Altitude training with Bora-Hansgrohe
The mountain is calling. And they come. All of them. The who's who of cycling pay their respects - settling down at the foot of the Teide volcano. Every spring. For almost 20 years, the Parador de Canadas del Teide has been an increasingly popular meeting place for the world's elite road cycling professionals.
In the month of February in particular, the cycling pros from the big racing teams are literally holding the doors of the three-star hotel in their hands - from the window you can see the 3715 metre high Pico del Teide, the highest point on the Canary Island of Tenerife and in Spain.
Bradley Wiggins once said that training here on the mighty mountain slopes gave him the certainty that he could still be the first Briton to win the Tour de France at an advanced age. His team-mates Christopher Froome and Geraint Thomas trained here for their triumphant rides into the yellow jersey, as did Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard recently.
Become faster
Given this success story, it's no wonder that it's almost impossible to get one of the rooms in the third week of February 2023. "You have to book at least a year in advance," estimates Rolf Aldag, the sports director of Germany's best team, Bora-Hansgrohe.
For the first time, the German team has taken up residence in the highest hotel in Tenerife for this 16-day training holiday. The goal is clear: to become more efficient and therefore faster up here in the thin, oxygen-poor air. "The primary aim is to increase the red blood cells," explains Dan Lorang, the racing team's head coach. So far, his athletes have mostly spent their first altitude training camp of the season in the Sierra Nevada, the high mountains in the south of the Spanish mainland.
Thin air, thick blood
Altitude training is a compulsory programme. "It's now standard in professional cycling. You can no longer avoid it if you want to be competitive," says Maximilian Schachmann. The trend has been increasing for a good decade and a half - cyclists are preparing for the spring classics, Giro and Tour earlier and earlier in the year. "You have to look at cycling's past. In cycling, the increase in red blood cells was partly achieved with doping - which is another reason why altitude training was not necessary. However, it is the only legal means of achieving this effect," emphasises training expert Lorang. Italians, for example, are also prohibited from using altitude tents.
In the Parador on Tenerife, the hotel beds are at an altitude of around 2150 metres - so apart from training, the professional cyclists spend at least 18 to 19 hours a day in thin mountain air.
And this has consequences that are expressly desired (see below). Altitude training does not work for all athletes. Science distinguishes between responders and non-responders - i.e. people whose body reacts positively to the particular training stimulus and those for whom the method makes no sense because there is no measurable improvement - or even a negative effect. Not everyone copes well with altitude.
Bora Hansgrohe - The premiere convinces
The first impressions of the new training ground are impressive. "What we all like is the good weather," emphasises Schachmann after a week at the Parador. He and his training colleagues Lennard Kämna, Patrick Konrad, Bob Jungels, Matteo Fabbro and Aleksandr Vlasov still find remnants of snow on the shady roadside; a few days earlier, it was impossible to get up or down the mountain by car because an impassable layer of slush and black ice had formed on the roads in the icy wind; hardly any rental cars here have winter tyres fitted.
But winter only lasts a few hours here in mid-February - before the sun drives it away. Schachmann has no complaints. "In the Sierra Nevada you have 25 centimetres of snowfall during the day - here we have really warm weather for winter and we ride short-short down here," emphasises the Paris-Nice winner. The workplace fits.
Inactive volcano
"The landscape is crazy! It's special with these lava fields - because it looks like it happened yesterday," says the 29-year-old Bora pro, who has landed on the largest Canary Island for the first time in his life. The lava looks as if it has recently solidified into stone in the middle of the river.
In fact, there hasn't been an active volcano on Tenerife for more than 100 years. "There's a lot of greenery here, beautiful vegetation - it's a feast for the eyes," says Schachmann, who, after a long and difficult phase with an exhaustion syndrome and a six-month break from racing, is now blossoming again in the Canarian spring (see interview).
"You can also ride on the high plateau here and spend even more time at altitude if you want to - the terrain is also extremely challenging overall," says Schachmann, explaining the special advantages of the training area around the mighty volcano. From the beach to the highest point that can be reached by road bike, there are no less than 2350 metres of ascent in one go - no Alpine pass can offer that.
You can pedal more than 30 kilometres from one end of the crater landscape to the other - consistently above the 2000 metre mark. Nowhere else in and around Europe are the climatic conditions so favourable so early in the year. Livigno, Kühtai, the San Pellegrino Pass and Sankt Moritz in the Alps are popular destinations for altitude training, while Andorra or Font-Romeu in the Pyrenees or the ski resort in the Sierra Nevada mountains in southern Spain are more suited to skiers than cyclists at this time of year.
Bora-Hansgrohe - The group dynamic drives us forward
"Go!", shouts Sylwester Szmyd, the sports director from Poland, to his athletes, who set off from the back entrance of the hotel at ten o'clock sharp. Thickly wrapped up, they race through the lava desert, turning right at Boca Tauce through the long straights that the TF-38 road cuts through the dark lava boulders, plunging towards the south-west coast of the island, racing through sweeping hairpin bends at breakneck speed.
Stop at the bottom: change or undress, apply plenty of factor 30 sun cream to the now bare skin of the arms and legs. Then the first long climb towards Santiago del Teide, the training group splits into splinter groups - depending on the pace. You can feel the group dynamic that drives the half-dozen racers in dark green - despite different fitness levels, different goals and different levels of fitness.
Team Bora-Hansgrohe - Bitterly serious?
Maximilian Schachmann and the newly signed Luxembourger Bob Jungels are often storming ahead uphill - they should already be in form at the beginning of March and shine above all in the spring classics Tour of Flanders, Amstel Gold Race and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Lennard Kämna, Patrick Konrad, Matteo Fabbro and Aleksandr Vlasov are mainly preparing for the big Giro d'Italia project, where they want to play as good a role as last year, when Kämna won a stage and team-mate Jai Hindley won the overall classification.
At the very back, you can usually see the small Italian Matteo Fabbro, who masters some of the climbs under a breathing mask. Coach Szmyd, who is driving the support car, a rented silver-grey VW Caddy, wants to measure the climbing specialist's oxygen intake. During a brief stop at the side of the road, he squeezes a drop of blood from Vlasov's earlobe somewhere on the long climb up to the Canadas to quickly measure the lactate that the Russian produced during the last ten-minute interval.
But it's not all bitterly serious. "There are a few games between us. Otherwise it would be boring," says Kämna with a smile, admitting that even professionals like to challenge each other in training.
Kämna, Schachmann & Co have just returned from a five-hour ride that took them through the breathtaking hairpin bends around the village of Masca - even if they had to stop in between in the traffic chaos of hire cars and tourist buses around the popular tourist destination and the drizzle on the steep, slippery ramps spoilt their training a little.
Bora-Hansgrohe: Everyone seems happy
When the streams of tourists and avalanches of hire cars have rolled out of the streets at the top of the island and down to the coast at sunset, the cycling pros at the Parador have a wonderfully quiet time - on the nights of the new moon, it is pitch black outside the hotel doors. Of course, there are also downsides - and not just because the sun first has to rise above the 2300 metre-high crater rims in the morning before temperatures rise well above zero.
The Colombian Rigoberto Uran once said that it was so lonely up there that you would slit your wrists if you didn't go down to the lively beaches from time to time. The premiere guests of Bora-Hansgrohe see it differently - they enjoy the seclusion. "You're not as stressed here as in Mallorca when you're in a big Ibero-star hotel and 180 people are having dinner together. There's so much background noise, it's a bit stressful. Here everything is very easy going, relatively quiet, relaxing. I enjoy the fact that you can relax here after training," says Kämna.
Get up, 8am breakfast, 9.30am activation and stretching with osteopath Bartek Czerwinski, 10am start of training, five to six hours in the saddle, uphill and downhill, with and without intervals, back at the hotel, change, shower, eat, massage in room 106 with physiotherapist Jonathan Davis, dinner from 7.30pm, bedtime. "There's not a minute to spare," emphasises Schachmann. No need for a leisure programme.
The world's elite come together at the Parador
In the thin mountain air, the cycling world comes together in the hotel on just a few square metres. No sooner has Team DSM around Romain Bardet departed than the next professional tour group fills the hotel, where a double room costs 200 euros per night without breakfast.
And so it happens that to the left of the corridor, where the jerseys of many teams from previous years hang framed, the Bora pros are warming up, while Roubaix winner Dylan van Baarle is doing core stabilisation exercises in the weight room opposite on the right; After training, Wout van Aert can be seen reading a book on an armchair in the stairwell on the first floor, Jumbo coach Merijn Zeeman is discussing deployment plans and how to beat Tadej Pogacar in front of the fireplace in the hotel lobby, Tour stage winner Christophe Laporte is chilling on the couch a few metres away, Primoz Roglic is walking past the bar to dinner - and finally a breath of nothingness flits through the dining room: Jonas Vingegaard, the slender Tour winner from Denmark, who will win his first race of the season five days later.
Everyone does their own thing
The hotel management has placed the tables of three professionals from EF Education EasyPost and the rest of the hotel guests between the Bora-Hansgrohe and Jumbo-Visma groups. In the morning, the men in EF pink are the first to set off, Jumbo-Visma turns right, Bora left, or vice versa - or they fight their way up the mountain together in small groups. "We don't have a huge competition here or look at each other's plates to see what everyone is eating - everyone does their own thing," emphasises Kämna with a view to the celebrity housemates such as Vingegaard & Co.
Everyone is preoccupied with themselves - big goals in the back of their minds, the effect of the altitude on their bodies. "I feel the altitude, of course. At first I sleep worse at night. I can feel it in my breathing when I walk up or down the stairs in the hotel. The first few days I can't get going, my pulse is much higher," reports Schachmann.
Wow effect
Anyone who has climbed 3,000 to 4,000 metres a day around the Teide summit no longer needs to worry about the Cote de la Redoute, Stilfser Joch, Monte Bondone, Galibier or Tourmalet later in the season.
The wow effect will hopefully follow soon. "One or two days after altitude training, you think the power meter isn't working properly because you're pedalling at a much higher power level," Schachmann knows from experience. A visit to Mount Teide, where, according to indigenous mythology, a demon is imprisoned under a god-made prop, seems to give you undreamt-of powers.
Altitude training in cycling - Teide instead of EPO
Altitude training is the body's adaptation to a lack of oxygen. Because the proportion of oxygen in the air we breathe decreases at higher altitudes, the body adapts by producing more red blood cells - which transport oxygen in the blood.
Altitudes of up to 2300 metres are now considered ideal. The higher the altitude, the greater the effect - but also the greater the risk of problems adapting to the altitude. Ideally, you should spend as much time as possible at altitude. Training performance must be reduced. For a long time, altitude training did not play a particularly important role in cycling - presumably because of the widespread doping with artificial EPO.
Andreas Kublik
Editor
