King’s stage 2 California Strava is royally impressive

Ben King earned his yellow jersey the hard way in Monday’s stage 2 at the Amgen Tour of California, off the front all day, in the breakaway, slugging out a two-up sprint to win just ahead of the peloton. It was an impressive victory. His ride data, uploaded to Strava, shows just how hard it was to be King that day.

His four-hour ride was a total of 151.4km, slightly more than the official 148.5km race distance — just for good measure. he averaged 37.8kph and hit a max speed of 82.3kph.

Those metrics are solid, especially since most of the day was ridden in a four-man group. The power figures are most telling. He averaged 300 watts on the day, which Strava calculates as a 341w average weighted power figure. He maxed out at 1,408w, likely during his fast finishing sprint. According to Strava, that works out to 4,841 calories expended — about 10 In-N-Out cheeseburgers.

And yes, we know he isn’t racing for KOMs, but he did pick up nine segments along the way, including one on the day’s last categorized climb, Little Tujunga Canyon. According to our back-of-the-napkin math, he did about 5.64 w/kg on that five-minute climb. That said, Rally’s Evan Huffman (second on the stage) won the race’s actual KOM jersey on Monday, thanks to his efforts alongside King in the break.

It was a hard day to be King, but it was also a good day to be King.