5 Surprising Things I Learned at the Tour de France

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It was an amazing experience and privilege to visit the Tour de France as a guest of Visma Lease a Bike and Ketone IQ—an experience I’ll never forget. Here are a few things that surprised me the most when visiting the tour in person.

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doing a bottle drop at the tour to France was way scarier than I thought it would be but the thing that surprised me the most was how excited I was afterwards I gave L Gard a bottle that was really cool Ketone IQ and Vima Lisa bike invited me to join them for stage four of the tour to France this year I know insane I could hop on that bus and my tour will be over but it will be the most epic moment of my life so let’s just kidding as much as I wish I could have brought all of you with me to the tour I’m going to do my best to try to explain what the experience was like and I’m going to share at least five things that surprised me while I was at the tour the last one kind of blew my mind but we’ll start off with something I probably should have realized before and that is the Tor of France is a team event and I’m not just talking about the writers on the team as I mentioned we got to go to stage four which this year was the stage that went from Italy into France up the galier which is one of the tour to France’s most famous climbs and if you don’t know anything about the tour don’t worry I’m going to do like a brief synopsis of the whole thing later but first I want to explain how crazy just a single morning of the race is so our little group arrived at the hotel where the team was staying a few hours before the stage was set to start and we had time to look at all their bikes talk to the me mechanics talk to their chef my name is remes and I’m a performance chef of Team FMA bike together with my colleague franka we uh cook for the Riders and I learned a couple interesting things for example the team eats at least 3 hours before the race starts their chef Remco makes the meals for everybody but the specific portions like the macros for every writer are detailed and prescribed based on their effort that day in the race and what their role in the race is and that’s not even the craziest marginal gain the craziest one in my opinion is the fact that each Rider has their own fitted mattress that follows them throughout the tour let me break that down every single day a van with all of the mattresses for all of the Riders goes to the next hotel takes the mattresses out of the hotel room puts the specific mattress for each Rider in their room like they get a mattress fit in the same way they get a bike fit and then they repeat that every single day of the tour which is just craziness but that’s the level of work that the team does for the racing team and all of the racers like their time is very protected unfortunately you know as a bunch of YouTubers we didn’t get a spend a lot of time with them but can’t figure out why it’s not like they’re doing the most important race of the calendar right now we did get to see them for a little bit and I did have a few like takeaways from my short time with W van Ard and Matteo Jorgenson when I I saw pictures of w van art in the pelaton among the other writers he looks huge but in person I was surprised that he’s about my size and I consider myself a string bean of course he is leaner and faster and stronger and overall Superior to me in every single way the other thing that surprised me was how tall Mato Jorgenson is he’s actually taller than W I’m just under 6’2 I’m 187 cm and Mato is taller than me he has to be like at least 63 which is so tall for like a climbing specialist in fact a lot of the Vima writers were pretty tall I I don’t know if that’s because a lot of them are Dutch or just because they like having bigger Riders to create a bigger draft for their team leader yonas vinegar and I guess talking about the team leader is a good segue into the basics of the tour to France the tour is 21 days long that’s 21 days of racing with two rest days that are distributed throughout the tour and while it’s called the tour to France it sometimes starts outside of France for example this year it started in Italy but the bulk of the race always is in France fun fact the furthest the race has ever started from France was irand in 1998 and thinking of the logistics involved in getting all of the teams from Ireland to France is enough to give me a headache because there are 22 teams each team has eight Riders that’s 176 Riders and that doesn’t include the non-athlete members of the team all the support team members that are also traveling around this year the race will be about 3500 km long that’s 2,200 miles and it will end up in nce normally it ends in Paris but because of the Olympics they’ve made an adjustment this year I think it’s nice each day of the race has a winner and at the end there is an overall winner of the general classification so when a team says they have a team leader that’s the person they’re betting on to win the general classification the person who has the fastest time over all 21 stages that is the winner of the tour to France that is kind of the most basic version of the tour Michael Brandt the CEO of Ketone IQ who was on this trip with us he had a really good analogy that I liked he compared bike racing to like a complex wine you can enjoy it in its simplest form but the more you learn about it the more you understand the intricacies and the more you appreciate it I know it’s snobby but let’s be honest Road cycling is kind of snobby we have two equally important things happening right now first off ardam and Nidan have prepared the bottles to give them to the people who are actually racing the tour to France and then maybe more importantly over here Michael and being filmed by cam is putting on an inflatable Ketone IQ suit Michael and Ketone IQ are the reason I got to go on this trip and I’m super grateful for it you may not know this but Ketone IQ not only sponsor me they also sponsor a little bike team called um I’m not going to tell you which sponsorship is the larger one but I will say I learned a lot talking to vima’s athletes and food coaches after learning about custom mattresses you can probably guess that visma does everything they can to optimize their Athletes Performance and when it comes to nutrition it’s no different that’s why they partnered with Ketone IQ for their recovery nutrition if you’re not familiar with ketones they are another fuel source that your body can use like carbs unlike carbs which your body needs to process before it can use them ketones can go straight into your I was going to say straight into your brain but they can go straight into your brain because your brain loves using ketones as fuel but they can also be converted into ATP and your body can use them just the same way that they do other fuel sources they’re especially good when they’re stacked with other fuel sources like carbs while you’re on your workouts and carbs and protein for Recovery in fact visma Ketone IQ and the largest research University in the Netherlands are working together on a robust study about using ketones for athletic recovery now I’ve done some anecdotal testing with this and spicy you know maybe my budget’s not as high but ketones did help me survive training like a pro for a week Jokes Aside I’m really looking forward to seeing this research study I was talking with Michael again the CEO of Ketone about the study and the specifics and it seems very very promising visma isn’t the only team that uses ketones in fact they’re not even the only team that uses Ketone IQ I’m not sure how much I can kind of share on that that but let’s just say based on dinner conversations it seems like pretty much every World Tour team is using ketones as part of their recovery nutrition if you want to give ketones a try you can go to Ketone docomo that’s my link you’ll get 30% off your first subscription order and a free six-pack of ketones now I like a free six-pack I tried that’s unfortunately not one of the things you get with ketones I guess if you work out with it you could anyways let’s go back to the tour the tour to France is very different from other major sporting events like the world cup or the Super Bowl this next thing really surprised me although in hindsight I guess it was a little obvious and that is the tour to Franc is free kind of like there’s no stadium so you don’t buy tickets it’s all on a public road and because it’s on a public road it’s kind of first come first serve people camp out days before in fact about a week before the race got there cam Nichols and I raced up the galier ourselves and it was filled with people and as as much as I wish they were camping out to watch Cam and I but they were cheering us on and every other cyclist and that’s kind of one of the cool things about the tour it is this big event turns out the race is just like one little part of the tour there’s so many things that happen around it for example there is a 30 minute long parade that goes down the entire parkour like the race course every single day so every stage all 2 one stages has this massive parade that goes down they throw like candy and food and prizes out to the people waiting on the side of the road and the reason why that parade exists is money because the people in the parade are sponsors of the tour the organization that runs the tour the ASO they need to make money somehow and the parade is one of their big money makers they can also make money by uh towns offering to host a particular stage and they will pay the ASO money to end a stage or start a stage in their tour because it brings people to their town and it’s kind of a captive audience through the FR are very very powerful they can close the road whenever they uh or how long they want so the people in these towns they’re just stuck here all day you’re also stuck in town and you cannot leave and so you might as well you know go to the cafe or the pub and watch the tour there after they pass you because you’re only going to see one little segment but that’s you know part of the experience although I’m getting ahead of myself I’m like jumping into the race because the next thing that surprised me is that the Riders actually do a lot more than just race after leaving their hotel getting on the bus they go to The Paddock which is set up at the beginning of each stage we’ve got some little team behind me called UAE I don’t know if I’m supposed to film them especially since uh Vima Lisa bike yeah I’m a guest of them but uh you know going to film it I’m out here going to hopefully see T pagach all of the buses from all of the teams line up they put the Riders bikes out and it is this circus for the people in the town where the race starts that day to just come and see the Riders see the buses the VIPs and the media get to talk with like the team leaders the Riders ride up onto stage and they’re announced they’re cheering fans and just like the races people are so obsessed with getting a selfie almost knock Riders off their bikes but most interesting of all every single team bus has one thing that blew my mind every single bus has a little side flat that opens up to an espresso machine I don’t have a bus but I feel like I need that in my life so I never know what to do during these uh these experiences it’s really cool I’m excited about it I just walking around looking at everything I could talk about all the different winning jerseys the truth is the only one you need to know about is the yellow Jersey that is the one that the leader of the general classification wears there is a white jersey for the youngest Rider a polka dot jersey for the person the fastest up the mountains and a green jersey which is technically not a sprinter’s jersey but it’s a point Jersey but whatever i’ digress there are plenty of videos that go into all the intricacies if you really want to dig into that the jerseys didn’t it’s surprise me what did surprise me is that there are more cars on the road during the race than there are bikes at the start of the tour there are 176 bikes on the road because there are 176 Riders as the tour goes on some Riders inevitably drop out because they don’t reach the time cuts or they get injured that number goes down the vehicle number is much higher let’s start by talking about the team Vehicles each team has two support Vehicles those are like the station wagons that you see with the bikes on the roof if a rider has a a bike that breaks during the race they swap it out with one of those bikes in addition to those the team also have at least one team bus that transports the team to and from hotels wealthy teams like visma have like multiple buses a mattress van and Hospitality cars like the ones that we got to ride in now not all of those team cars are on the parkour at the same time for example in the hospitality cars we actually rode at the front of the race all the way up until the bottle drop at which point we pulled over hey guys I’ve been given the responsibility of handing a bottle um it’s a lot of responsibility so if I drop it could affect me a lot so let’s see what happens let’s not drop it gave the bottles to the Riders and then the race went on and then we were no longer part of like the full pelaton of the racers and the cars so the number kind of fluctuates but even if you didn’t include all the team cars minus the two support cars that are always in the race there would still be over 250 cars on the road because the race organization itself has over 200 Cars TV equipment and cameras and race announcers and VIPs and sponsors and neutral support for the Riders and more the number of vehicles on the road for bike race is kind of mindboggling and they’re all like weaving in and out so if there’s a breakaway it splits up and some of the team cars are in front of the bike racers and others are behind them almost like a school of fish weaving in and out of each other which leads me to my last surprise the thing that shocked me the most descending in the tour to France inside of a vehicle is terrifying when you’re in a car that is trying to stay ahead of the pelaton a pelaton that is descending at 100 plus kilm an hour which is like what that’s like 65 miles an hour down a Winding Road it is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying the only thing that was keeping me sane in the moment was the fact that our driver Nathan van hyunk was a former pro he rode in the tour to France last year in fact he was a lead out man for yonas Vino who won the race spoiler alert sorry riding with him was crazy it was like a privilege that he was our host throughout this whole thing the the day before I’ll tell you this because this was an incredible we got to go on a ride with him and Eddie Bowman another like former tour to France Rider and they took us around and at the end of the ride before the final climb Nathan comes over to me and he says like stick by me I’m going to lead you out on the final climb dude a pro who was the lead out man for yonas Veno was going to lead me out on a climb it went about as well as you would [Music] think I did not hold the wheel but it was a lot of fun [Music] that’s about all I got during the race I asked Nathan like what’s scarier descending like full gas on your bike or in this Hospitality van and he said the van because you’re caring other people but honestly watching him descend in this van while he’s also watching the race and talking on the race radio he seemed pretty calm to me and and maybe that’s the the biggest takeaway I had these Pros it’s not it’s not just like their FTP that’s different like they have nerves of Ste they just at least on the outside appear so calm in a situation that I would be completely frazzled although I did pretty well with that bottle drop [Music]