Ask Julich about pain, and he speaks about heartache. "I think the worst pain that you suffer isn't so much the physical pain, it's the mental pain, the mental disappointment," he says. "I don't know if you can correlate disappointment with pain, but at least I do. The physical pain, you know why it's there. But the mental pain that you go through, the frustration, that's sometimes the most difficult. Just not finishing as well as I would like. For me, it's just the suffering of your body not following what your mind wants it to do."
When he crashed during the '99 time trial, Julich says his first impulse was to get back on his bike. He didn't feel any pain -- until he tried to get up, "and it felt like somebody was holding me down with a spear in my chest."
Tyler Hamilton rode most of last year's race with a collarbone snapped in two places.
(Laurent Rebours -- AP)
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"You don't think, 'Oh my God, my elbow's broken.' You think more about the bike race," Julich said. "To a certain degree, that's kind of sick. But it's just who we are. We're warriors. You just pick yourself up and get going again and sort it out later."
Julich says that as far as pure pain threshold is concerned, losing skin and sticking to the sheets at night is worse than a broken bone. But any injury or muscle burn hurts worse at the back of the peloton, as the main herd of riders is called, than at the front.
"I've always said that you suffer just as much in the front as in the back, but in the back is when you feel it," Julich said. "In the front you're probably suffering more, but you have so much more adrenaline going through your body that you don't feel it as much. It's almost a good pain, compared to a miserable pain when you're in the 'grupetto' " -- the group sliding off the back of the pack as the peloton races ahead.
Lose contact with that invaluable drafting effect of riding behind another rider, and you'll need to gut out even more horsepower to combat the wind resistance alone.
"Pain is huge," said sports psychologist Saul Miller, author of "Sports Psychology for Cyclists," in a phone interview from Vancouver. He has counseled some riders to develop mantras to deal with the pain. "They'll think, 'pain is power,' and go deeper into their breathing," he said. Another rider would say to himself, "If it's hurting me, it's killing them."
The Massage
Here is where it ends. It's every rider's antidote to a punishing day: the massage. Every team employs several soigneurs -- French for "those who care for" -- who are the cyclists' surrogate mothers. They pack lunches and sling them over the riders' shoulders at the race's designated "feed zones." They ready their hotel rooms and oversee the dinner menu. They act as bodyguards between the riders and the crush of public and media at the starts and finishes. They are also their confidants.
Most of all, they are their masseurs. The post-stage massage is a ritual of spiritual and physical importance. It gets the riders to relax, ready to eat and sleep and start the grueling test all over again the next day. And it flushes toxins out of their muscles, restores blood flow, getting the legs back into condition so the riders can drain them again.
A small room at the Hotel Jeanne D'Arc has a fresh herbal smell from the massage oil that Eddy Wegelius is working into the legs of Anthony Charteau, a climbing specialist with the French bakery-owned team Brioches la Boulangere. One of this team's riders, Thomas Voeckler, 25, is the current race leader, the wearer of the coveted yellow jersey. He has the fastest accumulated time over the first week of the race, though that lead will likely dissolve once the serious mountain climbing starts and titans such as Armstrong, Hamilton and Germany's Jan Ullrich start to zoom away from a struggling field.
Wegelius, sweaty and breathing hard, lowers his shoulder to dig deeply into the rider's thigh. He twists the flesh, rolling and folding it like a baker kneading dough.
After a day of racing, not even the massage is pain-free. "It hurts at first," Charteau acknowledges. This stage into the town of Gueret was a particularly tough one, "lots of attacks. The legs started to burn. We have the yellow jersey, so we don't want to lose it. That's what we think a lot about on the course. And when our legs hurt, we aren't allowed to fall back. We have to stay in front. Even when you think your legs are" -- he whistles sharply, describing an inflating balloon with his hands.
Now, however, that all starts to fall away. "Yes," he says with a smile to Wegelius, closing his eyes, as the soigneur bends Charteau's knee and rakes his fingers along his quadriceps. "Especially when you do that."
