2011 Tour de France - Stage 15, July 17

Sorensen has an easy day!

Stage Results

1 Mark Cavendish (GBr) HTC-Highroad 4:20:24
2 Tyler Farrar (USA) Team Garmin-Cervelo
3 Alessandro Petacchi (Ita) Lampre - ISD
129 Chris Anker Sörensen (Den) Saxo Bank- SunGard 01:35

Chris Anker Sorensen's SRM Data

Weight- 64kg
Functional Threshold Power- 400w
Total Time = 4:21
TSS = 210
Average Power =  210 Watts. Avg Normalized Power* = 260
Avg HR = 125bpm
Max HR = 153 bpm
Mean Maximal 1-minute power = 443w
Mean Max 5-minute power = 341w
Mean Maximal 20-minute power = 270w
Avg Cadence =  86 rpm
Avg Speed =  27.1 mph

Race Analysis

Chris Anker Sorensen has a nice easy day in the Tour de France today.

Sorensen enjoyed a great ride in the peloton today and it came at an ideal time, as he certainly has been giving it his all everyday in this race. With a smooth ride today, his normalized power for the stage was only 260 watts and he barely burned 3700 kiloCalories in the peloton. He spent nearly 2.5 hours in his active recovery training zone as well and didn’t pedal for 20.5% (56 minutes) of the stage!

With the easier stage today and a rest day tomorrow,  this will help to reduce some of the fatigue and increase Sorensen's freshness.   We can track fatigue and freshness in a chart called the “Performance Manager”.  Right now this rider is the most fatigued he has been for the entire 2011 Tour de France and his “Training Stress Balance”(TSB)  is -91, which means he isn’t as fatigued as he was in 2010 (-93) or 2009 (-96), but is very close. The Performance Manager chart in TrainingPeaks WKO+ is the perfect tool to quantify an athlete’s fatigue and freshness along with their fitness.  When an athlete’s  Training Stress Balance (TSB) is zero, he is neither fatigued nor fresh and when their TSB is a positive number like +15, then he is fresh and could create one of their very best power outputs.  A positive TSB is desirable when you start a race that you really want to win and is an indicator of good “Form”.  Since Sorensen had the luxury of an easy day today and is doing an active recovery day tomorrow, then on Tuesday, his TSB will recover to -62, which will be the freshest he has been since stage 12.  He will need this rest day as he prepares to help Contador in the Alps starting on Tuesday.  With a ton of work left to do in this year’s Tour de France, the rest day came at a perfect time.

In today’s stage, Chris rode easy in the last 28 minutes even when the pace picked up, not worrying too much about finishing in the main bunch.  He lost about a 1:39 to the leaders but this isn't concerning as he needed to keep a nice and smooth pace already thinking about recovery and his rest day tomorrow.   While today’s stage wasn’t the easiest of this race, he only scored 210 TSS points today and spent much of the time sitting in the draft of the peloton preparing for recovery.   A perfect summer day for Chris!

Be sure to view Sorensen's actual race file in the TrainingPeaks.com Interactive File Viewer. Or, download his original file to view in TrainingPeaks WKO+ for your own in-depth analysis.

* Click here to learn what TSS (Training Stress Score), IF (Intensity Factor), NP (Normalized Power) and FTP (Functional Threshold Power) are, and how you can use these metrics along with a power meter to optimize your own training and racing just like pro's. Click here if you don't have a power meter but still want the benefits some of the same metrics in your training and racing.

File Analysis by Hunter Allen, Co-Author of "Training and Racing with a Power Meter" and Co-Developer of TrainingPeaks WKO+ analysis software.

Data captured by SRM Powercontrol 7.

Thank you to Saxo Bank-SunGard and Chris Anker Sorensen for allowing us to share race data and provide analysis on today's stage.

Click to View, Share or Download Today's File.

Download WKO File

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