on the road. Most will have found out that riding Le Loop is even harder than they expected it to be, but that they are equal to the challenge, and have more in them than they realised. Everyone’s perspective has changed by this point, and rather than the daunting prospect of riding for three weeks, the focus is more simple; reaching the next feed stop, making it up the next climb, or surviving to the end of the day.