Once the tests are completed, competitors will sit in their hotel rooms, with their legs up, surfing the Internet, reading, watching television and moving as little as possible. Their training has been done and now they simply rest, eat and ride their bikes without intensity. They can only harm their fitness by tiring themselves out.

In the last two months, I have been training and racing with my Team Columbia teammates as they prepared for the Tour de France. As the spring faded in late May and the summer sun began burning the lush Catalan countryside around Girona, our rides intensified as we began climbing into the high Pyrenees often riding tightly in the draft of a scooter to simulate the speeds of a race.

Training is about race simulation; we ride routes similar to those we will be racing, adding intervals of intense, heart rate elevating bursts over specific periods of time or distances. During the intervals, we push our bodies close to the maximum, to where we can feel the pain we will feel in a race.

When I was a child, my grandfather scolded my mother for allowing me to push myself to exhaustion on a bike. Once, as I sat on a curb on the other side of the finish line, unable to speak, breathing hard and seeing stars because of low blood-sugar levels, he said it was inhumane that she allowed me to get my heart rate so high and called my panting unhealthy. To me, it was natural. It was what cyclists, did and riding was my passion. Now, as a professional, my job is suffering.

Image Michael Barry, left, in the 2003 Vuelta a España, writes about the importance of training. Credit... Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

To monitor our efforts, clamped to our handlebars are small computers that measure all of the essential parameters, at least for a cyclist: time, the power output of our legs measured in watts, speed, distance, and heart rate. The daily training sessions last from three to seven hours, we ride over several 5 to 20 kilometer-long mountain passes and cover between 90 and 200 kilometers in total. The distances are often less than some days in the Tour. But the time on the bike is similar because the draft created by a pack of nearly 200 means that it moves much faster than a small group of riders.