The women’s professional peloton is deeper and stronger than ever, with women like Alice Barnes, Leah Dixon and Sarah Gigante throwing down serious watts at the pointy end of the pack. To pay homage to their performances, we collected some key metrics, including a Colorado Classic winner’s average speed (and some other fun ones), to see just how fast these pros are and how the rest of us would stack up against the world’s best.

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Time Trial Speed

Pro women’s teams crank out team time trials at around 30+ mph speeds. For example, Eva Buurman and the squad from Team TIBCO-Silicon Valley Bank averaged 31 mph (49.9 km/hr) during last year’s 2020 Giro Rosa team time trial (16.8 kilometers/10.4 miles).

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In comparison, the winning women’s team at the 2019 Philly Phlyer, Mathletes Racing, finished in 22:24 and 29 mph average (11 miles). That’s still super fast, but once you get over about 18 to 20 mph, the power you need to overcome wind resistance increases exponentially. That’s where that pro-level power kicks in.

Average Heart Rate

Pro hearts can jackhammer along at super high rates, ranging from an average of 178 bpm for nearly four hours for Leah Dixon (Team TIBCO-Silicon Valley Bank) to an average of 186 bpm during the Giro Rosa last year for Eva Buurman.

But if you’re not hitting those numbers, don’t sweat it. A healthy threshold heart rate for a typical active woman is in the ballpark of 155 to 160 beats per minute, depending on your age.

Power-to-Weight Ratio

The power-to-weight ratio, or how many watts you can produce per kilogram or pound of body weight, is one of the hallmarks of cycling success, and world class women riders can generate enough to power a house. Pro women at the top of the ranks can produce about 19 W/kg for 5 seconds; 9 W/kg for 1 minute; 6.5 W/kg for 5 minutes; and 5.5 W/kg at their threshold, according to power guru Andrew Coggan, Ph.D., co-author (along with Hunter Allen) and cycling scientist behind Training and Racing with a Power Meter.

Good amateurs, on the other hand, can generate about 13.5 W/kg for 5 seconds; 7 W/kg for 1 minute; 4.5 for 5 minutes; and about 3.7 W/kg at their threshold.

What does that wattage look like in real life? Well, in Gent-Wevelgem, Kristen Faulkner threw down:

  • Average power: 226 watts
  • Normalized power: 289 watts
  • Max power: 1,005 watts
  • 1-minute power: 463 watts
  • 5-minute power: 383 watts
  • 10-minute power: 338 watts

Training Hours Per Week

Being a pro is a full-time job (which many women do on top of their full time job…but that’s another story), and time on the bike alone is a part-time job. Pros like Sarah Gigante (TIBCO-Silicon Valley Bank) clock about 20 hours of riding time a week.

For serious recreational cyclists not paid to ride their bikes, half that amount—about 10 hours a week—is a solid amount of weekly training time. Bonus: 10 hours of riding a week also doubles the odds of aging disease-free and fully functional.

Race Speed

You can’t be a pro unless you’re fast. And the women in the front of the women’s pro peloton, like Chloé Dygert (Canyon/SRAM Racing) are consistently quite speedy. Dygert swept all four stages of the 2019 Colorado Classic, maintaining an average speed of about 23 mph for most of the 220-mile race.

To put that in context, fast amateur women tackling the same terrain at the Steamboat Stage Race in Colorado that same year averaged about 19 mph.

Resting Heart Rate

Pros are so efficient at using oxygen, their hearts don’t need to tick at very high speeds when they’re not nose in the wind. Dixon, for instance, has a resting heart rate of a leisurely 38 bpm. The average resting heart rates among the women of Canyon/SRAM Racing range from 35 to 60, says team performance director Lars Teutenberg.

Considerably higher resting heart rates of 60 to 100 bpm are considered normal, though fit women will often have heart rates at the lower end of that range.

VO2 Max

Considered one of the gold standard metrics of endurance performance, VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen that your body can take in and use. (It’s recorded in milliliters per kilogram of weight per minute of exercise or ml/kg/min.) As you’d expect, pros can take in and use a lot. But it’s important to note that there’s not a direct relationship between a high VO2 max and podium-level performance. Many other variables, such as lactate threshold and efficiency (not to mention tactical smarts) are equally, if not more, valuable in the race for the top spots.

So it’s not terribly surprising that there’s “quite a bandwidth” in VO2 max—ranging from 69 to 80 ml/kg/min on the Canyon/SRAM team, according to Teutenberg. Though most of the riders fall into the 70 to 75 ml/kg/min range—a typical range for elite athletes.

VO2 max is trainable to a point. Other factors like genetics, body composition, and altitude are all at play. It also decreases with age. Generally speaking, a VO2 max of between about 31 and 37 is considered excellent for healthy adult women, and trained women will fall in the 55 to 60 ml/kg/min range.

FTP

FTP, or functional threshold power, is the average number of watts you can sustain in an hour and it’s a strong predictor of cycling success. On average, the women on Canyon/SRAM team fall into the 250 to 300 watt FTP range, says Teutenberg, which definitely puts them in rarified air.

Forty six percent of women riders using Cycling Analytics (generally serious recreational cyclists) have an FTP of below 200W, 44 percent have an FTP of 210W or more, and 10 percent have an FTP between 200W and 210W.

Bonus: Test Yourself!

Last year Team TIBCO-Silicon Valley Bank had Lauren Stephens do a max speed sprint effort on her trainer. She went from 0 to 50.9 kph/31.6mph in 30 seconds!

That’s one you can definitely try at home to see how you measure up. Good luck!

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Selene Yeager
“The Fit Chick”
Selene Yeager is a top-selling professional health and fitness writer who lives what she writes as a NASM certified personal trainer, USA Cycling certified coach, Pn1 certified nutrition coach, pro licensed off road racer, and All-American Ironman triathlete.