The riders about two-thirds through the Tour de France look in need of a good meal.
Many, like Garmin-Slipstream’s Bradley Wiggins, have so little body fat that the veins in their arms nearly poke through their skin. Others, like Astana’s Lance Armstrong, are so gaunt that their cheeks have turned concave.
Despite appearances, the riders at this three-week, 3,500km race are not starving. How could they be? Besides cycling kilometer after kilometer, eating is their second most time-consuming activity.
They eat breakfast in the morning. They snack before the race. They eat on the way to the starting line, and twice more on the road. Then they eat again as soon as they cross the finish line — before going to their hotel to snack.
Then, what do you know, they finally eat dinner, topping off their day of systematic gorging. They consume about 5,000 to 8,000 calories a day — two to three times that of an average American man. Without that fuel, they would never be able to finish this grueling competition.
“When you start to get really extreme fatigue, what tends to happen is you start to lose your hunger, your appetite,” said David Millar, a British rider for Garmin-Slipstream. “Your body just starts to shut down, you can’t eat. It’s almost like your body is trying to get you to give up the race. When that happens, that’s always a scary thing. Because when you don’t eat, that’s it. It’s over.”
With that in mind, teams like Garmin-Slipstream, based in Boulder, Colorado, have gone out of their way to keep the riders sated, feeding them nutritious and tasty meals as well as recovery drinks, whether they want them or not. All the teams are searching for every advantage.
For Garmin, that meant hiring Sean Fowler, an American chef who runs a restaurant, El Raco d’Urzs, in the Pyrenees. The team had eaten there during training sessions and hired him on the spot.
Fowler, 43, and a native of Wondervu, Colorado, has a lofty risumi. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, he is thought to be the first American chef at the Tour de France.
“To have Sean cooking and all the fresh stuff makes a big difference,” the rider David Zabriskie said. “He’s even making me beets, which I like a lot. Helps move things along.”
It is relatively common for teams to hire chefs for this important race. But some, including the holder of the yellow jersey for the past week, AG2R La Mondiale, still do things the old-fashioned way: they eat whatever the hotel restaurant serves. And, most of the time, that is “27-minute al dente pasta,” Wiggins said. Other riders agreed.
“If you’re eating the soggy French pasta, it does give your body kind of a nasty, just heavy, bad unhealthy feeling,” Zabriskie said. “The way we are doing it is just one more little thing that helps.”
Every day at the Tour, Fowler cooks exclusively for Garmin’s nine riders, to the chagrin of team management. His sister, Laura Fowler, a schoolteacher, made the trip from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to help out.
On a typical morning, they will gather their cooking gear and take it to the motor home in which they follow the race. They make sure to arrive early at the team’s next hotel, to inspect the kitchen.
If it is not up to Sean Fowler’s standards for cleanliness, which has happened a few times at this Tour, he will cook in the motor home. He takes precautions to keep the riders safe from food poisoning or other gastrointestinal problems, which could be devastating to their performance. In his motor home, he wields utensils and pots and pans like a careful samurai because the space is cramped.
His goal is to make food both healthy and appealing to riders who can burn 4,000 calories on their bikes in one stage — but are often too exhausted to eat.
“At this point, the riders’ mental capacity goes along with their physical capacity because they are so tired,” Fowler said. “It’s hard to figure out what you’re going to eat when you feel like that. So we decide that for them, but also give them other options, too. If they like what they are having, then they can actually get more food down.”
Nearly every day, Fowler buys fresh products from a local market and makes everything from scratch. Before the Tour, he reviewed possible menu items with Allen Lim, the team’s exercise physiologist. So Fowler knows exactly what foods could help the riders get through the race.
Pineapples, for instance, are good because they help the absorption of vitamins and minerals. Cherries and blueberries are good antioxidants. Almond butter is better than peanut butter because, as Lim said, “it’s just a better nut.”
“Most importantly, the food choices we make tend to be foods that are not inflammatory to the body,” Lim said. “If you think about a big hamburger that’s really greasy, that’s dipped in tempura batter and deep fried, that could actually be really inflammatory. That could actually sit in your gut for a while and be hard to digest.
“A lot of food that we eat is really clean; it digests very easily. It comes into the system and actually makes the guys feel better. It might also help the rider’s body heal itself faster after a difficult ride.”
If the riders do not eat well, Lim said, that may translate to subpar performances on their bikes. They may not sleep well, or they may become moody. They may not recover from a workout as quickly, or feel sorer after a ride. The worst-case is that they cannot keep up with the peloton during a stage, dropping back from the pack and perhaps out of the race.
The riders do not drink many dairy or soy products, Lim said, sticking to rice milk or almond milk instead. Their diets are generally gluten free.
At meals, boxes of different cereals and bowls of fruit are strewn everywhere. At breakfast, Fowler serves items like oatmeal and plates of pasta and eggs. It is not fancy, he said, but it kicks the riders into gear.
In the team’s hotels, energy bars, fruit and other snacks are lovingly set on tables in hallways or in a special room, to try to make snacking more alluring.
During the race, the riders often approach the team car to grab drinks or energy gels, or even a Coke when they need a quick jolt. Twice, they veer to the side of the road to pick up musettes, which are cloth goody bags with long handles containing energy bars and gels, rice cakes and sandwiches. Like NASCAR pit stops, but without stopping, riders grab them on the run.
After the race, the Garmin riders eat a quick meal like chicken stir-fry. For dinner, Fowler may prepare rosemary chicken or white fish served with pineapple salsa. The cyclists eat red meat occasionally. They get carbohydrates from pasta, but also from couscous and risotto to keep the menu interesting. Light desserts like fruit puree and apple cobbler are permitted.
Even all that food may still not be enough for the riders, Lim said, because their bodies still break down muscle during the Tour. The workouts are so intense, he said, that they can easily end up looking skeletal.
To keep the riders at an optimal weight, Lim weighs them before and after each stage. For him, feeding the riders is a science. He has calculated exactly how many calories and grams of protein each rider needs each day and at each meal.
Over all, though, he said riders are often free to eat what they want, particularly with Fowler in the team kitchen. With at least one exception.
“They would love to finish a day in the Tour and have a nice ice cold beer, and that’s something we’ve never offered to them,” Lim said. “But I’m sure by the end of this thing that might be something all the guys would really enjoy.”
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