What's in the Tank?

Two rides, and a question worth sitting with

There's a phrase in cycling about emptying the tank. Most of the time it's just something people say, yet as a cycling fan we got to see what it actually looks like more than once in the last month; however, two in particular stand out.

The first was Mathieu van der Poel on the Champs-Élysées, final stage of the Tour. He'd gone clear over Montmartre with Pogačar, held ten seconds into the finishing straight with an entire peloton coming at them, and then found one more acceleration that even the yellow jersey couldn't answer. He crossed the line and couldn't unclip. He went down onto the cobbles, curled up, and lay there with his face in his hands while Paris went absolutely mental around him. He couldn't stand up to celebrate the biggest one-day win left on his list.

Asked afterwards where it came from, he said he thought they were going to get caught, and that he just put his head down. Then this, which I keep coming back to: there's a saying in Dutch that it has to come from your toes. He said he didn't know where this one had come from, but it wasn't from his toes. He didn't know.

The second was Sigrid Haugset, three weeks later, stage 3 of the Tour de France Femmes. She attacked on the Col de la Savine with around 85km still to ride and stayed away. In the closing kilometres Lotte Kopecky (two-time world champion) closed to about ten seconds. Haugset knew it was happening,  saying afterwards that she was sure Kopecky would catch her, and that she thought about sitting up: "should I just drop down to her? Because OK, second is good." But she didn't sit up, she kept going and won the stage by over a minute. The longest successful solo win in the history of the race, beating a record that had stood since 2022. The Second professional win of her career and the First Norwegian ever to wear yellow in that race. Crossing the line so on the limit that she couldn’t even celebrate properly, "I could not lift my arms off the bike. It was impossible." She said she was too dizzy at the end to have taken in what had happened. Going a step further when Asked if the yellow jersey was a dream come true, she said she hadn't thought about it, because she'd never thought it was possible.

Two riders,  both expected to be caught, but kept going anyway. Pushing themselves to a deep dark place that many can only imagine, which made me think, how many of us really get close to that point, close to the limit of what is possible?

At what point does one person dive further into the difficulty or the suffering while another backs off and retreats to a safer place, a more comfortable place. Because I don't think most people ever find out. There's rarely a moment that demands everything, so we never build a reference point for what everything feels like. We get to somewhere uncomfortable, we register discomfort, and we back off. We call that our limit when in reality it’s not; it’s just the place where it started to hurt.  

The research on endurance has been moving in this direction for years now. The old picture was mechanical: you go until the body physically can't, and that's your ceiling. What's held up far better is that we stop when the effort required starts to exceed the effort we're WILLING to give, rather than can give, meaning the ceiling moves depending on what's at stake, who's watching, what you believe is possible, and how you're reading the discomfort in that moment.

That's why Haugset's ride is particularly interesting. The decisive moment in that stage wasn't physical; it was a decision with ten kilometres to go: sit up, or don't. And the uncomfortable truth is that sitting up was completely reasonable and in reality a good result for her. Second to a two-time world champion, after 75km alone off the front, it’s a brilliant day's work. Nobody would have said a word. That's exactly what makes it the real moment of the stage, because the exit was reasonable. Our limits rarely announce themselves as quitting; more often, they are an internal discussion justifying something as reasonable.

Afterwards she talked about what kept her going; she talked about the team car pushing her on, about her teammates, about people watching at home. Her attention went outwards, onto something bigger than how she was feeling. That's not a coincidence; it's one of the few things that reliably shifts what a person will tolerate. When the reason is bigger than you, the discomfort stops being the biggest concern.

Van der Poel's quote matters just as much, he had no description for where it came from, telling us  that it may not be a skill that we can simply summon on command when you decide you want it badly enough. It shows up when the conditions are right, the years of work, the meaning attached to that particular finish line, and the willingness to be in a state you can't talk your way out of.

So is it a skill? For the most part I would say yes. The ability to keep going while your body is negotiating with you is trained like anything else. You build it by repeatedly going past the first place it hurts and finding out you were fine. Every hard session where you don't take the exit is a small deposit. What you're actually building isn't toughness; it's evidence, so that when the moment comes you have somewhere honest to look for what you're capable of.

And the part that doesn't sit comfortably in a training plan: you probably can't find the edge without going over it sometimes. You don't learn where the line is by stopping short of it every time, you learn it by getting it wrong, probably more than once! Going too early, blowing up, sitting on the side of the road working out what happened. Van der Poel on those cobbles isn't a picture of perfect pacing; it's a picture of someone who went past the point of managing himself and got away with it. The days you overcook it are the days that tell you where the line actually was.

If there's something to take from all this, it's probably not "push harder". It's smaller and more useful than that. The next time you get to the point where backing off starts to feel sensible, notice it. That moment isn't your limit arriving; it's a decision presenting itself, and you get to choose how you answer it. It's not being forced upon you. You won't take it every time; you shouldn't, but the times that you don’t take that easy-out option are the times that you will really start to see what is actually in there!  

I've no idea where the bottom of my own tank is. I’ve tried some hard things, but when I look at those two performances I think I can safely say I have never hit that point. I've been closer some days than others. But watching someone refuse to sit up does make you consider wanting to go and find out.