Bradley Wiggins: My Time (11 page)

So then they said, what are your goals in those races? Working from the start, at Algarve the aim was to play a team role but try and win the time trial; as for Paris–Nice I said, ‘Well, I was 3rd last year. I’d really like to have a crack at that and go for the overall classification because the last few days finish with a time trial so I’ve got a good chance of placing well or maybe winning that, so I’ll accept responsibility as leader.’ At Catalonia I wanted to play a team role again; Romandie I wanted to win; Dauphiné as well. Those were the goals for the year.

One of the biggest things for us was to move away from the cycling tradition of racing yourself fit, riding races purely as training. So going to those races, and taking the responsibility as leader was part of the process; race practice, you could call it. Paris–Nice, Romandie and Dauphiné are all only five, six or seven days long, so it’s not as if you’ve got to lead for three weeks each time. The idea was to go to those races, perform, treat each one as if it were a Tour de France in miniature, lead the race and get the team around me to do the job as
they
would in the Tour. When it came to July, getting it right would not be just a matter of being in perfect form; it was as much about leading the team and getting used to leading overall and all that went with it. It was also important not to disrupt the build-up for the Tour; what that meant was that, although I might have only been at Paris–Nice at 95 per cent of the form I went to the Tour in, we still went there as if I was at 100 per cent and raced with that.

At Algarve I won the time trial – by less than a second – from Tony Martin; Richie Porte from Sky won the overall, and I was 3rd. It was key to help the other guys like Richie and Eddie win in their own right. Their sacrifice was going to be a huge part of me winning the Tour de France. The competitive part of me wanted to race for the win in the Algarve but I had to think of the bigger picture. If I said I was in a team role, I had to act like it; my teammates had to realise that if I said I would ride in a certain way, that’s what I would do. I had had a great winter, starting training early on, so I was still in better form than most of my rivals, even though I was still building, gradually, towards the Tour. It’s not as if I was winning those races by minutes – I was winning by a few seconds, certainly at Paris–Nice and the Tour of Romandie. I kept telling people, ‘You don’t realise what’s still to come, this is just the start of it.’

Paris–Nice was more than just a physical test. There were other things that I was worried about more than the climbing and the time trials. The route wasn’t the problem; the issue was that I really struggle in cold weather, and on some days,
like
the fifth stage to Mende, it didn’t get above zero all day. Simply staying warm enough so that I didn’t crack was a bigger challenge than the physical demands of racing. The cold and wet is something I’ve always struggled with. I’ve no idea why. Some people prefer it but I find it affects my legs more than anything; once they go cold, or they get wet from the rain, they just shut down.

Paris–Nice was everything to me at the time. I was racing for those six or seven days with no thought about the Tour. Once we were in the race there was never any question of thinking, ‘Whatever happens here, if it goes wrong, it doesn’t matter because we’re training for July.’ I wanted to win Paris–Nice that week, and that was that. I thought, ‘All this crap about saving it and not showing your aces too early, you could still be in the same position physically, not show the world how you are, yet you’ve still got to manage that form on the first of July, so why not just race and try to win?’

At Paris–Nice I was in slightly different form compared to the Tour. I was still two or three kilos over the weight I wanted to be in July; that gave me a little more explosiveness, and the weight I was at that time was good for the weather. Having the extra kilos on meant I wasn’t getting as cold and it didn’t matter because we didn’t have to go up climbs for thirty, forty, fifty minutes on end. The Paris–Nice climbs were more explosive, short, 2 or 3km like the one at Mende.

As usual in a stage race, once I’d got the lead it was just a matter of going day by day, the team taking the strain, then I was finishing it off at the end; keeping in touch on the bunch
finishes
, hanging in on the big climb at the end of the stage to Mende. Perhaps what I didn’t expect was having to answer so many questions about what I was doing. Time after time I was asked whether I had peaked too early; time after time I had to explain it all. Trying to convince people how we were going about it turned out to be harder than the race itself. It really was a strain. It felt like dealing with a five-year-old, telling them why they can’t go in the garden when it’s raining. It was like talking to someone who doesn’t speak your language and you don’t speak theirs, and you’re trying to ask how to get to the toilet, ‘
le toilet
?’ I was continually trying to explain that we were training for July and it was possible to race to a high level all year, but it was like talking to a brick wall at times.

What wins you the Tour is all the work you put in over the whole year, all the background training. That is what allows you to be at your best for twenty-one days in July without having one bad day. Over the course of the season, there is not a huge difference in power output; what changes is that your weight goes down gradually, but most of all you improve your ability to maintain that power one day after another. In March, you might have that form for one day, or a few days, but you wouldn’t be able to manage to go out on a time trial like the one from Bonneville to Chartres after three weeks of racing and produce the kind of power I managed there for an hour and five minutes. That’s the difference.

It wasn’t as if I had 50 watts more in me in July than I had at Paris–Nice. It’s more marginal than that, because to win Paris–Nice you still have to be bloody good. Winning
something
like that would be the peak in most people’s seasons. It’s not as if I won it at 80 per cent. I probably raced the Tour de France in 2009 at the form I was at in Paris–Nice in 2012; I might have been good enough to come 4th in the Tour in the shape I had there, but obviously it’s that last 5 per cent that’s going to push you on to the podium in the Tour. So at Paris–Nice I was in bloody good form, at 95, 96, 97 per cent, but that last few per cent is going to come from the fine-tuning, the last bit of weight loss, being acclimatised to altitude, being acclimatised to the heat. That’s what gives you the ability to race day after day for three weeks: the seven, eight months of training before it. It’s such a different way compared to how we used to do it. Rather than starting the season in a really bad place, overweight, then building all the way through, I started at about 95 per cent.

I only competed in five races before the Tour in 2012, so it was not as if I was racing week in week out. I raced Paris–Nice, we had a week off, then we went to Catalonia; there it was just a case of riding the race and letting the mountainous terrain give me a workout. This should have been a classic example of using a race as training, but it went belly up when the final stages were snowed off. So I went home, Tim devised three tough six-hour rides, and I ended up putting in more work than my teammates did that weekend racing in the Critérium International on the hilly roads in Corsica. Then we had four weeks left until Romandie. We went away, did an altitude camp, so by the time I got back to Romandie I was ready to go again. Romandie is five days’ work, then it’s all over, and after that
we
had five weeks to the Dauphiné. Critically, it was not as if I was going from one race straight to the next, burning my mental reserves up as I did so.

The idea of racing yourself fit is a curious one. What Tim identified is that when you race a lot, there are times when you don’t work your body hard enough. You de-train. The trouble with racing is that sometimes mentally you can’t be bothered to compete so you just sit in the peloton and it becomes a way of getting the hours in, cruising along. It can end up a bit like sitting on the rollers.

That’s even the case in the Tour. The first few days of the Tour should be relatively easy, sitting in the peloton for 200km in a flat stage. If there’s a wind or bad weather that changes it, but the first 200km you’re just sitting in, chatting with your mates. It’s the last 50km that are bloody hard because you have to stay in position, the speed goes up massively, and by the end of the stage when they download the SRM boxes from your handlebars you learn that you’ve only averaged 190 watts for the day. You could go out and do a five-hour training ride harder than that.

That is precisely why at Sky we still did some bloody hard rides up to five days out from the Tour, rather than backing off for two weeks beforehand. Tim was saying that you could get to a point ten days into the Tour and find that all of a sudden you haven’t trained really hard for a month so you’ve de-trained before you hit the mountains. That means that when you start making those really intense efforts it comes as a massive shock to the system. If you were in the last week
before
the World Road Race Championships, three days out you’d go and do a big effort, a big ride.

Clearly, we got our preparation for the Tour spot on, but what made all the difference was having people like Tim in the background, asking those questions. Building up to the Tour was about defying tradition, not being scared to try out new ideas. I think we were vocal about this in the first year of Sky, when we were determined that this was what we were going to do. That was always Dave Brailsford’s goal for the team: changing the way we think, defying received ideas, asking why’s it always been done like this. The most obvious example, and the simplest one, is warming down at the end of the stage. How many teams are doing that now? But when we started warming down in 2011 everyone laughed: ‘What are they doing? Look at them idiots.’ But it makes total sense: you warm up, so why not warm down? At times the overall philosophy didn’t work, or we started to look stupid, but we are still sticking with it, and we are still learning from our mistakes. The difference is that now it’s all working and people are praising Dave and everyone else. I think we’re setting a precedent for how it’s done in the future.

Another radical change in the way we built up to the Tour was our two-week training camps at altitude in Tenerife, staying at the Hotel Parador on top of Mount Teide, the volcano in the middle of the island. We did one camp in April, but the second one in mid–late May six weeks before the Tour was probably the most important. Quite a lot of Tour de France mountain stages finish high up so the main
goal
was to be able to perform at altitude without any drop-off in power. Another massive plus of Tenerife was that we were pretty secluded, with no distractions and nobody about. That meant we could get the work done – plenty of climbing, key blocks of specific training – and sleep every other hour. It was ideal.

The altitude training dated back to the big rethink of 2010. Tim’s view was that in that Tour I had been really struggling with the altitude, especially whenever the race went over 1,600m, which he calculated was eleven times. He said, ‘We’ve got to train for altitude’, but he was also asking the question: ‘What do we need to do at altitude? If we’re going there for two weeks we’ve got to know what we’re doing.’ So Tim went to Tenerife in January 2011 to check the place out. He went around all the roads, looked into how other people were training at altitude, and came up with plans of what he thought we should do. He really did his homework. We went there straight after the Tour of Romandie in 2011, did two weeks and realised we’d latched on to something. We felt we had to do it again in 2012, more and better, so we planned two camps. We had gone to Sestriere in 2011, up in the Alps on the border between Italy and France. That didn’t work out so well, because the weather doesn’t tend to be as good as in Tenerife and you have no choice but to ride down from the resort to train. In Tenerife you can do a two- or three-hour ride at 2,000m, if that’s what the trainers feel you need.

From each camp we did at altitude, we seemed to be getting a bit more information to make the next one better. There is a difference between training at altitude, which can
be
pretty damaging, and acclimatisation to altitude, where you just let your body adapt to the thinner air. There is a well-known benefit from being at altitude: as your body adapts, it naturally produces more red blood cells, increasing your body’s capacity to carry oxygen to the muscles and improving your performance that way. This is what most people think of as ‘altitude training’, but this wasn’t our goal. What we wanted to do in 2012, with the core of the Tour team at those camps, was acclimatise; get our bodies used to performing in that thin air so that we would all be able to do it at the Tour.

The toughest thing with training at altitude is getting the right balance: Tim had decided that the issue was doing enough work to get an improvement in performance, but without overdoing it, given the demands altitude makes on the body. You can’t fail to get the efforts in when you’re in Tenerife because the climbs up to Mount Teide last for a minimum of 30km: a camp like this is where you always do the hardest work of the year, because there is no compromise when you are away from home, it’s just you, your teammates, and the trainers. As for acclimatisation, just being there and sleeping there is enough. We ended up training mainly on the roads down below, then riding up to the hotel again. We didn’t stay up on the top and train hard at 2,000m because that’s quite damaging to the body as your system fights to work hard in spite of the thin air; that’s probably the most destructive way of training because, in addition to the effort, you are taking more time to recover due to sleeping at altitude. But if we had an easy hour or two on a rest day, we didn’t bother going down.

The goal in the plan was to do 100,000m of climbing between March and June. That sums up that period. If you worked it out it was about 10,000m a week – a little bit more than the equivalent of going from sea level to the top of Everest. It was clear that if I was going to win the Tour I was going to have to do a lot of climbing, so at first just going up the hills would help in itself, but later on the work I had to do on those climbs was very specific. In Tenerife in April, between Paris–Nice and Romandie, we were doing five or six hours a day, just putting in a lot of mid-range effort. It’s the kind of climbing you’ll do on the Tour on the first climb of the day when a team is riding tempo on the front and there are three
cols
to go. We were putting down a big fitness base so that when we came to Tenerife the second time, we were even fitter, so we could tolerate doing the really high-workload stuff. At the second camp, in the big, intense sessions, we might do as much as an hour and a half of threshold, working at the point where your body is producing lactate as fast as it can process it – in other words, the point where if you go any harder you crack rapidly. That would all be on climbs: pure hard work.