In the increasingly scientific world of professional cycling, the altitude training camp has been a key area of evolution. If you go through the start list for the Tour de France, there won't be many who haven't spent some of the preceding weeks on a lonely mountainside, breathing thin air, turning pedals, and doing not much else.
Cyclingnews has already spoken with Jumbo-Visma’s head of performance Mathieu Heijboer about the benefits of altitude training. But what about the nitty-gritty, day-to-day organisation of a training camp at altitude, and how much has that changed in the last 10 years?
There’s arguably few people as expert on the subject than Jumbo-Visma’s Gerard Spierings. Now in his 50s, the Dutchman began his soigneur career working with Netherlands’ Olympic mountain bike star Bart Brentjens before heading on for a spell with Skil-Shimano in 2010, then Rabobank’s women's team, and now Jumbo-Visma.
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Be it phone apps for riders to tell the team cooks exactly what they need for their evening meals, designing a computer program to decide how many recovery drinks a team will consume over four weeks atop a Spanish mountain, or the best kinds of custard fillings for bread rolls, Spierings has the answers.
We sat down with him at Jumbo-Visma's recent training camp at the Sierra Nevada ski station, near Granada in southern Spain. The camp is held at Sierra Nevada’s Centro de Alto Rendimiento (High Performance Centre), or, to give it its Spanish initials, CAR.
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