A world-class marathoner would never even consider racing a marathon in two consecutive days - maybe not even in two consecutive weeks. It just takes too long to recover from such a race.
Yet the TDF has three mountain stages in a row: five hours of exertion at near maximal effort (at least for the contenders) for three consecutive days (in contrast to a marathon duration of a bit over two hours), and all this in the middle of three weeks of racing, with only two rest days.
So how is this possible? Is a world-class performance in a TDF mountain stage just a lot less taxing than a world-class marathon? That just doesn't seem plausible. I'm not implying anything in particular here. Something just seems out of whack here.
Yet the TDF has three mountain stages in a row: five hours of exertion at near maximal effort (at least for the contenders) for three consecutive days (in contrast to a marathon duration of a bit over two hours), and all this in the middle of three weeks of racing, with only two rest days.
So how is this possible? Is a world-class performance in a TDF mountain stage just a lot less taxing than a world-class marathon? That just doesn't seem plausible. I'm not implying anything in particular here. Something just seems out of whack here.