How hard is the Tour de France?
We look at power, speed, calories, recovery, fuelling, du✃rability, sweat data and more to compare a Tour de France rider's efforts to those of an everyday cyclist
Watching the Tour de France from the comfort of your own home, many of us have questioned if it'd be possible to ride the race ourselves. The world's best cyclists at peak fitness can make it look almost too easy at times, which could lead to a skewed perception of how hard the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tour de France really is.
Deep down, we are all very well aware that the race is light-years away from a Sunday coffee ride with your local cycling club; otherwise, we’d all be lining up at the start. But when you watch the likes of 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) powering up 𝄹an Alp, it’s hard not to feel inspiredཧ.
It's a logical step to then wonder how we might compare, and whether we could keep up with the pro peloton, especially on those easy sprint days when the commentators continually remind us they're "taking it easy." Any cyclist who is familiar with power numbers such as watts per kilo, FTP, and so on, will likely have wondered at some point how their numbers would stack up when compared with 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Wout Van Aert and co.
The questions on our minds often boil down to just one: How hard is the Tour de France𝔉?
Spoiler alert: it’s hard. Very hard. Of course it’s hard, it’s the Tour de France, arguably the ✃pinnacle of any pro rider’s career. What we really want to know is 'how hard?'
Over the course of this article, we will try to quantify just that: how hard the pros work during the three-✤week race and compare that, roughly speaking, 📖with the efforts we mere mortals are capable of.
To provide you with meaningful answers, we dived into race road books from the last few editions of the race, dug through the power files of some of the riders to try and fathom their efforts, along with taking a look at their recovery files to gauge the relative strain that their bodies endure. Then, we gathered data from the general public – ‘normal’ cyclists 🍷such as you and I – in an attempt to gain some perspective on the difference.
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The terrain
At its close, the riders in the 2021 Tour de France covered 3,💖414 kilometres (2,121 miles) – not including the riding they did on the two rest days. The 2022 edition of theꦬ race was actually ever so slightly shorter with a total of 3,328km (2067 miles) of racing.
Put plainlꦿy, if you were to get in a car in New York and head west, that'd get you as far as Salt Lake City. If you were to get onto a plane in London, you could get to Paris and back again five times. If you were in Australia you'd make it from Melbourne right over to Perth on the western coast.
Throughout this distance, riders face a whole host of climbs, from small hills to enormous mountain passes. Fo♈r the 202๊3 edition this year, riders will cover 3,404km (2,115 miles) including ascents of the Puy de Dôme and the Grand Colombier in the Pyrenees.
According to data published to Strava by Tour debutant 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tom Pidcock (Ineos Grenadiers), in the 17 stages leading up to his impressive Stage 18 victory atop Alpe D'Huez last year, he had ascended a total of 43,110m.✱ That's almost five times the height of Mount Everest.
In addition, while it's easy and obvious to focus on the difficulty🍬 of going uphill, there's a level of difficulty involved in coming down the other side too.
For us average Janes and Joes, coming downhill might seem like the easy pa🐼rt – you can often stop pedalling and simply let gravity do the work – but let's not for🥂get these riders are in a race so will be sprinting out of corners and pushing the limits of physics to go as quickly as possible, which in itself takes an enormous amount of mental energy and focus.
As an example of this, according to that same data from Pidock, the maximum speed he hit during Stage 18 of last year's Tour was 62.7mph (100.91km/h). Stage 18 will long be remembered in particular for the jaw-dropping desꦗcent of the Col Du Galibier that Pidco😼ck executed on the way to a solo win atop Alpe D'Huez. Although he actually clocked his maximum speed later on in the stage on the descent of the Croix de Fer / Glandon. He also hit a huge maximum cadence of 200rpm during the stageಞ. Descending like this takes a large amount of skill and concentration, it is hard to begin to imagine the amount of focus this requires and the cognitive load it creates.
The training
The Tour de France is ridden by the world's best roa🧸d cyclists, all of whom are full-time professionals that ride for around 20 to 30 hours per week. But wait, before you quit your nine-to-five job and start cycling all day, know that these riders aren't just riding their bike for fun, they are completing highly tailored structured training programs designed by some of the best physiologists 🔜and coaches in the world.
Sadly, even if we did have that expertise at our disposal, most of us still couldn't quit the day job, because professional cyclists are also blessed with the right mix of genetic potential that enables them to respond to such a high training stimulus and recover quickly enough to go again the next day, day after day, week after wꩵeek.
To try and quantify this, we reached out to – a popular training-based 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:indoor cycling app turned all-around training p𓃲latform that bo♔asts a dataset of over a million users – to get a sense of the amount of structured training that the 'average' cyclist tackles.
According to TrainerRoad's data, an average 'beginner cyclist' performs 3.53 hours of structured training perꦏ week, split at 3.61 hours for men and 3.06 hours for women. While 'experienced cyclists' perform 6.43 hours per week (6.5 hours for men, 5.46 for women).
What this means is that your average beginner is performꩲing just 10% of theꩲ training hours of a Tour de France cyclist.
The time cut
To complete the Tour de France, you cannot simply commit to finishing the route, you'll need to🧸 do so within the constraints of a time cut on each stage.
According to rule 2.6.032 of the UC𓄧I rulebook, exactly what that time cut♓ will be is defined as follows:
"The finishing deadline s൲hall be set in the specific regulations for each race in according with the characteristics of the stage.
“In exceptional cases only, unpredictable and of force majeure [unf🦩oreseeable circumstances], the commissaires panel may extend the finishing time limits after consultation with the organisers."
So in layman's terms, the organisers will decide the time cut based on the difficulty of the stage. We won't go into the details of how they then calculate it, but depending on the difficulty of the stage and the pace of the fastest rider, it will usually be the winner's time plus anything be♋tween 4% and 18%.
To turn that into an example, if a stage took the winner exactly four hours to♋ complete, the time cut would be anywhere💙 between 9m36s and 43m12s later.
It was a hotly discussed topic last year, with sprinter 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Fabio Jakobsen fighting on every mountain stage, and in particular on Stage 17, where he pushed himself to the very limit to 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:make the time cut by a mere 15 seconds.
This essentially means that to complete the Tour de France, you need to not✅ only finish the route, you need to be able to do so within a percentage of the winner's time, which leads us nicely onto speed.
The speed
In trying to work out how hard the Tour de France actually is, you will need to know what speed you'll need to be able to ride in order to keep up. The 2022 edition of the Tour was the fastest in the race's history. The average speed of winner 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Jonas Vingegaard for the 21-stage race set a🐟 new record at 42.03km/h (26.12mph)
Combining every edition of the Tour since 2007, the average pace of the winner has been 40.07km/h (24.89mph). Anyone who has ridden a local time trial will know that i꧂t's difficult to mai🥂ntain this pace for 10 miles, let alone the 2000-plus miles covered in the Tour.
However, of course,ꦆ anyone who's ridden in a group will also know that there's an enormous benefit from being in the draft. That is, of course, until the road points up and gravity does its best to slow you down🍷.
After Ben O'Connor's victory into Tignes on stage 9 of the 2021 Tour, we 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:analysed his performance and saw just how strong the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:AG2R Citroën rider had to be to wꦓin a stage of the Tour de France. The final climb on this stage was Montée de Tignes, which is 31.1km lon🐟g with an average gradient of 4.1%. This climb took O'Connor 1 hour and 12 minutes, during which he rode at an average speed of 26kph (16.15mph), naturally taking the Strava KOM along the way.
But even if you're not vying for a win, and you're simply trying to make it to the finish line within the time cut, you'll still need to maintain a very high pace. In 2020, Roger Kluge finished at the very bottom of the GC standings, at 6:07:02 behind Tadej Pogačar's winning time of 87:20:13. With that, Kluge still maintained an average speed of 39.09km/h (24.29mph).
The power
A commonly used and widely understood assessment of a rider's ability is FTP, or Functional Threshold Power, which is said to be the maximum amount of power that a rider can sustain for an hour. It is often tested with a sustained 20-minute effort, with the average power from this effort multiplied ♉b🦩y 0.95.
Measured in watts, this can b𒀰e quoted in an absolute figure, or in 'watts per kilogram' where the absolute figure is divided by the rider's weight. So for example, a 75kg rider with an absolute FTP of 300 watts would have a weight-adjusted🌠 FTP of 4w/kg.
In our analysi🏅s of O'Connor's data, we calculated hi🔴s absolute FTP to be 395 watts, and according to ProCyclingStats, his weight is 67kg, meaning he boasts an FTP of 5.89w/kg.
Similarly, during the 2020 Tour, we analysed the power 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 compare this to an average cyclist, we went back to TrainerRoad, who supplied the average FTP of its entire database💜.
- Male beginners, the average FTP sits at 214 watts (2.81w/kg)
- Experienced male cyclists, the average jumps to 271 watts (3.75w/kg)
- Female beginners, the average FTP sits at 146 watts (2.45w/kg)
- Experienced female cyclists, the average jumps to 189 watts (3.25w/kg)
- All beginner cyclists combined, the average FTP sits at 204 watts (2.75w/kg)
- All experienced cyclists combined, the average FTP sits at 266 watts (3.72w/kg)
That means Pogacar's 410w FTP is more than 50% better than the average experienced cyclist (266w), and more than double that of the average beginner cyclist (204w).
Of course, beyond this simple metric, there a🦂re a lot of other factors at play too. Not least fatigu⭕e resistance, which is the ability to output the same high power numbers at the end of a long day or at the end of three weeks of back-to-back racing.
For his ascent of Montée de Tignes in 2021, O'Connor needed to put out an average of 345 watts (5.1w/kg) for the 1h12 duration, on a day where, in tot🐼al, 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 came on stage 8, he averaged 429 watts (6.7w/kg) for 24h08 at the end of a four-hour stage that included three mountains.
For a reference of just how good this is, anyone who's spent time racing on Zwift may be familiar with the five Zwift Power categories (A+, A, B, C and D). A+ is the highest here, and to get yourself into 𓆏this category, you'll need an FTP of 4.6 W/kg.
The energy
To maintain♔ all this effort, a rider needs to eat. A lot.&nb🅰sp;
Going back to Tom Pidcock and adding up his calorie expenditure up to stage 18 during last year's race, the Brit had burnt a total of 59,609 calories. That's the equivalent of aꦯbout 232 McDonalꦉd's Big Macs.
So how hard is it for the professional riders?
By now we have a pretty good idea of just how hard the Tour de France is, but these are professional athletes, they're the best road racing cyclists in the world and this is their job. So while it might be an impossiblꦏe task for us mere mortals to even consider💯 getting round, surely it's just another day at the office for them. Not exactly.
To quantify this, we reached out to , sponsor to 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:EF Education-EasyPost, and makers of a wearable wrist strap that uﷺses an optical heart rate sensor to continuously monitor heart rate and heart rate variability to quantify various metrics.
For those interested in how this works, Dr Stephanie Shell, a Senior Physiologist specialising in recovery at the Australian Institute of Sport explained the science a little more as part of our 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Whoop 3.0 review but put simply, it uses these metrics to allocate a 'strain' and 'recovery' score. Both are calculated🐼 using proprietary Whoop algorithms, and strain is score𝐆d out of 21, while recovery is scored as a percentage out of 100.
Whoop duly shared data for a number of its riders on various stages in the 2021 race🃏. The most complete of these datasets is for time trialling specialist Stefan Bissegger.
Looking at his data, we're able to see how these algorithms rate the difficulty of Bissegger's days in comparison to his own baseline, thus 🍰quantifying how hard the days must be for Bissegger himself.
The data here is thr☂eefold, covering strain, recovery, and sleep performance data.
Across the nine stages for which we ꦿhave data, Bissegger♏ didn't have a day with a strain score below 17.4, with all of stages 9 to 13 scoring above 20 out of 21. This suggests that even for him, racing the Tour de France put his body through extreme strain.
Alongside this, his recovery ranged widely. Hi💖s lowest score was 30%, with his highest being 81%.
Conclusion
All in all, it's safe to conclude that the Tour de France is truly brutal in its difficult🦂y. It's well in excess of the capabilities of the general public and still beyond the reach of experienced, trained cyclists. Even for many of the professional athletes who start the Tour de France, actually finishing it is an altogether different proposal, and each year, dozens of riders miss the time cut.
For those who do make it to Paris, it's sti꧑ဣll right at the upper limits of their capability and that's what makes it such a thrilling sport for us viewers to consume.
