 How do you train for gravel racing and riding? This is what we'll be discussing today. As always, we'll be looking at some science, but I'll also be getting into some key workouts that I use to get ready for long gravel races. And while this video is gravel focused, the overall training principles that I'll be talking about apply to pretty much any discipline of cycling. Welcome back to another video. It seems like gravel racing and riding is getting more and more popular every single day. I myself have started to make the transition into a full-on gravel racer, and I know that a lot of you are in the same boat. So I thought it was about time that I make a video dedicated to gravel. Oh boy, here we go, a whole video about gravel. If you're new here, get ready for this kid to take up like half the video talking about his frankly creepy obsession with his aero bars. A good place to start would be by analyzing the demands of a typical gravel race. That way we can get a better idea of what we need to work on in training. By the way, you should do this with anything that you're training for. The most popular gravel races right now are what I would classify as ultra endurance events in that they range from 100 to 200 miles or more. Now, of course, there are shorter gravel races and for more time crunch riders, these shorter races may be a better option. And the workouts that I'm gonna go over later in this video can be scaled down to fit the length of gravel race that you're training for. Gravel events are also generally mass start events. At least they used to be and hopefully they'll return that way soon. When I say mass start, I mean that everyone from pros to the last place finisher are all starting in one wave. This makes for some very interesting race tactics, especially because drafting does play a large role in gravel racing. You will likely have to go a bit harder than what would normally be considered optimal pacing to get with a fast group within reason, of course. Interesting, does a 1200 watt attack half a mile into a 100 mile gravel race to start my 99 and a half mile solo breakaway to glory count as within reason? Nope, well, I'll probably just do it anyway and use that as my excuse later. As a result, most gravel races will be positively paced or if you're in it to win it or getting competitive with the riders around you and trying to beat them, parabolically paced. Let me explain. From this review article on describing and understanding pacing strategies, positive pacing means that speed gradually declines throughout the duration of the event. So you're slowing down. Parabolic pacing is when you go harder at the beginning and at the end and slower in the middle. It can follow a U, J or reverse J pattern depending on how hard the start is relative to the finish. If gravel racing was just a long time trial then you would want a more even pacing strategy but it's not. So one of these two pacing strategies is likely inevitable and even preferred to take full advantage of drafting. These two pacing strategies are something that you can train specifically for and I recommend doing that in order to increase your endurance. Speaking of endurance, these races are gonna require a lot of it as they often cover some massive distances but you don't wanna just be able to cover the distance. You wanna be able to cover the distance while putting out good power at a relatively high percentage of your FTP. This is something that will also need to be worked on. You should also take into account the elevation profile of the specific race that you're training for. For example, if you know that there are three main climbs in the race that take roughly 30 minutes each then you're gonna wanna develop your 30 minute power and be able to repeat that multiple times throughout a ride. So we have a good idea of the demands of gravel racing. Now, how do we design our training in order to meet those demands? It's important to note that your training should be changing throughout the course of a year but for the sake of this video, we'll assume that you've already done your off-season training and your base training and now we're getting into specific training right before racing. Generally, during this period, you're gonna want to increase your intensity and reduce your volume to make way for that increased intensity. Research has been done into reducing training load by reducing volume and by reducing intensity and consistently results show that fitness is maintained when volume is reduced. However, when subjects reduced training intensity, more fitness is lost. And this method of reducing volume and increasing intensity will likely work for shorter gravel races. However, for longer gravel events, your training is actually becoming less specific since you're reducing your training volume for a high volume event. We don't want this until the last one or two weeks before the event during the taper. This is why I generally go with the approach of increasing training intensity while maintaining volume for long-distance races. You will sacrifice some training quality for those high-intensity days by doing this but it will be worth it for the extra stamina late in the race. With this in mind, let's lay out a typical training week for a rider who trains about 12 hours a week. Again, this is just an example and you may need to train more or less than this depending on your fitness level and a variety of other factors. And of course, you can adjust this to fit your own personal schedule. You generally want two recovery days in the week. These can either be completely off or you can do an active recovery ride for no longer than an hour. In this example week, we have Monday completely off and Friday as an active recovery day. We then have two high-intensity days in the week. This number is very important and is actually where most riders screw up their training. Studies done on training intensity and duration distribution find that a high-intensity frequency greater than two or occasionally three days a week does not induce further improvements and in fact tend to induce symptoms of overreaching and over-training. For example, this study on Ironman triathletes which found that more time training above the endurance zone actually contributed to slower race times and poorer overall performance. Okay, so we know we want two intensity days in the week but what should these days look like? I usually go with one general high-intensity day and one specific high-intensity day. From this study on specific intensity for peaking, they found that both specific and high-intensity training increased race pace equally and concluded that the combination of both high-intensity training and specific training may lead to a higher training response. The general high-intensity day is usually some form of these three workouts. 30-30s where you ride 30 seconds all out, rest for 30 seconds and repeat. VO2 max intervals which are four or five minutes in length, all out repeated four or five times or eight minute intervals again, all out repeated four or five times. The reason for these specific sessions is because these workouts have been shown to have some of the highest training response in the literature. For the general high-intensity workout in the week, I'm gonna put that on Tuesday since that's gonna be a shorter workout. This brings us to the specific day which I'll put on Saturday because again, when training for this type of event, this day needs to not only be high in intensity but also high in volume. How do we go about doing this? I'll often stack intervals at the beginning and the end of a long ride. Not only does this make for a high-quality long ride but it also mimics the kind of effort that you'll likely have to do on race day. For example, let's take a day when we're working on power at lactate threshold. So intervals done around 95 to 100% of FTP. Generally, during these days, you're looking to get in 30 minutes to an hour of intense work. The fitter you are, the closer you wanna get to that full hour. Typically, you might divide this into three by 10 minutes, four by 12 minutes or three by 20 minutes just as examples with rest periods roughly half as long as the interval period. And then when you're done with your cool down, you might call it a day. For this workout though, you're gonna wanna split it up and do part of the workout at the beginning of the ride and part of the workout at the end of the ride. For example, let's take four by 12 minutes at 95 to 100% of FTP. You may choose to do three of the intervals at the beginning and one at the end or two at the beginning and two at the end or if you're feeling really ambitious, all four at the beginning and then try for a fifth one at the end. Doing these efforts late into the ride when you aren't perfectly fresh will prepare you for doing this on race day. The time spent in between these two interval sections in the workout should just be zone two endurance. Now, it is important to remember that a lot of time during these events is spent between zone two and your FTP. So in order to tailor your training towards the event, you're gonna wanna spend some time in this in between zone. This can be dangerous and you have to do it strategically. Most riders ride all of the time in this in between gray zone and they're never really going easy, which in turn means that they're never really recovered enough to go really hard, which is not optimal training. All right, mister, I wear a heart rate monitor when I take a dump in order to not strain myself above zone two. Most of us live in the real world and have actual friends that we ride with and every stop sign on every ride is a potential sprint point and every slight incline is a point where we could either drop or get dropped. So your methods are really just not that practical. This study on using different training models in train cyclists had subjects complete a six week training plan using different training protocols. One group spent 80% of the time training at endurance zone or below, no time training at sweet spotter tempo and 20% of the time training at or above FTP. The other groups spent 57% of the time at or below endurance, 43% of the time at sweet spotter tempo and no time above FTP. What they found was that the group that did no sweet spotter tempo improved their peak power outputs, lactate threshold, high intensity exercise capacity and 40 KTT time more than the group that spent a significant amount of time at those in between zones just below FTP. And these kinds of results are backed up by multiple reviews looking at many studies coming to the same conclusion. These studies may lead one to believe that sweet spot and tempo should be avoided at all costs and for certain types of racers training for shorter events, I would agree with this. However, if you still load your schedule up with easy zone two riding and use sweet spot and tempo sparingly, you can see great results from it. This is what is referred to as pyramidal training and has been tested in studies like this one that had a group similar to the previous study that completely avoided sweet spot and tempo and then another group that still did the majority of their training at that easier endurance zone at 78% but then spent the remaining time mostly doing sweet spot and tempo work. And what they found was no significant difference between the two groups in competition times. The pyramidal approach is what I would use for ultra endurance races like long gravel races. This means that your tempo and sweet spot days count as one of your two high-intensity days in the week and as such you wanna get the most out of them. Let me show you some examples. Again, we have our high-intensity tempo day on Saturday in this week and on this day we're shooting for an hour and a half of tempo on the low end and potentially as much as three hours on the high end. So for example, this might look like three by 30 minutes at 85 to 90% of FTP or as much as four by 45 minutes at this pace for highly trained riders. This sounds like a lot but remember that on race day you'll need to do even more time at this intensity and if you're not doing it three or four times a week like so many sweet spot coaches suggest then you should be recovered enough to complete the workout. And of course another great way to get in gravel-specific intensity before your A race is to do a less important gravel race in the month leading into that race. If you do this treat this as one of your high-intensity days in the week. That's our intensity for the week. Now what do we do with the rest of the week? Again, current research into training intensity distributions suggests that most of the time 80% or more should be spent below the first ventilatory threshold or endurance zone in order to maximize results. You want the rest of your week to be done at or below zone two or roughly 75% of your FTP. There's no need to do any fancy intervals on these days or make up for riding less hours by riding harder. Just enjoy your nice conversationally paced zone two ride. Not possible dude. If I'm ever riding slow enough to have a conversation with you then I'm not gonna be enjoying it. In this example week, that gives us a shorter endurance ride on Wednesday and Thursday and a longer one on Sunday to finish out the week. Finally, if you've been lifting throughout the season and wanna continue into the build season, which I recommend, where should you put your lifting sessions? In this example week, I'd place them on Wednesday and Saturday so that there's enough recovery time between a lifting day and the next high-intensity day. During this period, you're gonna wanna reduce the training load of your lifting sessions in order to make way for the higher-intensity work that you're doing on the bike. And there's a number of ways that you can do this. You can reduce the total number of sets that you do when you go into the gym. You can lift just one day a week instead of two times a week or you can reduce the amount of weight that you lift with each set. Two more things to consider when training for gravel racing. First, ride your gravel bike on gravel in training. This seems obvious, but a lot of riders just spend all their time training on the road and then hop into a gravel race. And while gravel isn't as technical as say mountain bike racing, it does take some skill in order to navigate gravel corners, potholes, washboard roads, sand, mud, et cetera at speed. I'd say that in your preparation for a big gravel race, you'll want a minimum of two days per week spent off-road. Also, your nutrition is a very important part of long-distance gravel racing and you don't wanna be trying anything new on race day. You wanna play with your nutrition in training to make sure that it works for you, particularly on those long, high-intensity days. This will also get your gut used to consuming this level of carbohydrates while you're riding, which is important. From this article on training the gut for athletes, it is clear that nutritional training can improve gastric emptying and absorption and likely reduce the chances and or severity of GI problems, thereby improving endurance performance as well as providing a better experience for the athlete. When experimenting with your nutrition, there are two things that you wanna look for, bonking and gut issues. If you're bonking, that means that you're not consuming enough carbohydrates. If you're having gut issues, then it could mean a number of things including how much sodium you're taking in, but it could also mean that you're consuming too much food while you're riding. You wanna consume enough calories so that you don't bonk but not so much that you start to develop GI issues. For more information on cycling nutrition, check out the video that I did on it, linked down in the description below. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, subscribe for weekly science-based cycling videos just like this one and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.