COMMENTARY

By Chris Carmichael

updated 6:05 p.m. ET July 8, 2005

Chris Carmichael has been Lance Armstrong’s coach since 1990. He is writing columns for The Associated Press during the race.

Nature plays a cruel joke on professional cyclists. Though they spend up to 30 hours a week on their bikes, they still have to watch their weight to be successful at the Tour de France. After developing new nutrition techniques, Lance Armstrong and I have been able to optimize his race weight without sacrificing performance.

The Stakes: Two pounds can mean the difference between raising your arms in victory and losing 30 seconds on a mountain summit finish. When you’re pedaling up a mountain pass, you’re propelling your bicycle upward, against gravity, as well as forward. Since your legs have a finite amount of power, the amount of weight they have to push uphill makes a big difference.

In cycling, we use a measure called power-to-weight-ratio to compare the climbing strength of one rider against another. Lance’s chief rival, Jan Ullrich, can generate more power, in watts, than Lance can because he is significantly bigger than Lance. However, when you divide their sustainable power outputs by their respective weights, you see that Lance can produce more power, per pound of body weight, than Ullrich can.

To put this in perspective, consider Lance a new Subaru WRX STI and Ullrich an Audi A8. The Audi has more horsepower (335), but that horsepower has to pull a bigger mass (4,300 pounds). The Subaru has a little less horsepower (300), but since it has to move less weight (3,300 pounds), it’s much more nimble and can accelerate like a bullet.

The Problem: A cyclist’s life revolves around food, and he is always hungry. It takes a lot of calories to supply the energy needed for training rides that sometimes last upward of six hours, and no one blames him for wanting to put his feet up with a massive bowl of pasta once he’s done. Yet, at the top level of the sport, all that training could be for naught if you get to the race 5 pounds heavier than your competition.

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To make positive adaptations to training, your body needs a slight surplus of energy. To lose weight, you need a slight energy deficit. Trying to lose significant amounts of weight while training hard can do more harm than good because it robs the body of its ability to recover, which in turn reduces the positive impact of workouts.

We have seen examples of this from Jan Ullrich. Earlier in his career, he would gain more than 20 pounds during the winter, slim down slightly in the spring, then lose the final dozen pounds within a month before the start of the Tour de France. The problem, however, was his power output suffered from the combination of caloric restriction and increased training. He arrived at the Tour de France lean and mean, but without the power to challenge Lance in the mountains.

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