After finishing second at Brabantse Pijl and second at the Amstel Gold Race, the Irish racer attacked his way to a fourth-place finish at Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Fans were as impressed by his gritty, combative style as they were by his results. Ben’s coaches were impressed by his power files.

Let’s take a look at Ben’s data from Liège-Bastogne-Liège with EF Education-Easypost performance manager Nate Wilson.

Ben and his teammates train and race with power2max power meters, which provide Nate and his colleagues with precise, reliable information about every second that our athletes spend on their bikes. Within a few minutes of the end of a race or training session, their data is automatically uploaded to TrainingPeaks, which is our coaches’ preferred analytic tool.

“TrainingPeaks is such a good platform for us to plan, analyze, and organize workouts,” Nate says, “The user interface just makes it so clear. It is so easy for me to flick back and immediately know what Ben has done. That is because the TrainingPeaks user interface is really good. It allows us to be as granular as we want to be when we open up a file and look at the details. I can scroll through the file and see the key moments on the climbs, as well as the overall impact.”

Liège-Bastogne-Liège was a very long, hard day out for Ben. He crossed the finish line after six hours and 22 minutes of racing, having done 5,224 kilojoules of mechanical work across the 260-km course, an effort which would have burned about 5,224 Calories, or 17 Belgian waffles.

(Although one Calorie, or kcal, is equivalent to 4.184 kilojoules, the human body is only 20-25% efficient at turning stored fuel into work. The remaining 75-80% is lost to heat. As such, cyclists can estimate that one kilojoule of work done is equal to about one Calorie burned.)

With 4,511 meters of climbing en route, Ben finished Liège-Bastogne-Liège with a normalized power of 296 watts. Normalized power is average power with the zeroes from coasting taken out. This gives a better measure of the difficulty of an effort than a simple average, since bike races are full of lulls and accelerations. Especially on a hilly course like Liège-Bastogne-Liège, where there are lots of climbs and descents, racers spend a lot of time pedaling very hard and some time hardly pedaling at all. If that time spent coasting is included, their average powers will be lower, but that doesn’t give a full account of the toll of their efforts. It’s a lot easier to ride, say, 200 watts on the flat at a steady effort than it would be to finish a ride of the same distance with the same average on a hilly course, when you’re going hard up the climbs but doing zero watts downhill. Normalized power better quantifies the physiological cost of racing.

At a race like Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the overall toll is only a fraction of the story though. In fact, Ben spent most of the race trying to do as little work as possible. His teammates sheltered him from the wind and brought him water bottles to help him save his strength for the decisive moments. Bike races last hours, but they are won and lost over the course of a few key minutes or even seconds. At Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the climbs from La Redoute onwards, 225 kilometers and more into the race, were crucial.

“Basically, the climbs from La Redoute to the finish were the hard ones,” Nate says. “Obviously, a lot of them were hard, but starting from Stockeu and then Haute Levée and Rosier, they were all somewhat controlled, and then from La Redoute each climb was pretty well full-gas. You have the total duration and kilojoules up to La Redoute, and then the average power for each of those. The race basically comes down to four climbs from La Redoute to the finish.”

Ben averaged 458 watts up La Redoute. He held that effort for four minutes and 58 seconds. He couldn’t quite match eventual race winner Remco Evenepoel’s acceleration over the top, but hung on with a group of chasers. For the rest of the finale, Ben pushed the pace every time the race went uphill. He knows he doesn’t pack much of a sprint, so wanted to get to the finish line with as small of a group as possible.

“Ben is obviously really strong, but he is not the most explosive rider,” Nate says. “His strength is in his resistance, his ability to repeat efforts, and his fatigue resistance.”

That makes him well suited to the Ardennes classics. The longer and harder the race, the better. The fact that top riders are attacking from further and further out is fine for Ben.

“As these races are getting harder from longer out, it is suiting Ben,” Nate says. “At Amstel, Pidock could follow Pogacar, but then couldn’t, and over the remaining duration of the race Ben was quite a bit stronger than Pidcock. He is maybe not the most explosive rider. If it comes down to one single climb, like at Flèche Wallonne, he might not do super well, but when there is all of this resistance to build up, it makes him quite competitive.”

One reason that is the case is that Ben races with a very high cadence. Looking at his file from Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Ben averaged 99 rpm for the duration of the race. Up the slopes of Redoute, which is over 10%, he averaged 91 rpm. While other riders could match his accelerations with higher torque earlier in the race, their legs failed faster than Ben’s. Over the course of a 260-kilometer monument, turning lighter gears allowed Ben to save his strength, so he could keep attacking deep into the race.

In the finale of Liège, Ben did 365 watts for 3 minutes and 53 seconds up the Cornemont. He then did 477 watts for three minutes and ten seconds up Forges and 463 watts for four minutes and one second up Roche aux Faucons. Ben weighs less than 65kg. After over six hours of racing, there were only two other riders left in the chasing group who could match his seven-plus w/kg accelerations.

Ben did wish he could hammer a bigger gear in the sprint at the end. He rode onto the finishing straight in a group of three. They were racing for second. He led it out and finished at the back of the group. Fourth in his first monument, after finishing second at Brabantse Pijl and second at Amstel, was still a phenomenal result. Ben is only 22. With the help of his coaches, and informed by his data on TrainingPeaks, he will keep practicing.

Ben Healy is just getting started.

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