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"&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Twenty-one stages, 2,267 miles, 198 riders, 12 million spectators, and 101 years of history: The Tour de France is the most prestigious and arguably the most grueling cycling race in the world. The 23-day event takes riders up and over three mountain ranges and through four countries, in a distance about equal to the drive from Boston to Salt Lake City. So how on Earth do riders train to prevail in such a crucible?\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u201CI expect to go through some rough days,\u201D says Ben King, one of nine cyclists on the American Garmin-Sharp Team, who will compete in his first Tour de France this year. \u201CPeople talk about the hammer that hits some time around 10 days into the race\u2014they say it's key to overcome that. But it's already clear that the pressure and stress surrounding this race are immense.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;King knows something about stress\u2014he overcame enough of it in 2010 to win the National Road Race Championships. But it\u2019s different when you\u2019re dealing with a race of such international acclaim as the Tour, says Robby Ketchell, director of sport science for Garmin-Sharp and the man responsible for all training of the Boulder, Colo.-based team.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u201CWe\u2019ve been preparing our riders for the Tour since January,\u201D Ketchell says. \u201CIt\u2019s about progressively overloading each rider with the right metrics so he can peak at the right moment.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In simpler terms, this means pushing each rider to get stronger and faster without pushing him so hard that he ends up overtrained, injured, or simply too tired by the time the Tour rolls around. It\u2019s a delicate dance that Ketchell says he begins early in the year by building up each cyclist\u2019s endurance and strength, and then socking them with more intense speed and climbing sessions as the Tour approaches.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u201CA really big week would be anywhere between 25 and 30 hours of riding,\u201D says Ketchell. \u201CCloser to the Tour, we do a lot of climbing\u2014between 20 to 40 minutes on a four-hour ride, sometimes on a 15- to 17-percent gradient. A lot of times, the road serpentines, and if you\u2019re just a general cyclist riding up, you\u2019d have to serpentine with the road. But these guys just go straight up. It\u2019s pretty grueling.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grueling, however, is what gets results, and Ketchell and the rest of Garmin-Sharp have high hopes for the team\u2019s leader, Andrew Talansky\u2014the best U.S. hope for a podium placement, if not the yellow jersey. \u201CWhen he\u2019s doing some of his biggest training loads, he\u2019s riding up to four or five hour a day, sometimes six,\u201D Ketchell says. \u201CBut there are so many variables\u2014that\u2019s what makes cycling so great and so hard to predict. [Talansky\u2019s] done all the preparation he can, so he has a really great shot.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Part of Talansky\u2019s preparation, along with that of every other cyclist on the Tour, is to race\u2014and race a lot. According to Ketchell, Talanksy has logged 35 racing days since January (including the recent eight-stage Crit\u00E9rium du Dauphin\u00E9 in early June, which he won); other cyclists on the Garmin-Sharp Tour team have put it close to 50 racing days. Oftentimes, too, riders don\u2019t have much recovery time between their last race and the Tour\u2014King, for example, wrapped up the nine-stage Tour de Suisse only 12 days before the start of the Tour de France. \u201CThe racing part is something [the fans] really don\u2019t think about,\u201D Ketchell says. \u201CBut these riders are doing a significant amount of hours in the peloton before the Tour.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are other variables &amp;nbsp;that influence\u2014and sometimes sidetrack\u2014Tour training. The race\u2019s route changes every year, and with it the terrain and weather conditions. Perhaps more significantly, the teams also change, and many riders don\u2019t know whether they\u2019ll be part of the Tour until just days before race time. \u201COur Tour team wasn\u2019t picked until a couple of weeks ago,\u201D says Ketchell. \u201CIt all depends on the health of the rider and how they\u2019re performing.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The uncertainty of whether a cyclist will make the Tour team, the dual demands of training and racing, the months upon months of four-hour days on the bike, the agonizing climbs up hills that look more like stock graphs with triple-digit growth\u2014it all culminates in a race that Ketchell says no amount of training can truly prep a rider for. \u201CI think experience makes all the difference,\u201D he says. \u201CYou really can\u2019t prepare for the setting of the Tour because there\u2019s nothing else like it.\u201D\r\n&lt;/p&gt;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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