Starting tomorrow, the world’s best cyclist will toe the line of the Tour de France, and later that month the inaugural Tour de France Femmes (for female riders, ed.). To win a stage, or even better, the overall tour – the dream of every cyclist – these athletes do whatever it takes, but what is that exactly? How do you train for such a big event? With Strava sharing insights into the training data of Tour de France cyclists, we get an idea of what their daily life – at least training wise – looks like.
The main question of course is: how many kilometers do athletes ride in preparation for the Tour de France? Looking at data from the period of January until June 2022, Strava figured out that on average athletes covered a distance of 15,000 km by bike. That’s the distance from the United Kingdom to Australia, or the same distance as cycling the complete Tour de France five times. Some athletes can handle a big volume, and noted even more: up to 17,000 km.
On average, cyclists trained 400 hours on the bike in the past six months. Some athletes even hit the 600 hours. As we get closer towards the start of the Tour de France, some cyclists reach 30 hours of training per week, covering a distance of more than 1000 km.
With the Tour de France being full of hills and mountains, there’s only one thing to do in training: look for elevation. That’s what these pro cyclists do, because they climbed around 180,000 meters; that’s 20 times the Mount Everest.
All that hard work is best rewarded with a victory in the Tour de France, but a nice little bonus is the Kudos that athletes received: a total of 10 million Kudos were given to athletes training for this year’s Tour de France.
