| Issue # 110: Beachbody News
Contents
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Allez! Ride the Tour de France |
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Beachbody Receives Email Award |
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The Secret to BODY TRANSFORMATION . . . |
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Tip of the Week |
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New Success Story: Diane D. |
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Tony Horton Gives Self a P90X™ Workout |
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2004 Hawaii Trip |
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Recipe: Spicy Red Pepper Pasta Sauce |
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
Aristotle
Allez! Ride the Tour de France
Ever wonder what to do with all your newfound fitness? Why not try and ride the Tour?
By Steve Edwards
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| Steve Edwards |
Watching Lance Armstrong fly up L'Alpe d'Huez spinning a cadence of 90 rpm is nothing short of astonishing. And until you've seen it live, you can't possibly believe the speed that a human being can propel a bicycle up a mountain. It becomes even more impressive when you've ridden the same mountain yourself, which in this particular case, I had.
Everyone should catch a stage of the Tour de France live at some point in their lives. The spectacle is beyond belief, especially considering it's a live sporting event held in public. And in a truly perfect world, everyone should ride at least one stage too.
Here are two important facts about the Tour de France:
1. You can't ride in the Tour de France any more than you can participate in the NBA
finals, but . . .
2. You can ride the Tour de France.
Allow me to explain.
First off, cycling is a sport, and the Tour is its pinnacle. In order to make a tour-eligible team you must be an outstanding pro racer. Then your team must be chosen as one of the top 20 in the world. Beyond this, you need to be chosen as one of your team's nine best riders to make the Tour squad. What this means it that the worst rider in the Tour de France would drop your local pros (those guys you see riding around your town in matching uniforms really fast) like they were little old ladies on Huffys with flowered baskets.
However, the Tour is also a public event. Its route follows the roads around France and is made available to the public the same day it's announced to the riders. Each year, thousands of fans ride part of the course. Tour groups organize rides where you follow the race around, riding part, or all, of each stage. And some crazed fans, albeit very few, ride the entire 2,000-plus-mile course. Each morning, that afternoon's course is littered with thousands of fans wanting a vicarious taste of the race.
To win the Tour requires that you be blessed with an enormous amount of natural talent, as a start. After that, you must dedicate your life to peaking during one 3-week period each year. To get into Tour shape, Armstrong will weigh each bit of food he eats during the early season until his weight is low enough to enable him to hit a speed fast enough to win. Since you can only produce so much wattage by gaining strength, weight must be reduced in order to increase speed up a mountain. According to his coach, Chris Carmichael, if Lance weighed the same as he did before he had cancer (when he was a talented but unfocused racer), he would lose three and a half minutes in the 15 kilometers up L'Alpe d'Huez to rival Jan Ullrich, as opposed to gaining a minute. Danish racer Frank Hoj commented, "It's boring to predict this but Armstrong will win again because he's the most focused of all the riders. He does everything he's supposed to, exactly as he should, without fail. No one else is willing to do this." For a Tour rider, completing a climb like L'Alpe d'Huez is no big deal. Three-time Tour winner (and first American) Greg LeMond said, "It's not the mountains that makes the Tour hard. It's how fast you go up them."
For the average Joe, summiting L'Alpe d'Huez on a bike is a big deal—a long, arduous, and often endless deal. The difference between riding a bike on flat ground and up a hill is monumental. To the uninitiated, going uphill on a bike is harder than walking uphill. The nine-mile jaunt can turn into an all-day epic.
Yet the public comes out to face the challenge. And it comes in droves. I have no idea how many people took on L'Alpe during this year's Tour but it must be well into six figures. I rode it a week before the event and must have passed a hundred people. The day before was so crowded you could hardly ride. Most were on nice racing bikes or mountain bikes (that have lower gears more suited for steep climbs), but many were on machines that would be a challenge to ride down the Venice Beach strand, much less up the most revered climb in all of cycling! But they come for the festival, the history, and to experience some firsthand suffering of their own. The atmosphere, even a week before the race, was electric. People from all over the world were camped alongside the road, encouraging us with shouts of "allez," "venga," and "hopp." For my part, I threw out yellow LIVESTRONG bracelets to the kids I passed.
This carnival atmosphere makes that Grand Boucle (French term for the race) very hard on the racers. At the stage finish the public engulfs the riders. Without trying, I ended up close enough to high-five Ullrich, Andreas Kloden, and Ivan Basso at the Villard de Lans finish as they rode by en route to their team trailers. No fences separate the racers from the public. The fans remain amazingly respectful, yet it's a lot for the racers to deal with. So much so that Armstrong credited his main improvement during his third tour victory as the ability to figure out how to reduce the time he had to deal with the public, resulting in an hour's more rest each day. And rest, meaning recovery, is the crux of the Tour de France. "The Tour is won in bed," claimed five-time winner Eddie Merckx.
For the fans, it's all about the carnival. It's hard for Americans to relate to it, but if you can picture the entire hullabaloo surrounding the Super Bowl happening on public streets, you'll have some idea. Most people focus on one stage, where they'll take the family, some bikes, and camp out waiting for the race to come by. All of this to see a few minutes—at most—of racing. But it's not all about racing. On major stages the processions start days before, kind of like an athletic version of Woodstock. And the day of the race is complete madness.
Trying to maximize our ability to view as much of the race as possible, I rode from Grenoble to the ski town of Villard de Lans the day before to scope out the course and layout. I figured that by renting mountain bikes in a town 10 kilometers away, we could avoid the traffic getting to the race, then move around on the course using shortcuts made possible by the ability to ride on dirt, to view the racers at various points of the course.
Most towns that get to host the start or finish of a stage roll out the red carpet and the place looks like it just won its independence. In Villard de Lans there were bands and performers almost everywhere you looked. The race came through town en route to its finish at the ski station, 5 kilometers above. With our bikes, we were able to catch the prerace parade in town before riding to the finish. The parade is a caravan of race sponsors throwing out goodies to the audience. It's such a spectacle that it's arguably more fun than the race itself. This finishes about an hour before the tete en course (head of the race) comes through. In between, we were allowed to ride our bike up the actual course for a kilometer. We couldn't believe we were let on the climb. It was the most exciting kilometer of riding I've ever done. To catch the final, we had to take a shortcut and hammer up an adjacent climb for a couple thousand feet to beat the racers to the finish. Not exactly couch-potato viewing, but well worth the trouble.
A sprint finish is the most exciting thing in cycling. On flat stages, it's a mass procession of bodies elbowing each other for position at 40 mph. At Villard de Lans, the sprint was atop a climb and the field had been whittled to five contenders: Armstong, Basso, Kloden, Ullrich, and American Levi Leipheimer. The speed was unbelievable. I broke into a sweat just watching. Someone told me that night that on TV Armstrong looked like he cruised to victory. In person, he was fighting tooth and nail with Basso right to the line. The announcers were going wild and a huge TV screen showed a close-up of Armstrong punching the air as he crossed the line. I'll have chills replaying this memory for the rest of my life. A moment later Ullrich et al. rode right by me. I rarely feel fat, but seeing these guys up close inspired me both to eat better and train harder.
"The first year I rode the Tour de France, 1984, I had raced practically every other major professional race. I had won the Tour de l'Avenir, which was supposedly the junior version of the Tour. Supposedly. In that first Tour, I couldn't believe there was never any letup. I could never recuperate. In the first Pyrenees stage, suffering from bronchitis, I was in so much pain that I could barely see! My legs felt as if they were no longer there. I kept pushing and getting dropped on the climbs. All I could think about was quitting."
—Greg LeMond
The Tour is often called the hardest athletic event in the world. Seeing these guys finish this stage and knowing they'd be doing something just as hard again the next day is so daunting. You can see how drug allegations in the sport are rampant. To most of us, pushing the body like this just seems inconceivable. But to think this way just puts limits on human potential—something that anyone who looks at history would know is a mistake. We still have no idea what humans are capable of. All we know is what's been done up 'til now, and that it will improve in the future.
I set two completely arbitrary goals at the base of L'Alpe d'Huez. One was to break an hour. The other was not to allow Armstrong to beat me by 20 minutes (very arbitrary considering he hadn't ridden yet). Having not done it before, I had no idea whether or not this was possible. In fact, it was both a random and absurd goal to make. But I like to have goals, and these seemed nice and round. L'Alpe has 21 famed hairpin turns. Each one is marked with a sign telling you how far you have to go. I rode steady over the steeper bottom section of the climb, not wanting to blow up early. Plus, there was a guy in front of me riding about my tempo. I was slowly gaining on him but when I'd get fairly close he'd surge away. Unfortunately, he quit with 10 turns to go. Losing my (again arbitrary) rabbit, I was forced to look elsewhere for pacing.
Doing quick calculations it seemed like I was close to my goal the entire way, although I don't think I believed I really had a chance until I was into the final 5 turns. Every now and then I'd put in a surge, a-la Armstrong, and accelerate to 90 rpm. In about 100 meters, I'd be about to blow and have to back off. Hou la-la! When I hit turn 21, I knew it would be close as there were a couple more kilometers through town to the summit. I started hammering with all I had left. My jersey was hanging open and flying in the wind, which the townspeople loved. Cars honked and people in cafes applauded as I came by, going faster and faster. I had to weave through some traffic, but instead of getting to yelled at, I heard shouts of "allez, allez!" I couldn't tell where the finish line was so I just ran out of road and hit my watch: 59:47*.
Vive Le Tour!
*The following week, Armstrong won the stage to L'Alpe d'Huez in 39:42.
Beachbody Receives Email Marketing Best Practices Award!
During the first six months of 2004, Arial Software secretly audited the email subscription practices and the federal CAN-SPAM ACT compliance of 1,057 prominent organizations (including many Fortune 500 and popular Internet firms) by subscribing to their email newsletters. Arial Software researchers then tracked the actual email practices and behaviors of each organization, noting subscription handling, privacy protection practices, spamming behavior, unsubscribe handling, and other characteristics.
We are happy to announce Beachbody was one of the 65 online businesses recognized for outstanding email practices.
Click here to read the full article from Arial Software.
The Secret to BODY TRANSFORMATION is the Beachbody
Support Team!
The growth of the Beachbody Support Team has been remarkable—not because of the sheer numbers, but because we have seen a remarkable increase in the consistency of weight loss and body transformation results due to the increase in peer support!
The Support Team is how you can work with fellow members to help each other stay motivated to Keep Pushing Play!
| Beachbody Support Team Members |
15,848 |
| Beachbody Support Team Coaches |
252 |
| Message Board Members |
77,808 |
| WOWY™ Workouts Logged Last Week |
2,931 |
| WOWY Success Buddy Workouts Last Week |
332 |
| WOWY Record |
39 people online at 9:04 AM ET on 7/28/04 |
As of July 28, 2004
Check it out and see how these tools can help you stay committed to your success!
Tip of the Week
By Steve Edwards
Are you getting enough shut-eye?
Sleep duration and patterns canhttp://www.msn.com/ affect all aspects of your health, especially when you work out hard. Most people need 7 or 8 hours of sleep. Your body functions at its best when you have regular sleep patterns, generally sleeping at about the same time every night. So if your workouts aren't going well, or you don't feel like you're recovering as well as normal, consider adding some sleep to your schedule.
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New Success Story: Diane D.
Congratulations to Diane D., our featured Success Story for August!
Otherwise known as "the incredible shrinking woman," in just over a year Diane lost a phenomenal 88 pounds and dropped from a size 20 to a size 6! A veteran of Beachbody fitness programs including Power 90®, Power Half Hour®, Slim in 6®, and Slim Series™, she is now an active Beachbody Support Team Coach ("dianed"), and is gearing up to terminate P90X™.
To read Diane's Success Story, click here. |
Tony Horton Gives Self a P90X Workout!
Check out the August issue of Self, featuring Tony’s "10 top-to-toe toners." In the article "Body Bonus" by Colleen Moriarty, Tony gives a routine that "attacks a snug spot . . . and works surrounding muscles to maximize the toning" with moves taken from his P90X fitness program. The article also includes a bonus set of tear-out cards illustrating each exercise.
The August issue of Self is on newsstands now.
2004 Hawaii Trip
If you've had incredible results with Power 90®, you could be invited to Hawaii!
Submit your Power 90 Success Story and you could be off to a one-week all-expense-paid trip to the tropical paradise of Kauai! Click here to learn more about our annual Hawaii trip and how you can submit your story. Hurry, the deadline is September 1, 2004!
Recipe: Spicy Red Pepper Pasta Sauce
By Denis Faye
This week, it's my turn to throw down a recipe for y'all. It's a riff off a recipe I found in the Lean and Luscious and Meatless cookbook by Bobbie Hinman and Millie Snyder. (An excellent series of books, I might add. Not only are the books filled with super-healthy recipes, but each recipe is broken down into calories, protein, fat, carbs, sodium, and cholesterol.)
If you have a recipe you think is Beachbody material, send it to recipes@beachbody.com. If we choose to use it, we'll send you a free T-shirt!
This is a red pepper sauce I zinged up a little.
Ingredients:
1 tablespoon olive oil
5 cups chopped sweet red peppers
2 cups chopped onions
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 small serrano chili, de-seeded and finely chopped
Heat oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add all ingredients except serrano chili and cook until peppers are very tender, about 25 minutes. Stir frequently while cooking. Spoon mixture into a blender and add serrano chili. Blend until smooth. Add a few teaspoons of water if necessary for blending.
Makes 6 servings of 1.5 cups each.
