Nick McKinley

So what is it like to ride the Tour de France?

Sadly I never made the professional ranks, so I’m not qualified to say, but having ridden several multi day amateur events in the mountains of Europe I have a good idea of what I’m getting in to. 

The challenge I’m undertaking this summer, is to ride the exact Tour de France route, in the same order, replicating the experience the professional will have in the high mountains of the Pyrenees and Alps a week later.  

I will not be racing the parcours like the pros will be, the challenge of ‘just riding’ seven days back to back will suffice. But let’s add some context to what a week up ‘Pyrenee and down Alp’ will be like.  

The headlines.  

6 stages 

A whisker under 1000 kilometres 

22000 vertical metres climbed. ( Everest is 8850m ASL BTW OMG ) 

14 major mountain summits crossed ( were not counting the ‘lesser’ hills) 

Let’s break that down a bit further. 

The average distance covered each day is roughly 165km - 100miles in old money, or London to Norwich every day.  

Sounds bad already!  Well let’s put the vertical ascension on that. The biggest days have over 5000m of climbing and days which aren’t considered mountain stages still have a daunting 2000m+ of grippy bits.  

Normally on a training ride in the UK, I’d expect to cover 100km in around 3 hours or so, typically with 1000m of climbing.  A ratio of roughly 1m climbed for every 1000m travelled.  By comparison on the bigger days on Le Loop this ratio shifts dramatically to over 3m climbed per 1000m travelled.  

This obviously impacts average speeds, which will drop from low 30kph to something in the mid 20s and therefore longer saddle time each day.  

I’d expect a 170km ‘day out’ with 4 mountains climbed to take around 7 hours.  When you put all that together, rinse and repeat for a week and the size of the challenge that awaits feels a bit more daunting.  

One of the hardest elements of riding long days in big mountains, aside from the obvious gravitational issues, is energy or more accurately how to fuel your body to sustain the effort required.  

If we consider this in the context of running a marathon. The average time to complete a marathon is roughly 4.5 hours.  A runner would typically burn 100 calories per mile - so 2600kcal.  On the bike, when riding in challenging terrain you can expect to consume 800kcal an hour.  Or 5600kcal a day!  That’s a bit bonkers, given your daily calorific need is around 2000. Which means I’ll need to be eating 7500 calories a day! Elvis would be proud.  

It also equates to double the caloric need of running a marathon.  I’m not playing down the achievement of running a marathon, you certainly won’t see me ever running one, my cyclist’s knees wouldn’t like it.  Put simply, Le Loop Mountains week is in someways equivalent to running two marathons a day, for a week.  

Hmm. On that note,  I better get back to training…….

Le Loop 2025 - Why?