from Bruce Hildenbrand

The first weekend of the Tour welcomes the big mountains of the Pyrenees. While there were a few smaller hills on the way south, the long, race-defining climbs had yet to test the cyclists. The first day in the mountains is tough for the Tour riders, especially the contenders for the yellow jersey. With all the pre-Tour responsibilities the week before the start and the usually flat route in the first week of the race, it can be 10-14 days since they have ridden up a major hill. With fitness always a prime concern, the riders just do not know how they will perform in this most crucial of the Tour's challenges.

Five-time Tour winner Bernard Hinault had a pretty simple strategy for dealing with the uncertainty. Regardless of how he felt on that first day in the mountains he would just go to the front in a big gear and show everyone that he was ready for battle. Sometimes his strength was for real, other times it was pure bluffing, but however he felt, he won five Tours looking strong.

You might think that Hinault's bravado was a pretty simple ruse, but believe me, the top riders are definitely checking each other out looking for signs of weakness. Who can forget Lance Armstrong’s deception in 2001 when Jan Ullrich's Team Telekom was clearly checking out the Texan's climbing form on the first big day in the Alps. Lance decided to play along and when Jan and his boys smelled weakness, they poured on the coals hoping to catch Armstrong on what the French call a "jour sans" roughly translated to a "day without". In the end Armstrong turned the tables and went on to drop Ullrich and win atop the most hallowed of summits, l'Alpe d'Huez.

You don't win seven Tours by pure luck. Lance had a plan to gauge his climbing form and, obviously, it worked well. Armstrong found a one kilometer climb which averaged 10% near his training base in Girona, Spain. He measured his power output on this ascent religiously, using his output in watts and his weight to calculate his watts per kilogram. In the week before leaving for the Tour, his goal was to generate 6.7 watts per kilogram on the climb. When he reached that number he was confident that he could climb in the big mountains, sickness and injury aside, even though they were almost two weeks and many flat miles away.

We mere mortals face similar challenges in our cycling lives. More often than we would like, work or family obligations seem to put a damper on our preparations for the season's cycling goals. We can all learn from Lance and use power measurement on a known course to help us gauge our progress and give us the confidence that we will perform well when we finally arrive at our event.