Coach: Eliminating waste boosts Armstrong

By Chris Carmichael

Carmichael has been Lance Armstrong's coach since 1990, guiding him to five straight Tour de France titles. He is writing columns for The Associated Press during the race.

PARIS (AP) -- A famous sculptor was once asked how he managed to create a beautiful woman from a block of coarse stone, and he replied that the woman was already in the stone and he just had to remove the debris from around her.

The sculpting of Lance Armstrong's Tour de France fitness follows a similar story.

Armstrong's reign at the top of the Tour de France podium began when George W. Bush was still the governor of Texas, and the Y2K bug was our biggest worry. In the summer of 1999, and in every summer since, Lance arrived at the Tour better prepared than anyone else and left three weeks later with the yellow jersey.

For six years, the goal has remained the same, but the methods for reaching it have changed.

Progression is one of the principles of training. To provide the stimulus for continued improvement, your training workload has to progressively increase over time. At the elite level of professional sports, however, you start to run out of hours in the day.

Increases in workload have to alternate with longer periods of quality recovery, and eventually you reach a point when there's not enough time in the week to complete the training and obtain the rest necessary to do it well.

In the process of designing Lance's training for the Tour de France, I couldn't just add hours or intensity to his schedule. We had reached the limit of available training time before the 2003 Tour de France, and he struggled to win the race that year. For 2004, the potential to reach the necessary fitness level was within Armstrong; I just had to remove the debris to allow his full power to emerge.

Lance's preparation became more about what he wasn't doing than about what he was.

NO DIETING

The more a cyclist weighs, the harder he has to work to reach the summits of mountain passes. At the same time, it is neither healthy nor practical for a Tour de France rider to maintain his optimal competition weight year round. While some of Lance's rivals gained a lot of weight during the winter, he didn't because the process of spending the entire spring losing weight takes away from an athlete's ability to train effectively.

I developed a new nutrition program for Lance to eliminate the need for proactive weight loss. The process of thinning down requires either caloric restriction or extra hours on the bike, both of which hinder his ability to complete high-quality workouts targeted at developing Tour de France fitness. Using heart-rate monitors and power meters, I examined the demands placed on Lance over the course of the training year, and adjusted the calories and balance of nutrients in his diet to provide fuel for performance while eliminating waste.

During the middle of winter, Lance's workouts were long but not terribly difficult. He burned a balanced mixture of carbohydrate and fat, with a little protein, for energy. As the intensity of his training increased in the spring, he needed to consume more calories, many of which needed to come from additional carbohydrate.

Lance worked hardest in training and competition during the late spring and early summer, which meant those were the months his caloric and carbohydrate intake were at their peak. At the Tour de France, Lance consumed nearly 1000 grams of carbohydrate a day; nearly double his daily intake in January.

Matching nutrition to training provides the body with the nutrition it needs for health and performance, without the excess that leads to weight gain. When you look at the normal relationship between nutrition and exercise for active adults, exercise load changes dramatically from winter to summer but there is no corresponding change in diet. As a result, there is a part of the year when you are eating more than you need (and gaining weight), and there's a part of the year when you're eating too little. During this latter period, you lose weight but you also hinder your ability to exercise at your best.

NO WASTED EFFORTS

The old-school methods of training lacked precision. We sent athletes out for several hours, but much of that time was spent at intensity levels that were either too easy or too hard to provide the desired results. Athletes were spending six hours to accomplish what could be done in four focused hours.

Lance doesn't waste time on his bike. He knows the goals of the day's workout before he leaves the house, and once his power meter tells him he has ridden long enough to accomplish those goals, he goes home. Extra time on the bike isn't necessary and just leads to more fatigue and longer recovery periods.

GETTING MORE FOR LESS

Removing the waste from Lance's training and nutrition programs left more room for better recovery, which allowed me to increase his workload and reap bigger rewards. At the highest levels of sport, it takes a huge effort to see a 1 percent improvement in performance, and no individual change in training or nutrition is solely responsible. Rather, it is the combination of minute modifications that leads to significant gains.

Increasing the efficiency of Lance's training and nutrition programs also simplified his Tour de France preparations, giving him more time to relax and concentrate on his life outside of training.

Back in 2000-2001, Lance used to restrict his diet and weigh his food to be leaner for the Tour de France. With his weight tracking along with his training this year, he had more freedom to eat what he wanted, and he didn't have to obsess about everything he put in his mouth. Likewise, eliminating waste from his training allowed more flexibility to handle his busy schedule without compromising performance.

In the end, performance at the Tour de France is the only way to evaluate the effectiveness of Lance's training and nutrition programs.

In 2003, he struggled to win his fifth yellow jersey. After focusing on hard work and efficiency for eleven months, he went to the 2004 Tour and won five stages en route to a dominating victory. Removing the debris revealed a beautiful champion, resplendent in yellow.