Comparing the Tour de France and Wimbledon

I was watching some sports this past week and being interested in fitness, I compared the sports and running for the cardio-respiratory benefits. One event was the Tour de France and the other was the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. The athletes in the Tour de France have some of the stages of the Tour well over 100 miles and take over five hours to complete. Some of the men’s tennis games went for five sets that lasted close to five hours. When I trained for marathons and was doing 20 - 22 mile runs, I set aside three hours to complete the distance. All of these events require lots of endurance and a strong heart and lungs to finish.

It has been recorded that the resting heart rate of athletes in the Tour de France have pulse rates in the mid-30 beats per minute. The fact that they have a faster pulse rate when competing for five hours puts them near the top of endurance athletes. The main muscle group for a bicyclist is the legs. The trunk and arms are not involved as much other than support for the legs. The legs really get a workout when the stage has mountains in the route. Their bikes are special compared to most of the bikes an average person would buy at a bike shop. While the bikes are some of the very best, the athlete still needs to put five hours of effort during a stage.

The tennis players will have a five set game that can last almost five hours. The tennis players get breaks where they can sit down for a few minutes after several games. But when they are playing, they are moving fast and in all directions. For a runner it is similar to doing intervals on a track where the athlete will run a lap fast and then rest before doing another lap. For training purposes, the heart will beat very fast, slow down a little, then beat fast again. How does this compare to a bicyclist that has that steady heart rate for those five hours? The heart rate of the bicyclist remains relatively steady for the event compared to the tennis player whose heart rate varies from fast to slower to resting. The cyclist is primarily using the leg muscles where the tennis player is using the muscles of the entire body.

A first time marathon runner will often take between four and five hours to finish the 26.2 mile run. The difference is the effort between an elite athlete’s faster time versus the slower runner. The point to make is that for the slower runner the effort they are putting forth to run slower than the elite runner is at almost the same level of that elite runner. For the five hour marathoner the effort is just as hard for them as the marathoner, that runs under a 2:30 marathon. Talking with the two hour marathoners they are impressed that a runner can run for over four hours. Talking with the four hour marathoner they are impressed that an athlete can run so fast for 26.2 miles. It is all about perspective.

When I trained individuals to run a marathon I usually tried to have them run close to a 3:30 time (8:00). My race pace was close to a 7:15 – 7:30 mile and running at an 8:00 minute pace to guide my training class was an easy run. Using this example as a guide to compare the Tour de France and Wimbledon Tennis players to getting cardio-respiratory fitness it seems that if a person wants to improve their fitness the training program needs to have some hard effort days built into their program. If my example of going from a 7:15 per mile pace to an 8:00 minute per mile was an easy effort then think how fit the athletes in the Tour and Wimbledon are. If the beginning fitness person wants to improve they need to put in a day or two where they increase their effort. If the person is a walker and wants to increase their fitness they might try a day of fast walking or striding. The distance does not have to be as long as the days they walk at a more leisure pace. And if they want to follow the Wimbledon example the faster walk can be at different intervals during their walk. An example would be to walk one block faster several times during the walk. As the fitness improves, the faster effort can be lengthened to two blocks at that faster pace. As the fitness improves and that once slow pace is very easy to accomplish, they can try the Tour program where they increase the pace a little for the entire walk. It doesn’t have to be that all-out effort but just slightly faster than the original slow pace walk. This is going on the assumption that the person was taking a walk to improve their fitness. If part of the walk was to get some fresh air walking slightly faster with the same effort is going to accomplish the same thing.