Cycling for five hours on an omelette
Before Froome’s bid for a third Tour de France, is given access to Team Sky’s training camp in Tenerife. It’s not easy, you feel really hungry, and it plays with your head.
The pause was brief. The riders loaded on rice cakes, which had been wrapped in foil, and murmured encouragement to one another.
Geraint Thomas tried to lift the mood with a whispered joke, Wout Poels smiled wanly in response. Chris Froome was already metres away, pale eyes scanning the peak above, before glancing down to the thick layer of cloud, far below. ‘‘Come on, guys,’’ he said. ‘‘Let’s get back out there. Every second counts.’’
There are few more beautiful – or forbidding – landscapes than that which surround Mount Teide, the volcano that towers above the island of Tenerife.
This is where Team Sky assemble for their mountain training, a collective exercise in exquisitely-calibrated masochism. Today in mid-April is the third day in a four-day block, almost 4000 metres of climbing over five hours, interspersed with high-intensity aerobic efforts at sea level.
‘‘It’s a short day today,’’ Tim Kerrison, head coach of Team Sky, says without irony. ‘‘Tomorrow we will do eight hours and, in physical terms, it will be much tougher. All told, they will average about 18,000 to 20,000 metres of climbing this week. This camp, and the one a month from now, will provide the foundations for everything we hope to achieve at the Tour.’’
Froome has set off again, arched head bobbing from side to side, as if searching for something he knows he will never find.
When Sir Dave Brailsford launched Team Sky in 2009, few took him seriously when he outlined his ambition of having a British winner of the Tour de France within five years.
The team reached their target two years early when Bradley Wiggins won the yellow jersey in 2012, and have won the race three times in the past four years.
‘‘We never do things the same way twice,’’ Kerrison says, by way of explaining the serial success.
‘‘If someone comes into the team who says, ‘I want to do things the way I have always done them, because that is comfortable,’ he is in the wrong place.
‘‘We want continuous improvement. People are familiar with how we look for marginal gains [classic examples include transporting mattresses from stage to stage during the Tour for a gain in sleep quality]. Individually, these improvements look tiny, but the aggregation is huge.’’
When Team Sky started performing warm-downs after Tour stages, many teams scoffed.
Why would a rider who has just cycled 200 kilometres wish to do more pedalling on an exercise bike? It took Kerrison, drawing on his experience in other sports, to realise that warm-downs don’t burn carbohydrates, but aid recovery. Now all teams do it.
After five hours of cycling, the riders return to the team hotel. They warm down, shower and reload (a huge buffet prepared by the Team Sky chef with rice, chicken, pumpkin soup, grains, vegetables and natural yoghurt), before studying the training data. They are exhausted, but determined to see out the week with humour. What is it like to train without carbs, I wonder? Chris Froome ‘‘Yesterday, we only had an eggwhite omelette and cycled for five hours,’’ Froome says.
‘‘It’s not easy, you feel really hungry, and it plays with your head. But it is a perfect way to teach your body to become more efficient at burning fat and using it as a fuel source.
‘‘You have to keep reminding yourself that you are doing this for the greater good; that it will help come July. It means that when you have a proper breakfast, you have this fuel (ie fat) that you keep for special occasions, when the going gets really tough.’’
Tomorrow is a gruelling eighthour intensity ride, then another low-carb day, and then, a few days hence, they will test themselves almost to destruction at their final altitude camp.
‘‘It’s a tough way to live,’’ Thomas says with a wink and a smile. ‘‘But the deeper we go here, the better our prospects. You have just got to keep that in your head, particularly when you are low on fuel. Otherwise, you might go f***ing bonkers.’’
The evening that Team Sky won the 2015 Tour, he didn’t pause to celebrate but spent the evening negotiating for new riders.
‘‘When you win, the biggest danger is complacency,’’ he says.
‘‘It is natural to parade your achievements, but that steals the energy from discovering new improvements – and there are literally thousands of them. One of our medium-term objectives, for example, is to integrate the technology used by fighter pilots.
‘‘They have a little thing in their visor which projects key information onto the lens of their goggles. I want our riders to have access to power, speed and route through custom-built glasses so they don’t have to move their heads.’’
I ask whether work-life balance is important. ‘‘Absolutely. That is a performance variable, too,’’ he says. ‘‘It is normal for us to be away from home, so we mustn’t take our families for granted. It is easy to get home after a tough trip and to expect the family to be grateful. You grab the remote and put on the football when they are watching ‘Corrie’. That alienates the people you live with. I have been as guilty of that as anyone.
‘‘Steve Peters [the team psychiatrist] gave us some crucial advice: ‘When you go home, be grateful to your family. Always take a gift, no matter how small. And remember that what your kids will remember are experiences. When you have a small period at home, create a nice memory because when they’re older, they will remember those experiences.’
It is now 48 hours before the Tour and the team are united in northern France. Brailsford, as so often before a race, is an almost perfect synthesis of anxiety and ambition.
‘‘The other teams are competitive, and have been exploiting their own research and improvements,’’ he says. ‘‘This is one of the joys of competition: you are constantly pushed outside your comfort zone.
‘‘This is the toughest race by far, and the fiercest battle. Every member of the team is crucial and we all have to be at the top of our games for the next three weeks.’’