Cycling: Why the Tour de France is a study in suffering as much as a race

Does any sport combine torment with excitement quite like an epic day of bike racing?

The pain is etched in the face of Marc Hirschi as he reaches the limits of endurance

Does any sport combine torment with excitement quite like an epic day of bike racing? Stage nine of the Tour de France even had my kids gripped to this dramatic test of human limits.

Marc Hirschi was attempting a solo breakaway, which lasted for 90km up and down fierce Pyrenean climbs. As he rode alone, a lush, mountainous setting provided a stunning backdrop to the Swiss rider’s agonising attempt to stay ahead of his pursuers.

Even with no allegiance to Hirschi, 22, or any knowledge of him, the family were shouting encouragement. But I kept thinking about the pain on his face as he strove up the punishing 12 per cent gradients of the Col de Marie Blanque.

The Tour is a study in racing but also suffering. The first we can measure — in finish times but also on bike computers and power meters in the output of watts per kilogram.

The second bit is much more complex and, as someone who loves to engage in endurance sport, as many readers do, I find it fascinating to wonder how much this ability to suffer is part of what separates not only the elite from the rest of us but the great from the very good. Anyone who has done a 5km Parkrun as hard as they can, or raced against mates on bikes on a Sunday morning, knows how it is to push themselves, and to suffer. “No pain no gain” has long been the mantra in gyms. A popular training app for amateur cyclists is called Sufferfest.

We glean not just the health benefits but a kick from the endorphins released by tough exercise. For many, there is also something deeper in the soul; a need, a striving, a cleansing.

But, as amateurs, we also know that we can stop, and back off any time, as I did once on the vertiginous road of the Marie Blanque that Hirschi battled up on Sunday. With victory, a career and millions watching on TV to think about, Hirschi had to push to the very limits — just as he did again on another remarkable breakaway in stage 12 to Sarran.

How much are those limits different from ours? In physiological terms, an elite athlete capable of riding the Tour can seem like a different species. Primoz Roglic, the Tour’s leader, can produce pedal power for the hours of a 100-mile stage that the rest of us would struggle to sustain for many minutes.

His limits are ridiculously different from yours or mine, but he faces something at least comparable when he hits them — which we have long recognised is not only about low glycogen or high lactate levels in the muscles, but the messages from the brain about exertion and eventually exhaustion. In short, how much, and for how long, you can suffer.

Understanding the ability to withstand pain, and trying to overcome it, has become something of a holy grail among sports coaches and behavioural scientists, neurologists and Silicon Valley developers alike.

In a world that understands more than ever about physiology — nutrition, training periodisation, recovery, sleep and so on — mental advances to boost endurance is a frontier of development, mystery and passionate argument. Optimism, too.

“In endurance sport, we are built in a way where we don’t push to the limit,” Professor Samuele Marcora, an Italian physiologist from the University of Kent, once explained.

Given that pain is something perceived — a sensation, an emotion, “a warning light on the dashboard” rather than the actual brake, according to the excellent Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson, a runner, writer and holder of a PhD in physics — how can we adjust that perception, or learn to live with the pain better?

Conventionally you can train mental endurance, just like muscles. Endure traces the many tests — including those as simple as how long a hand can be held in freezing water — to understand how repeated exposure to pain builds tolerance. The resilience to keep coming back willingly every day for brutal workloads is beyond most of us, and separates professional performers from recreational athletes as much as genetics.

Athletes build the strength to suffer through their physical work but many also try to train the mind through psychology. They try to take their mind to a different place, almost to trick it. Tests have shown subliminal messages can also do that work.

Some endurance athletes, including cycling teams, have explored transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), with electrodes clamped to the skull. The Bahrain-McLaren team even experimented during the 2018 Giro d’Italia, using electrodes to apply low current to the brain as riders had recovery massages each evening. Other versions of tDCS have been used during warm-ups to fire up neurons in the motor cortex of the brain. There are still arguments about the effectiveness and, indeed, the ethics.

Physiologists debate just how much the human system can consciously override its dashboard warning light, or not. We may also ask how much we want to risk ignoring the voice in our heads urging the body to slow down. But these internal battles help to make an endurance event such as the Tour so fascinating. The willingness to suffer is etched on riders’ faces, even if it is difficult to measure individual pain threshold.

Last week the Tour went up Mont Aigoual, the setting for the novel The Rider by Tim Krabbe, a meditation on what it takes to be a bike racer. “Suffering is an art,” he writes.

Expanding on a theme, Krabbe remarks on the masochistic pleasure to be derived from endurance sport and competition: “Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure.”

Hirschi may not have agreed after all he put in on stage nine. After hours on that solo break, the Swiss got caught with just 2km to go. “All for nothing,” he said. It must have felt like the cruellest of sports but on stage 12 he was back on another breakaway, this time staying ahead for a brilliant, deserving victory. Indeed, those final kilometres looked deceptively easy as he held off the chasing pack.

No one wins a Tour stage that way without great physical suffering but, with a decent lead providing the best possible pain relief, the mind was telling him otherwise.

The Times