By MICHAEL BARRY (written in 2009 but still very relevant to today)
GIRONA, Spain - A coach once told me, "Go until you see Jesus." Another told me, "Pedal until you taste blood." Everybody in the Tour de France will suffer; the winner will probably be the one who is prepared to suffer the most.
In Brest, 189 of the world's best cyclists are cooped up in small French hotels, anxiously awaiting the start of the race Saturday. They have been preparing to suffer for the past six months.
That suffering includes climbing some of the highest paved roads in the Alps and Pyrenees and covering inhumane distances under the summer sun. Many will crash and push on despite being covered in road rash. At night, their leg muscles will be so tired that it will be painful to climb the stairs in their hotels.
The riders arrived in Brest three days before the start of this year's Tour. They will undergo final medical checks to ensure they are not doped. Each rider's blood and urine are taken, analyzed and controlled. The Tour de France doctors run additional medical tests similar to a general practitioner's checkup. This medical session is attended by the news media and seems to be held more for the photo opportunities than for medical reasons.
Once the tests are completed, competitors will sit in their hotel rooms, with their legs up, surfing the Internet, reading, watching television and moving as little as possible. Their training has been done and now they simply rest, eat and ride their bikes without intensity. They can only harm their fitness by tiring themselves out.
In the last two months, I have been training and racing with my Team Columbia teammates as they prepared for the Tour de France. As the spring faded in late May and the summer sun began burning the lush Catalan countryside around Girona, our rides intensified as we began climbing into the high Pyrenees often riding tightly in the draft of a scooter to simulate the speeds of a race.
Training is about race simulation; we ride routes similar to those we will be racing, adding intervals of intense, heart rate elevating bursts over specific periods of time or distances. During the intervals, we push our bodies close to the maximum, to where we can feel the pain we will feel in a race.
When I was a child, my grandfather scolded my mother for allowing me to push myself to exhaustion on a bike. Once, as I sat on a curb on the other side of the finish line, unable to speak, breathing hard and seeing stars because of low blood-sugar levels, he said it was inhumane that she allowed me to get my heart rate so high and called my panting unhealthy. To me, it was natural. It was what cyclists did, and riding was my passion. Now, as a professional, my job is suffering.
To monitor our efforts, clamped to our handlebars are small computers that measure all of the essential parameters, at least for a cyclist: time, the power output of our legs measured in watts, speed, distance, and heart rate. The daily training sessions last from three to seven hours, we ride over several 5 to 20 kilometer-long mountain passes and cover between 90 and 200 kilometers in total. The distances are often less than some days in the Tour. But the time on the bike is similar because the draft created by a pack of nearly 200 means that it moves much faster than a small group of riders.
The key to training well for the Tour de France is not only to train hard enough that the body is fit, but more important, to train it to recover from near daily racing and not collapse from exhaustion before the three-week race is over. If a cyclist is overtrained, his fitness will fade. But if he is not fit enough, he will be unable to tolerate the speeds in the first
week of racing and will head home early.
Cycling overtakes a professional cyclist's life. We become obsessed with food, rest and fitness. We rarely walk more than a couple of blocks and when we do need to walk, we saunter slowly, our aching leg muscles feeling heavy and tight from riding most of the day. If we stop walking, we sit, taking the pressure off our legs to allow them to recover.
Our muscles are so specialized that we feel our weaknesses when making any effort other than pedaling the bike. Our arms, virtually useless on a bike, have become skin on bone with tiny muscles, which makes lifting our children a chore.
When we are not on our bikes, we are conserving energy for the next day's efforts. A professional cyclist is like a Formula One racecar: useless for anything except what it has been prepared to do.
We strive to maximize our efficiency. Every gram of food consumed is burned, so whenever possible, we rest, even while we race, dosing our efforts with prudence. We sit in the draft of other cyclists, not sticking our noses in the wind to save energy. Riders who do not are considered foolish. We save energy by wearing aerodynamic clothing and by riding with aerodynamic wheels and frames. We toss our water bottles before the final run toward the finish line to lighten our weight, saving more energy. Everything we do, everything we wear and every tool we use was made to maximize efficiency. Energy saving equals endurance.
Despite the massive workloads on long training rides, with thousands of calories burned, a Tour de France cyclist watches everything he eats in the months before the race to slim down so that his muscles are lean without a scrap of fat to weigh him down on the climbs. Ideally, they will aim to be between 5 and 8 percent fat.
Food is our fuel. While we must consume many calories, they must be the right calories. At the Tour de France, most teams include a chef to provide the riders with good, well-cooked food. Team Columbia has a German chef that specializes in cooking for elite athletes; he makes a variety of foods not normally found in hotels in rural France, like oat burgers, quinoa and whole grain rice. Eating a lot of white pasta for three weeks becomes unappetizing; the easiest way to keep cyclists happy and healthy is to provide them with a range of food.
Many of the teams' sponsors introduce their new equipment at the Tour to gain maximum exposure. The riders will need to adjust their new bikes and other gear to fit properly in the days before the race to ensure the fit is right to avoid injury, as riding a poorly fitting bike is like wearing a shoe that is too small, only worse.
The riders have each raced roughly 80 days a year for the last 10 years yet they still sit in the hotel rooms with the same nervousness they felt when they first took a start line. They have prepared, yet there is always the fear of the unknown. In the Tour, they will never cross the same road twice, they will sleep in a different bed on most nights, the weather can change
from sun to snow in a day, they may fall ill, or they may crash. All they can do is wait, hope and pray that they have prepared well enough to make it to the finish in Paris.
Michael Barry is a professional cyclist and author of "Inside the Postal Bus: My Ride With Lance Armstrong and the U.S. Postal Cycling Team" (VeloPress) and "Fitness Cycling" (Human Kinetics Publishers).
