I’ve been watching the Tour de France lately and becoming very interested in the athletes and just what kinds of power they generate on the various sections of a stage. As it turns out they are generating, on average about 250-300 watts. Roughly estimated this comes out to about 150-200 watts on flat sections, 200-300 watts on low grade climbs, 400-600 watts on steep climbs and 600-1000+ watts for sprints.

Now I am by no means a serious cyclist. I don’t even ride an upright bike. I ride a recumbent bike recreationally and rarely ever do organized rides. I have done a few centuries and plan to do more, but for me cycling is only 1 component of my fitness landscape. I do the vast majority of my cycling on a stationery recumbent bike at home. Luckily this bike gives me a digital watts reading so I was eager to see what it felt like to generate 200+ watts over a period of time. I normally don’t even look at watts when I ride so I had no real idea what I was typically generating on a daily basis. As it turns out watts is the only real universal method of measuring the power someone is generating for a given body weight and heart rate. This bike has 16 levels and I usually ride at lvl 10-14 at a speed that generates about 80-100 watts with my heart rate in the low range at 110-120bpm. It’s a pretty easy ride and serves as the initial 40 minute phase of my early morning exercise.

After coming to understand what the Tour De France rides are generating I decided to see what I could do on my own bike. I started out and used to first 10 minutes to warm up and work my way up to level 16 and get to 200 watts. At 200 watts I was sweating hard, but my heart rate was only about 140-150bpm. Still a long ways from my maximum of 185bpm. I kept up 200 watts for 30 minutes and it felt great. Certainly not easy, but very doable and I think I could have gone another 40 minutes at 200 watts without too much more effort. Distance covered was about 15 miles and calories burned was about 500-600. So this was it. The limits of this bike have been reached. The only way I can make it any harder is to spin faster.

I also tried out the bikes at the gym (upright and recumbents) to get a comparison of the wattage accuracy. Those bikes are Cybex Cyclone models and are very smooth. It turns out the gym bikes gave me readings about 50 watts higher than my home bike for about the same levels of exertion. So if they are more accurate then I was actually generating closer to 250 watts instead of 200 for those 30 minutes. According to the Pros, I should be able to sustain generating at least 4 watts per kilogram of body weight to compete at low level amateur cyclist levels – since I weigh 97 kilograms this means I need to be generating nearly 400 watts sustained. OUCH! OK, so I have some work to do. Will report more in a few months.

I still need to do some more tests with my heart rate to see if the exertion is the same on both, but doing this experiment has given me a little better understanding of what kinds of power the Tour De France cyclists are generating for long periods of time and over those grueling 21 days.