Rabobank Gets Through A Tour de Rest Day

Picture the scene: you’ve raced 2,581.5 kilometres and 15 stages of the Tour de France. The
sound of a rest day when you can simply ignore your bike for a few hours sounds great, doesn’t
it?
But as Rabobank team doctor Dion Van Bommel explains, it’s not so simple.
According to Van Bommel, days off from racing, like the Tour’s rest-day on Monday, are
probably the most dangerous of all for bike riders’ fragile organisms - more so than racing six
hours in the rain.
“A rest day represents a change in a body’s usual pattern of activity and that’s when a body is
most vulnerable to illnesses,” Van Bommel says.
“Riders are used to racing hard for four to six hours, and then suddenly they’ve got all this time
to fill.”
“The temptation is to rest and do nothing because that’s what your brain is telling you you want
to do more than anything in the world.”
“But if you do so then your metabolism suffers a big change and you can get sick much more
easily.”
With so many external factors influencing your metabolism, getting sick in a bike race like the
Tour is a bit of a lottery.
But many riders say the part where they all know they will all feel worse for the first hour or so
in the next morning’s stage.
“That’s because their bodies have stiffened up from not doing so much and it takes some time,”
Van Bommel says.
So Van Bommel recommends the riders have as similar a day as they would on a normal stage -
and not sleep 14 hours as some would want to!
“They should train for a couple of hours in the morning and then have a meal, but they’ll eat
their usual food, and drink their usual drinks.”
“There will no special beers or anything like that, because then you pay the price the next day.
That can wait til Paris.”
Then in the afternoon, the Rabobank team usually have a bit of a rest, but not for too long.
Rabobank will do some work on the rollers as well, just an hour or so to keep the body ticking
over again - and that’s different from many other squads.
As for other changes on a rest day, Van Bommel says “Riders like their relatives to come visit
and it’s great for their morale, but I always say the family should only be there for a limited
amount of time.”
“Afterwards the riders should rest in their rooms. Otherwise their whole routine is disrupted
again.”
That may sound harsh, but riders are already on the limit, Van Bommel says, after so much hard
racing.
“In general the principal thing is - the fewer disturbances they have, the better.”
“There’ll be enough time to get excited and stressed out in the stages that are left to race. And
after the Tour is over, they can rest all that they like!”