I’m doing ironman france this june and was wondering how substantial 1800m of climbing would be. Is this a lot? What can it be compared to?
Riding over a 600 story building?
I did the IsoStar Nice Triathlon in 2004 which may use some of the same bike course as Ironman France. You will want to research this in detail to confirm if the information I am providing is relevant to your race.
I cannot verify if this is actionable intelligence on the current race. I can verify it is accurate about the previous (2004) course.
The climb known as the Col de Vence is the primary climb. It is a long and difficult climb by any standards, a Category 2 climb that has been used in mountain stages of the Tour de France and other other international caliber stage races.
I was on the Col de Vence for about an hour, all climbing. I used a 34/25 gear (compact crank on a 10 speed Campagnolo drivetrain). My gearing choice was well suited for my fitness/ability level at the time. I passed over 300 riders up the Col de Vence and lost about 100 places on the descent. The descent is harrowing. One section features 6 switchbacks in 3 kilometers- it is extremely steep and twisting. One rider who has won the Tour de France three times told me that was the most difficult descent he has ever done. At the bottom my hands ached from holding my brakes.
The climb- and the course I did- are spectacular nonetheless. It is (was) an incredible course. I wrote this about it two years ago:
"
I don’t know the name of the road, I can’t speak French and I passed the sign at over 35 M.P.H. so I couldn’t read it anyway. Unloading off the final climb in the 2004 Isostar Nice Triathlon in Nice, France I traced a ballistic trajectory through the alpine corners from apex to apex. They are narrow and dangerous. I am a poor descender. Complete concentration. Around one bend the road was littered with victims of a mishap. A European ambulance horn beeped and wailed up the canyon in the distance. They flashed by in a blur; one man’s face, streaked in blood. Toward the bottom I glanced down on a river, hurtled into the valley and shot across the flats to a widening road. The course dumped me down a freeway on-ramp. I was on an empty freeway headed back to the Riviera. They had closed an entire freeway for us to race on. Only in France. I was with three men, none spoke English. Racing down into the yawning maw of a two-story high underground freeway tunnel, the longest in France, we would complete the final miles underground on a bike course that already crossed over the tops of two mountain passes. We were swallowed by darkness. Once inside the tunnel we became projectiles. The coastal wind fed the tunnel like exploding gunpowder pushing human bullets along a three mile rifle barrel. Like cannon shells accelerating along their rifling grooves our velocity accumulated; 28 M.P.H., 30 M.P.H., 35 M.P.H. It was effortless. And it was oddly isolated; just three other racers and I in the closing miles of the bike headed back toward T2 to begin the idyllic run along the most beautiful coastline in Europe, the Cote d’ Azur, on the French Riviera. The strange acoustics in the dark tunnel amplified every mechanical whir and whiz. Between my sunglasses and the dark tunnel I was a human bullet traveling toward the blinding gold light at the muzzle.
And then we surfaced.
The underground freeway tunnel canted abruptly upward and we rocketed into blinding sunshine on the spectacular coastline. The noise hit us like running into a white marble wall. There must have been 100,000 of them, and they were all screaming for us. The roar was deafening. Women in bikinis, people with white dogs. Men in dashing, light colored suits and rakish sunglasses, spectators dressed in sports clothes and bathing costumes. And there were the cameras. When we burst from the dark tunnel up into the burning French sunlight a hundred cameras hit us. In under a second I had my photo taken more times than in the entire previous year. After the oddly quiet tunnel the eruption into sunlight and exaltation was so powerful it startled me. I felt an adrenaline infusion like never in my life. They screamed at us, “Allez, ALLEZ!” The coast opened up to a brilliant, crystalline Mediterranean. The road along the Promenade Des Anglais was flanked by crowd barriers and behind them the spectators were three deep for miles. Welcome, My Friend, back to Nice. It is time to run."
1800m is nothing to sneeze at, for a triathlon
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This is a bit like going into a Ferrari dealer and asking how much for the red one… if you have to ask… 
similar to what LP, Kona and Roth have…the difference is that you’re not making up any time on the downhills, because there are a lot of technical downhills.
Nice seems like a very technical course. I saw the highlights on tv last year, and not one of the pros was using bar-end shifters. All had dropbars with clip-ons. And yeah it is hilly, but you knew that.
similar to what LP, Kona and Roth have…the difference is that you’re not making up any time on the downhills, because there are a lot of technical downhills.
Seriously? Kona has 5000 feet of climbing? LP? Who knew…
What should I use in terms of wheels? I have a pair of 909’s, but I’m not sure if I should use them. What about handlebars, drops or aero bars?
Tom, if you had a tri bike (bar-end shifters, steep, aero frame) and a road bike (mini aero bars, shallow, slightly lighter), which one would you choose for Nice? I can climb pretty well on my tri bike but I’m not too confident in my ability to handle a technical descent on it, because of the crappy brakes and the steep geometry. But on the other hand I’m 4 to 5% faster on a the tri bike, on a flat course.
My compliments to the Chef, You can cook up quit a story. Your word pictures put you in the middle of the decents and into the darkness of the tunnel. Great word play.