A Tour de France team travels on its stomach-here's an inside look at Team Garmin-Chipotle's daily menu
By Loren Mooney
A typical active American burns somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 calories per day. For a Tour de France rider, it's more like 7,000 to 7,500 during a flat stage like Saturday's 122-mile Stage 14 from Nimes to Digne-les-Bains. For a mountain stage, such as Stages 15 to 17 in the Alps, a racer can torch as many as 9,000 calories.
While those riders who endure to the end of the 21-stage, 2,175-mile Tour inevitably look like gaunt versions of themselves before the event started, teams go to great lengths to replenish riders every day. To keep its riders fed, Team Garmin-Chipotle relies on guidance from team physiologist Allen Lim, PhD, and on Chef Willy Balmat, a team chef for decades who worked with Lance Armstrong's teams during each of his seven Tour de France victories.
"Every day, Chef Willy cooks breakfast at the hotel," says Mr. Lim, which many Americans would recognize as standard, but supercharged with simple carbohydrates for the coming race: brown or white rice, olive oil, eggs or omelets, oatmeal, muesli, yogurt, fruit, orange juice, coffee and tea. Historically, teams relied on pasta for their carb fix at every meal, but "we've really shifted away from pasta as our primary source of carbs," says Mr. Lim, although the team does still eat some. "A lot of people have a slight wheat or gluten intolerance," he says, which can cause an inflammatory response that hinders digestion-not a good thing when your goal is having calories absorbed as quickly as possible. For Team Garmin-Chipotle, rice is the new superfood.
After breakfast, Chef Willy goes shopping for fresh provisions, and then drives to the next hotel to begin preparing post-stage food and dinner for the team. The team also has a truck with a pantry, full fridge and freezer, and a small kitchen for on-the-fly food prep.
Before the Garmin-Chipotle racers start the stage, typically at noon or 1 p.m. in France, they top off with Clif sports drink and energy bars. Once rolling, the riders aim to consume enough fluids and calories-almost all in the form of simple sugars (high-glycemic carbohydrates)-during the race to avoid losing more than 3-percent of their body weight, the point at which performance can decrease significantly, says Mr. Lim. During the first half of the Tour, he says, Garmin-Chipoltle's team leader, American Christian Vande Velde, 32, has lost only 1.5 to 2 percent of his body weight each stage, a sign that he hasn't been severely dehydrating or depleting himself.
Bicycling.com
