Elite Athletes Pedal 2,164 Miles, Just Don’t Ask Them to Walk
To preserve energy, Tour de France racers take steps to avoid taking steps
BY JOSHUA ROBINSON Wall Street Journal
LA TOUR-DU-PIN, France— Over the course of three weeks, this year’s Tour de France peloton pedals through 2,164
miles, five mountain ranges and more pain than most athletes can fathom. Simply surviving until the finish line in Paris is one of the sports world’s most grueling achievements.
But for cyclists who are among the planet’s hardest endurance athletes, one basic feat remains out of the question:
notching 10,000 steps in a day.
It’s not that Tour cyclists can’t. It’s that they won’t.
“Never walk—you’ll destroy your legs,” said Dutch rider Wout Poels, a member of four Tour-winning teams in past
years. “The Tour is hard enough.”
The modern fitness obsession of walking 10,000 steps daily is practically heresy to the fittest people in cycling.
They are so fixated on conserving enough energy to make it through 21 brutal stages that most won’t chalk up 10,000 steps the entire race.
Through the first 14 days of this year’s Tour, which finishes Sunday, Italian rider Alberto Bettiol, of Team
EF Education First, had covered some 1,646 miles on his bike—from the start in Nice, across France to the Pyrenees, and back to the foot of the Alps. He also took all of 3,274 steps, according to the smartphone he carries every waking moment off the bike.
That translates to roughly 1.6 walking miles, barely one-thousandth his distance on two wheels.
Mr. Bettiol’s American teammate, Neilson Powless, is almost as strict about self-enforced laziness between stages.
He is averaging around 800 steps every 24 hours, he said, on par with his numbers during the coronavirus lockdown. Except instead of padding around his apartment and watching Netflix the way the rest of us did, Mr. Powless is mixing it up in the world’s most
famous bike race.
He is simply applying a cardinal rule of professional cycling. “Don’t stand when you can sit, and don’t sit when
you can lie down,” he said. “That’s been ingrained in you since you first started.”
Ten thousand steps might seem arbitrary, dating back to a Japanese marketing campaign around the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
But modern wearable technology and smart-phone apps tout it as a healthy target for able-bodied folks of all ages. Twenty-something cyclists with minimal body fat and the cardiovascular systems of superheroes would disagree.
“If I go for a 30-minute walk with my girlfriend, when I get home I’ll probably be sore the next day,” said Stefan
Küng, a Swiss national champion on the Groupama-FDJ team. “We’re so focused on cycling that we do absolutely nothing else.”
So a typical Tour day is arranged entirely around minimizing time riders spend à pied. Their longest treks
are from hotel rooms to breakfast and then to the team bus, which pulls around to the hotel- entrance shadows to avoid a walk across a parking lot. Excess puttering around the hallways is frowned upon. Stairs are the enemy.
“If I was caught by a director walking around a hotel on a rest day, he would chase me back to my room and tell
me to lie down,” said Charly Wegelius, an ex-rider who is now the lead sports director for Team EF.
Once they reach a stage start, riders sit in plush reclining bus seats as long as possible until it is time to
warm up. They don’t stand again until after crossing the finish line, where seasoned pros cruise to the bus door and step inside without setting foot on the road.
“If you’re not riding your bike,” Mr. Poels said, “you just want to rest.”
What that rest should look like falls somewhere between exercise science and cycling witchcraft. French rider
Pierre-Luc Périchon said he sticks to the dogma that you should avoid leg-shaving before a hard stage—despite aerodynamic and other benefits— due to the crushing strain of standing in the shower five extra minutes.
That much is common in the peloton. Mr. Périchon goes further than most: He also avoids trimming his fingernails
outside of rest days. New growth, he is convinced, excites the nervous system and saps slightly more energy.
No one at the Tour will likely tell him any different. Teams are so fixated on giving riders every imaginable
advantage for recovery that they happily drag their own mattresses and pillows to nearly 20 different hotels around France so cyclists can sleep as they do at home.
The Groupama-FDJ outfit brought mobile cryotherapy chambers to the first week of the Tour.
The sport targets such specific muscle groups moving in such peculiar circles that Tour de France riders quickly
become useless at other daily activities.
Physiologists today suspect there are untold side effects to such targeted reconditioning of the human body.
The most severe consequence is declining bone density, according to a 2019 University of Mississippi study, in cases where cycling isn’t combined with more weight-bearing exercise, which can lead to osteoporosis.
Simply put, human beings aren’t made to ride bicycles instead of walking or running. The problem is that cycling’s
attitude about one of humanity’s defining abilities is too entrenched for pros to change.
“I’m not trying to win at being a human being,” veteran American rider Tejay van Garderen said. “I’m trying to
win at bike racing.”
Mr. Wegelius, the sports director, has often wondered whether a short morning walk might help riders gently wake
up their systems with some time outside and natural sunlight. The reality is that any surplus effort is a tough sell.
Mr. Küng has tried something like it. He sometimes breaks with orthodoxy at the Tour by ambling out of his hotel
for an evening constitutional. He likes to get the blood flowing after dinner. It gives him a chance to collect his thoughts, breathe some fresh air.
The stroll lasts four minutes tops.
“We’re high-level athletes,” he said. “But honestly, if I had to go for a four-hour hike, I wouldn’t be able
to walk tomorrow.”
--------------------------------------
Joe Cote
"Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else" Stephen Dobyns
Courtesy means being nice to someone who doesn't deserve it