How arduous is the Tour de France?

Watching the Tour de France from the consolation of your individual house, many people have questioned if it might be potential to experience the race ourselves. The world’s finest cyclists at peak health could make it look virtually too straightforward at instances, which might result in a skewed notion of how arduous the Tour de France truly is. 

Obviously, deep down, we’re all conscious that the race is light-years away from a Sunday espresso experience along with your native biking membership, in any other case, we’d all be lining up initially. But whenever you watch the likes of Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) powering up an Alp, it’s arduous to not really feel impressed. 

It’s not an enormous logical leap to then surprise how we’d evaluate, and whether or not we might sustain with the professional peloton. Any bike owner who’s aware of energy numbers resembling watts per kilo, FTP, and many others, will doubtless have puzzled in some unspecified time in the future how their numbers would stack up compared with Wout Van Aert and co. 

The query on all our lips is: precisely how arduous is the Tour de France? Spoiler alert: it’s arduous. Very arduous. Of course it’s arduous, it’s the Tour de France, arguably the head of any professional rider’s profession. What we actually wish to know is ‘how arduous?’ 

Over the course of this text, we are going to attempt to quantify simply that: how arduous the professionals work in the course of the three-week race and evaluate that, roughly talking, with the efforts we mere mortals are able to.

To offer you significant solutions, we dived into race highway books from the previous couple of editions of the race, dug by means of the ability information of among the riders to try to fathom their efforts, together with looking at their restoration information to gauge the relative pressure that their our bodies endure. Then, we gathered knowledge from most of the people – ‘regular’ cyclists resembling you and I – in an try to realize some perspective on the distinction. 

 The terrain 

At its shut, the riders within the 2021 Tour de France coated 3,414 kilometres (2,121 miles) – not together with the driving they did on the 2 relaxation days. The 2022 version of the race was truly ever so barely shorter with a complete of three,328km (2067 miles) of racing. 

Put plainly, should you had been to get in a automobile in New York and head west, that’d get you so far as Salt Lake City. If you had been to get onto a airplane in London, you possibly can get to Paris and again once more 5 instances. If you had been in Australia you’d make it from Melbourne proper over to Perth on the western coast.

Throughout this distance, riders face a complete host of climbs, from small hills to monumental mountain passes. For the 2023 version this yr, riders will cowl 3,404km (2,115 miles) together with ascents of the Puy de Dôme and the Grand Colombier within the Pyrenees.

According to knowledge printed to Strava by Tour debutant Tom Pidcock (Ineos Grenadiers), within the 17 phases main as much as his spectacular Stage 18 victory atop Alpe D’Huez final yr, he had ascended a complete of 43,110m. That’s virtually 5 instances the peak of Mount Everest. 

In addition, whereas it is simple and apparent to deal with the issue of going uphill, there is a stage of problem concerned in coming down the opposite aspect too. 

For us common Janes and Joes, coming downhill may seem to be the straightforward half – you may usually cease pedalling and easily let gravity do the work – however let’s not overlook these riders are in a race so will likely be sprinting out of corners and pushing the boundaries of physics to go as shortly as potential, which in itself takes an infinite quantity of psychological vitality and focus. 

As an instance of this, based on that very same knowledge from Pidock, the utmost pace he hit throughout Stage 18 of final yr’s Tour was 62.7mph (100.91km/h). Stage 18 will lengthy be remembered particularly for the jaw-dropping descent of the Col Du Galibier that Pidcock executed on the best way to a solo win atop Alpe D’Huez. Although he truly clocked his most pace in a while within the stage on the descent of the Croix de Fer / Glandon. He additionally hit an enormous most cadence of 200rpm in the course of the stage. Descending like this takes a considerable amount of ability and focus, it’s arduous to start to think about the quantity of focus this requires and the cognitive load it creates. 

The coaching

The Tour de France is ridden by the world’s finest highway cyclists, all of whom are full-time professionals that experience for round 20 to 30 hours per week. But wait, earlier than you stop your nine-to-five job and begin biking all day, know that these riders aren’t simply driving their bike for enjoyable, they’re finishing extremely tailor-made structured coaching packages designed by among the finest physiologists and coaches on this planet. 

Sadly, even when we did have that experience at our disposal, most of us nonetheless could not stop the day job, as a result of skilled cyclists are additionally blessed with the correct mix of genetic potential that permits them to answer such a excessive coaching stimulus and get better shortly sufficient to go once more the subsequent day, day after day, week after week. 

To try to quantify this, we reached out to TrainerRoad – a preferred training-based indoor biking app turned all-around coaching platform that boasts a dataset of over one million customers – to get a way of the quantity of structured coaching that the ‘common’ bike owner tackles. 

According to TrainerRoad’s knowledge, a median ‘newbie bike owner’ performs 3.53 hours of structured coaching per week, cut up at 3.61 hours for males and three.06 hours for ladies. While ‘skilled cyclists’ carry out 6.43 hours per week (6.5 hours for males, 5.46 for ladies). 

What this implies is that your common newbie is performing simply 10% of the coaching hours of a Tour de France bike owner. 

The time minimize

To full the Tour de France, you can’t merely decide to ending the route, you will want to take action inside the constraints of a time minimize on every stage. 

According to rule 2.6.032 of the UCI rulebook, precisely what that point minimize will likely be is outlined as follows: 

“The ending deadline shall be set within the particular rules for every race in in accordance with the traits of the stage.

“In distinctive instances solely, unpredictable and of power majeure [unforeseeable circumstances], the commissaires panel could prolong the ending cut-off dates after session with the organisers.”

So in layman’s phrases, the organisers will determine the time minimize based mostly on the issue of the stage. We will not go into the small print of how they then calculate it, however relying on the issue of the stage and the tempo of the quickest rider, it should often be the winner’s time plus something between 4% and 18%.

To flip that into an instance, if a stage took the winner precisely 4 hours to finish, the time minimize can be anyplace between 9m36s and 43m12s later. 

It was a hotly mentioned subject final yr, with sprinter Fabio Jakobsen combating on each mountain stage, and particularly on Stage 17, the place he pushed himself to the very restrict to make the time minimize by a mere 15 seconds. 

This primarily signifies that to finish the Tour de France, it’s good to not solely end the route, you want to have the ability to achieve this inside a share of the winner’s time, which leads us properly onto pace. 

The pace

In making an attempt to work out how arduous the Tour de France truly is, you will have to know what pace you will want to have the ability to experience with the intention to sustain. The 2022 version of the Tour was the quickest within the race’s historical past. The common pace of winner Jonas Vingegaard for the 21-stage race set a brand new document at 42.03km/h (26.12mph)

Combining each version of the Tour since 2007, the common tempo of the winner has been 40.07km/h (24.89mph). Anyone who has ridden a neighborhood time trial will know that it is troublesome to take care of this tempo for 10 miles, not to mention the 2000-plus miles coated within the Tour. 

However, after all, anybody who’s ridden in a gaggle will even know that there is an infinite profit from being within the draft. That is, after all, till the highway factors up and gravity does its finest to sluggish you down. 

After Ben O’Connor’s victory into Tignes on stage 9 of the 2021 Tour, we analysed his efficiency and noticed simply how robust the AG2R Citroën rider needed to be to win a stage of the Tour de France. The remaining climb on this stage was Montée de Tignes, which is 31.1km lengthy with a median gradient of 4.1%. This climb took O’Connor 1 hour and 12 minutes, throughout which he rode at a median pace of 26kph (16.15mph), naturally taking the Strava KOM alongside the best way.

But even should you’re not vying for a win, and also you’re merely making an attempt to make it to the end line inside the time minimize, you will nonetheless want to take care of a really excessive tempo. In 2020, Roger Kluge completed on the very backside of the GC standings, at 6:07:02 behind Tadej Pogačar’s successful time of 87:20:13. With that, Kluge nonetheless maintained a median pace of 39.09km/h (24.29mph).

The energy

A generally used and broadly understood evaluation of a rider’s means is FTP, or Functional Threshold Power, which is alleged to be the utmost quantity of energy {that a} rider can maintain for an hour. It is commonly examined with a sustained 20-minute effort, with the common energy from this effort multiplied by 0.95.

Measured in watts, this may be quoted in an absolute determine, or in ‘watts per kilogram’ the place absolutely the determine is split by the rider’s weight. So for instance, a 75kg rider with an absolute FTP of 300 watts would have a weight-adjusted FTP of 4w/kg. 

In our evaluation of O’Connor’s knowledge, we calculated his absolute FTP to be 395 watts, and based on ProCyclingStats, his weight is 67kg, that means he boasts an FTP of 5.89w/kg.

Similarly, in the course of the 2020 Tour, we analysed the ability file of Tadej Pogačar after his record-breaking ascent of the Col de Peyresourde and calculated his FTP to be 410 watts, or 6.2w/kg. 

To evaluate this to a median bike owner, we went again to TrainerRoad, who provided the common FTP of its whole database.

• Male rookies, the common FTP sits at 214 watts (2.81w/kg)
• Experienced male cyclists, the common jumps to 271 watts (3.75w/kg)
• Female rookies, the common FTP sits at 146 watts (2.45w/kg)
• Experienced feminine cyclists, the common jumps to 189 watts (3.25w/kg)
• All newbie cyclists mixed, the common FTP sits at 204 watts (2.75w/kg)
• All skilled cyclists mixed, the common FTP sits at 266 watts (3.72w/kg)

That means Pogacar’s 410w FTP is greater than 50% higher than the common skilled bike owner (266w), and greater than double that of the common newbie bike owner (204w).

Of course, past this easy metric, there are loads of different components at play too. Not least fatigue resistance, which is the flexibility to output the identical excessive energy numbers on the finish of a protracted day or on the finish of three weeks of back-to-back racing. 

For his ascent of Montée de Tignes in 2021, O’Connor wanted to place out a median of 345 watts (5.1w/kg) for the 1h12 length, on a day the place, in complete, he averaged 311 watts (4.6w/kg) for over 4.5 hours. 

And for Pogačar’s ascent of the Col de Peyresourde in 2020, which got here on stage 8, he averaged 429 watts (6.7w/kg) for 24h08 on the finish of a four-hour stage that included three mountains. 

For a reference of simply how good that is, anybody who’s hung out racing on Zwift could also be aware of the 5 Zwift Power classes (A+, A, B, C and D). A+ is the best right here, and to get your self into this class, you will want an FTP of 4.6 W/kg.  

The vitality

To preserve all this effort, a rider must eat. So much. 

Going again to Tom Pidcock and including up his calorie expenditure as much as stage 18 throughout final yr’s race, the Brit had burnt a complete of 59,609 energy. That’s the equal of about 232 McDonald’s Big Macs. 

So how arduous is it for the skilled riders?

By now we’ve a fairly good concept of simply how arduous the Tour de France is, however these are skilled athletes, they’re the perfect highway racing cyclists on this planet and that is their job. So whereas it could be an unimaginable process for us mere mortals to even take into account getting spherical, absolutely it is simply one other day on the workplace for them. Not precisely. 

To quantify this, we reached out to Whoop, sponsor to EF Education-EasyPost, and makers of a wearable wrist strap that makes use of an optical coronary heart price sensor to repeatedly monitor coronary heart price and coronary heart price variability to quantify varied metrics. 

For these serious about how this works, Dr Stephanie Shell, a Senior Physiologist specialising in restoration on the Australian Institute of Sport defined the science a bit extra as a part of our Whoop 3.0 evaluation however put merely, it makes use of these metrics to allocate a ‘pressure’ and ‘restoration’ rating. Both are calculated utilizing proprietary Whoop algorithms, and pressure is scored out of 21, whereas restoration is scored as a share out of 100. 

Whoop duly shared knowledge for quite a few its riders on varied phases within the 2021 race. The most full of those datasets is for time trialling specialist Stefan Bissegger. 

Looking at his knowledge, we’re capable of see how these algorithms price the issue of Bissegger’s days compared to his personal baseline, thus quantifying how arduous the times should be for Bissegger himself. 

The knowledge right here is threefold, protecting pressure, restoration, and sleep efficiency knowledge. 

Across the 9 phases for which we’ve knowledge, Bissegger did not have a day with a pressure rating under 17.4, with all of phases 9 to 13 scoring above 20 out of 21. This means that even for him, racing the Tour de France put his physique by means of excessive pressure. 

Alongside this, his restoration ranged broadly. His lowest rating was 30%, along with his highest being 81%. 

Conclusion

All in all, it is secure to conclude that the Tour de France is really brutal in its problem. It’s effectively in extra of the capabilities of most of the people and nonetheless past the attain of skilled, educated cyclists. Even for lots of the skilled athletes who begin the Tour de France, truly ending it’s an altogether completely different proposal, and every year, dozens of riders miss the time minimize. 

For those that do make it to Paris, it is nonetheless proper on the higher limits of their functionality and that is what makes it such an exhilarating sport for us viewers to eat.