The Critérium du Dauphiné is dead. Long live the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

Same roads. Same Alpine passes. Same role in the professional calendar, the final dress rehearsal before the Tour de France. ASO rebranded it for 2026, expanded it to eight stages, and moved the dates to June 7-14. The name changed. The purpose didn’t.

For every pro using it to calibrate their Tour form, there’s a lesson for the rest of us. If you’re targeting a July climbing event (an Etape du Tour, a sportive through the Alps, or even just riding the double Alpe d’Huez while the Tour’s in town), you have exactly nine weeks from today. That’s a complete training block. Not enough to build fitness from scratch. Plenty to sharpen what you’ve already built and find out whether it’s actually working.

Nine weeks is the window. The Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes sits right in the middle of it. Here’s how to use every day.

Quick Summary: Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes 2026

Detail	Info
Formerly	Critérium du Dauphiné (rebranded 2026)
Dates	June 7-14, 2026
Stages	8 (expanded from the traditional 7-8 day format)
Location	Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region — the Alps’ front yard
Role	Final WorldTour stage race before Tour de France
Weeks to race	9 from today (April 3)
Weeks to TdF	13 — the Dauphiné falls at week 9, leaving 4 weeks to taper and peak

The amateur training lesson: Pros use this race to confirm their Tour build is on track. You should use these 9 weeks to do the same thing: test your sustained climbing, benchmark your multi-day capacity, and answer the question “Am I where I need to be for July?” with data instead of hope.

Why the Rebrand Doesn’t Matter (But the Timing Does)

The Critérium du Dauphiné has been the Tour’s dress rehearsal since the 1960s. Merckx used it. Hinault used it. Pogačar won it in 2021 and then won the Tour. The name “Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes” is a marketing decision: regional branding, sponsor alignment, whatever. The racing profile hasn’t changed. Alpine stages. A time trial. GC contenders testing their legs on terrain they’ll see again three weeks later.

What matters is where it falls on the calendar. June 7-14. The Tour starts July 4. That leaves exactly three weeks between the Dauphiné finish and the Tour Grand Départ in Barcelona, enough time for pros to absorb the racing load, taper, and arrive fresh.

For amateurs, the math works differently but the principle is identical. You have nine weeks from now until the Dauphiné dates. That’s:

• Weeks 1-3 (April): Rebuild aerobic depth and extend sustained efforts
• Weeks 4-6 (May): Race-specific intensity and VO2max sharpening
• Weeks 7-8 (early June): Benchmark week, your personal “Dauphiné”
• Week 9 (mid-June): Recovery and reassessment before the final 3-week taper into July

If that nine-week structure looks familiar, it should. It’s the back half of the 12-week TdF climbing build with a checkpoint bolted into the middle. The Dauphiné dates give you a natural benchmark moment, a hard week of consecutive riding that tells you exactly where your fitness stands with a month to go.

What the Pros Are Actually Testing at the Dauphiné

Pay attention to what the GC contenders do at this race. It’s not about winning. It almost never is.

Pogačar won the 2021 Dauphiné and the Tour. But most winners treat this race like a controlled experiment. They test climbing power at race pace and rehearse fueling strategies for multi-hour mountain stages. Then they ride hard on back-to-back days to see how their bodies handle the accumulated fatigue, the same Day 3 problem that ruins amateur stage racers.

The riders who soft-pedal the Dauphiné’s flat stages and then go deep on the mountain stages are running a very specific protocol: can I produce 6+ watts per kilogram on a 30-minute climb after four days of stage racing? If yes, the Tour build is on track. If no, something needs adjusting in the final three weeks.

That’s exactly the question you should be asking yourself in early June, scaled to your level.

The 9-Week Block: April Through Early June

This plan assumes 8-12 hours per week and the kind of spring base you’d have from riding through March and April. You’ve done some structured work. Your FTP is tested and current. You’re not starting from zero. You’re sharpening.

Weeks 1-3: Aerobic Extension (April 3-23)

The spring classics season trained punchy efforts. One-minute hills. Five-minute power surges. Threshold repeatability. All useful. None of it prepares you for holding 88% FTP for 40 minutes on an Alpine col.

Rebuild the aerobic floor.

Weekly structure:

• 2 zone 2 rides: 2-2.5 hours each. Genuinely easy. If you’re above 75% FTP for more than a few minutes, you’re going too hard. These are the rides that feel like nothing and build everything.
• 1 sweet spot extension session: Week 1: 3 x 12 min at 88-93% FTP, 5 min easy. Week 2: 3 x 15 min. Week 3: 2 x 20 min. RPE 6.5-7/10. The goal is pushing the duration you can hold sub-threshold power without power drift. If your last interval is more than 5 watts below your first, the duration is too long. Drop back.
• 1 long ride: 3.5-4 hours, zone 2 base with 1-2 tempo blocks (15-20 min at 85-90% FTP) in the second half. Eat 80-90g carbs per hour from minute one. Not from hour two. From the start.

What you’re building: The sustained power foundation that climbing demands. After a spring of short, sharp efforts, your body needs to remember what holding moderate power for extended durations feels like. It’s forgotten. I promise you it’s forgotten. Every year I come out of the classics block thinking I’m fit, and the first 20-minute sweet spot effort after six weeks of 4-minute repeats feels like someone swapped my legs for concrete.

Weeks 4-6: VO2max and Climbing Specificity (April 24 - May 14)

Here’s where recent training science matters. The 2026 polarized training research from Seiler and others supports longer VO2max intervals, specifically 3-minute efforts, over the traditional 30-second to 1-minute repeats for developing the kind of aerobic power that climbing stages demand. Three minutes at 108-115% FTP taxes your aerobic system deeply enough to drive adaptation without the neuromuscular breakdown that shorter, harder efforts cause. For Dauphiné-style climbing (sustained 20-40 minute cols with variable gradient), this is the intensity that transfers.

Weekly structure:

• 1 zone 2 ride: 2-2.5 hours
• 1 VO2max session: 5-6 x 3 min at 108-115% FTP, 3 min easy between. RPE 8.5-9/10. These should hurt. Not the sharp, anaerobic hurt of a 30-second sprint — a deep, systemic burn that builds through each rep. If you can talk during the last minute of the fifth rep, you’re not going hard enough. If you can’t finish the fifth rep, you started too hard on the first.
• 1 climbing threshold session: 2 x 20 min at 92-98% FTP on the longest climb you can find (or trainer at 6-8% gradient simulation). Week 4: both efforts at 92-95%. Week 5: first effort at 95%, second at 92%. Week 6: both at 95-98% if Day 1 holds. RPE 7.5-8.5/10. This is the session that teaches your legs what Alpine climbing actually feels like. Not the gradient. The duration.
• 1 long ride: 4-4.5 hours. Zone 2 with a 25-30 min sustained effort at 88-93% FTP in the final 90 minutes. Simulate arriving at a col after four hours of riding.

Why 3-minute intervals and not 30-second repeats: Thirty-second VO2max efforts are excellent for criterium fitness. They spike your oxygen uptake fast and train the on/off nature of short-course racing. But climbing stages don’t go on/off. They’re sustained. Three-minute intervals hold you at or near peak oxygen consumption for long enough to stress the aerobic ceiling, VO2max itself, while also teaching your body to sustain that output. The carryover to a 35-minute climb at 95% FTP is direct. The carryover from 30-second repeats is indirect at best.

Weeks 7-8: The Benchmark Week (May 15-28)

This is your personal Dauphiné. A deliberate week of consecutive hard riding designed to answer one question: is my July build on track?

Week 7 — The Benchmark:

• Monday: Off.
• Tuesday: Zone 2, 75 min. Legs turning over.
• Wednesday: Stage 1. 2 hours with 3 x 10 min at 95-100% FTP, 5 min easy. Hard day. RPE 8/10. Record your power carefully.
• Thursday: Stage 2. 2 hours with 1 x 25 min continuous at 88-93% FTP. Sustained climbing on yesterday’s legs. RPE 7.5/10. Track the power relative to Wednesday.
• Friday: Stage 3. 90 min with 5 x 3 min at 108-115% FTP, 3 min easy. VO2max on two days of fatigue. This is Day 3. This is where you find out.
• Saturday: Stage 4. Long ride, 3.5-4 hours, zone 2 with aggressive fueling practice. No structured intensity. Just volume on tired legs.
• Sunday: Off. Assess.

What you’re looking for:

• Thursday’s 25-minute block: is it within 5% of your fresh sweet spot power? If yes, your recovery capacity is solid. If you’re down 10% or more, your overnight fueling is the problem, not your fitness.
• Friday’s VO2max reps: can you hit your Week 4-6 targets on Day 3? If the fifth rep is within 5 watts of the first, your accumulated fatigue tolerance is good. If you’re abandoning reps, you went too hard on Wednesday or Thursday. Or you didn’t eat enough. (It’s almost always the eating.)
• Saturday’s long ride: do your legs feel tired-but-functional or dead? Tired-but-functional means you can go to July with confidence. Dead means something in the preceding block was off.

Week 8 — Recovery and Absorption:

Easy week. Zone 2 only, 5-7 hours total. One session with 2 x 10 min at sweet spot just to keep the legs from going flat. Your body is absorbing the benchmark week. Let it.

Week 9: Transition to July Taper (May 29 - June 4)

One final focused week before the real taper begins.

• Tuesday: 5 x 3 min VO2max. Last hard top-end session.
• Thursday: 2 x 15 min at 95% FTP. Clean, controlled, no drift.
• Saturday: 3-hour ride, zone 2. Last long ride before volume drops.

After this, you’re in taper territory for your July event. The Dauphiné — sorry, Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes — wraps up June 14. Your benchmark week in late May mirrors when the pros are racing it. By the time the actual race finishes, you already have your answer: the build is working, or it needs adjustment.

The Benchmark Week Is the Whole Point

I want to be direct about this. The single most important thing in this 9-week block isn’t the VO2max sessions or the sweet spot extensions. It’s the benchmark week in Week 7. Everything before it builds toward it. Everything after it responds to it.

Most amateurs never test their multi-day capacity in training. They do one hard ride, recover for two days, do another hard ride, and assume that translates to four hard days in a row at a July sportive. It doesn’t. The Romandie piece covered this in detail — the Day 3 glycogen problem is real, it’s predictable, and it’s fixable. But you have to expose yourself to it in training to know where you stand.

The pros do this at the Dauphiné. You do it in Week 7. Same principle. Different scale.

How 3-Minute Intervals Actually Work (The Science, Briefly)

The polarized training model (lots of easy riding, a small dose of very hard riding, minimal time in the middle) has been validated repeatedly over the last decade. What’s newer in the 2026 research from Stephen Seiler and colleagues is the finding that interval duration matters as much as intensity for climbing-specific fitness.

Here’s the short version: VO2max intervals need to accumulate enough time at or near peak oxygen consumption to stimulate adaptation. Thirty-second efforts do hit peak VO2, but only for the last 10-15 seconds. The rest is acceleration. Three-minute efforts hold you near peak VO2 for roughly 90-120 seconds per rep. Five reps of 3 minutes gives you 8-10 minutes of total time at peak oxygen consumption. Five reps of 30 seconds gives you maybe 90 seconds.

For a climbing stage where you’ll spend 25-40 minutes above 90% FTP, the adaptation from accumulated time at high aerobic output is directly applicable. You’re training the same metabolic pathway at the same relative intensity. It just hurts differently — less sharp, more suffocating.

How to Watch the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Like a Training Nerd

The race runs June 7-14 with eight stages. Here’s what’s worth studying:

1. Who’s testing and who’s racing. The GC contenders headed to the Tour de France will ride within themselves on flat stages and only push on the mountain stages. If someone goes all-out to win the Dauphiné overall, they’re either not targeting the Tour or they’re making a mistake. Watch for the riders who look comfortable (not dominant) on the climbs. That’s controlled testing.

2. Power data on the final mountain stage. If broadcasters show estimated watts per kilogram on the queen stage, compare it to what the same riders produced at the Tour de Romandie in late April. A 2-5% improvement suggests their build is progressing on schedule. A flat line or drop means something went wrong in May.

3. Recovery between consecutive mountain stages. If the race includes back-to-back climbing days (and it will, eight stages in eight days almost guarantees it), watch who climbs at the same level on Day 2 as Day 1. Those riders have solved the recovery equation. Everyone else is hoping.

4. Abandon rate and DNFs. Riders who pull out of the Dauphiné mid-race are often protecting themselves for the Tour. A high-profile DNS on Stage 6 isn’t weakness — it’s strategy. The Dauphiné exists to gather information, not collect trophies.

Connecting the Dots: Dauphiné → Tour de France

This post sits between two bookends. The TdF double Alpe d’Huez training guide laid out the 12-week climbing build for July. This 9-week block is the middle section of that arc, the part where you test whether the build is working before you commit to the final taper.

Think of it this way:

• April: Rebuild aerobic depth after the spring classics
• May: Sharpen VO2max and climbing-specific intensity
• Late May/Early June: Benchmark week: your personal Dauphiné
• Mid-June onward: Taper, rest, and arrive at your July event knowing your legs are ready because you tested them under fatigue, not just fresh

The pros who succeed at the Tour are the ones who used the Dauphiné to confirm, not discover. By the time they pin on a number in Barcelona on July 4, the question isn’t “Am I fit enough?” It’s “I know I’m fit enough — I proved it three weeks ago.”

That’s what your benchmark week is for. Prove it. Then taper. Then go ride your mountain.

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Based on personal experience using the Dauphiné dates as a training checkpoint for July events over the past four seasons. Race details from the ASO Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes announcement and historical Dauphiné results via ProCyclingStats. Run a four-day benchmark block in late May. If Day 3 doesn’t make you question your life choices, you either paced it right or you didn’t go hard enough.