 2023 was the fittest that I've ever been. I managed to crack 400 watts for 20 minutes, which for me is 5.8 watts per kilo. I did over 300 watts normalized power for five hours and generally saw some of the highest power numbers and fastest times that I've ever seen in races. Despite this fact, the end result was the same as the year before. 16th place overall in the lifetime grand prix in 2023, which is exactly where I finished in 2022. And despite my best efforts, it seemed like in every race, I was destined to finish somewhere between 15th and 20th place last year. Now, top 20 in the lifetime grand prix still feels like a huge accomplishment for me. After all, we are talking about the fastest off-road racers in the US and beyond at this point. However, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a bit frustrating to not make any progress on the results sheet, especially considering that I was in the best shape of my life. Today, I'm gonna be talking about why I think that is, what went right with my training and preparation in 2023 to get me to that level and how I plan to continue to improve moving into 2024. Welcome back to the channel. This video is fueled by the feed. By the end of the 2023 season, it had become a running joke. No need to check the results sheet. Dylan probably finished 17th place again. And it's true, I was extremely consistent placing between 15th and 18th at five out of the seven lifetime grand pre-races. However, I was never able to step it up to that next level and get a top 10 or a podium. So this, of course, begs the question. Dylan, if you were supposedly so much fitter in 2023, then why didn't your results improve? I sound like a broken record for continuing to harp on this, but it's a point that easily gets missed by those who are not in the series and even those who are in the series, to be honest with you, and it's that the level in U.S. gravel and off-road racing just continues to go up, especially in the grand prix. I feel like some concrete examples are needed to show you exactly what I'm talking about and then I promise I'll shut up about it. That's a lie. He's never gonna shut up about this. It boosts his ego too much. Two races that are easy to compare from year to year in the series are Crusher and the Toucher and Leadbill because the courses are always the same and the courses contain so much climbing that race tactics play a much smaller role than they do in other races in the series, thus not having too large of an impact on riders' finishing times. In 2022, Keegan Swenson's winning time at Crusher was four hours, two minutes, and 23 seconds. And then in 2023, he chopped nearly six minutes off of that, getting a time of three hours, 56 minutes, and 42 seconds. Well, that is an impressive improvement from a rider who's already so incredibly fit. I think taking a look at the rest of the field tells a more complete picture as to how much higher the level was amongst all of the pros at Crusher this year. For example, in 2022, a time of four hours and 16 minutes would have gotten you a sixth place finish. No, I didn't just pick four 16 at random because as you may have guessed, this year, four hours, 16 minutes, and 10 seconds was the time that I actually got, but I was nowhere near sixth place. In fact, with the competition on the day, I didn't even break into the top 20. Leadbill is the same story. My time of six 26 from this past year would have gotten me seventh place in 2022, but in 2023, it was only good enough for my typical 17th. Race times are one thing, but my power numbers from these races tell the exact same story. In the case of Leadbill, for example, a 24 watt improvement in normalized power was still only good enough for a top 20, just like I'd gotten the year before. Now, I know these are not perfect comparisons. Conditions and race dynamics do change from year to year, but still, given the fact that these are the exact same courses, a time and power output that would have put you solidly in the top 10 one year, now barely being good enough to crack a top 20 seems undeniable to me. We were all just playing faster in 2023. Well, most of us were. There were some riders that struggled in 2023. And if you want my honest opinion, I think that what actually happened is that their fitness stayed the same while the rest of us improved, giving them the perception that they couldn't find their legs by comparison. I realized myself that if I hadn't improved in 2023, I may not even still be in the series. It seems like the threshold for making it back into the series in 2024 on the men's side was 23rd place overall. Those above that line made it back in and those below it did not and got replaced by new riders. And quite honestly, I don't think the Dylan from 2022 would have made the cut. Now, there were some strong international riders in the series in 2023 that were not present in 2022, but for the most part, the top riders are still the same names. It seems as the riders are going to greater and greater lengths to improve their results as gravel becomes more of a professional sport here in the US. For example, in the lead up to unbound, some of the training blocks that riders were doing is stuff that even world tour riders don't do. Keegan Swenson and Russell Finsterwald did 82 hours of training in two weeks to prepare for the unbound 200, which Keegan would go on to win. Most world tour riders, biggest weeks are in the 30 to 35 hour range and rarely back to back like this. This is probably the most notable example, but it is far from the only one. It seems like lifetime Grand Prix athletes continue to get more extreme with their training. And I will admit that while I hate jumping on bandwagons, I am fully on board with this one, but I'll get to that in a minute. The point I'm getting at is that in the US, gravel has very quickly become a full on professional sport with a lot of sponsorship and prize money on the line and knowing this, riders at the top are willing to put in massive amounts of work and stress over finer details like nutrition, equipment, recovery, et cetera, for increasingly greater rewards. Whether you like it or hate it, I would argue that the spirit of gravel, whatever that term means, is fully dead at this point at the pro level in the US. Gravel racing is just as professional, competitive and cutthroat as any other sport with money on the line at this point, but that's just my opinion on it. I came to gravel because I cared more about the adventure. I was tired of the world poor life of only training ride. That in mind, I stopped training as strict sweet. I still do intervals sometimes, but not as often. That is part of the spirit of gravel, I guess, is just a really cool adventure. I realized that we're pretty deep into this video and I haven't even started talking about what I did in 2023. So without further ado, let's get into it. And I wanna start by addressing iron supplementation. A couple of months ago, I made a video on the importance of iron for endurance athletes. It was one of my science-based videos, so I didn't get too deep into my own personal experience and just stuck to the research. I think I may have mentioned that I've had low iron in the past, but didn't say much more than that. Well, the truth is that this was actually an extremely relevant issue for me personally, and while much of the research was done for the purposes of that video, I also did it to alleviate my own issues with low iron. At the end of April last year, I got blood work back that indicated that I had low ferritin levels. Ferritin is the protein that stores iron, and as a biomarker, it's an indication of the amount of stored iron you have in your body. I started supplementing daily during this time and pretty quickly felt a lot better. The biggest noticeable difference was how much faster my recovery was, and you can actually see it in the amount of training load I was able to tolerate. Looking at the Training Peaks Performance Management Graph, you can see exactly where I started supplementing with iron. The blue shaded line in the background is my chronic training load, which is a weighted average of your daily training stress for the past 42 days. And we can see that I hit a plateau where I was hovering between 95 and 105. If I went any higher than that, my recovery would really take a hit and I was forced to back it down. Then we see a sharp uptick, and that is when I started supplementing with iron, and I was able to bump up another 15 to 20 points in my CTL without compromising my recovery. For me, this meant being able to go from 20 hours on a typical hard training week to say 25 hours. I usually hit a slump in my performance in the summer, and I've generally attributed that to overtraining, but this actually makes sense if I was dealing with low iron stores. This is because one of the main reasons endurance athletes struggle with low iron is due to how much more they sweat than your average person because iron is lost in sweat, and of course you sweat more in the summer. It could have very well been possible that these dips in performance were due to dips in my iron levels and not due to me training too much or too hard. And to be honest, it's a little embarrassing that as a supposed expert in endurance sports performance that I was leaving such a relatively common issue unaddressed, but hey, we all have our blind spots, just like GCN and whoever they hired to make their thumbnails. To be fully transparent, even though I don't talk about it a lot on this channel, in fact, I think I've mentioned it a total of one time in one video, I am vegan. I know, I'm breaking the first rule of veganism by not bringing it up every chance I get. Oh, don't worry, we knew you were vegan. Anybody who can talk for 20 minutes about which chain lube can save you a 10th of a watt is bound to have the most boring diet imaginable. While there are many health benefits of a plant-based diet, it is important to acknowledge that the iron in plant-based foods is less bioavailable and may have been contributing to the situation I found myself in. That's not to say that if you eat plant-based, you're doomed to have low iron levels. This is a problem that affects a lot of endurance athletes, vegan or not. And through changing a few of my eating habits and supplementation, I'm happy to report that my iron levels are back in the normal range. And I attribute a lot of my success in 2023 to getting my low iron under control. Now I do realize that the danger of me saying this is that some people may start taking iron supplements when they don't need to. Don't do that. Please go watch the video I did on iron and endurance athletes before you do anything. I promise this isn't clickbait. I'm not just trying to squeeze more views out of you. Having iron levels that are too high is a bad thing as well. And I go over all of that in that video. All right, moving on, this change in my iron levels meant that I was actually able to implement the second change that had a huge impact on my fitness. And that was high volume blocks. I mentioned earlier in the video some of the insane training that Keegan did in preparation for Unbound. I did something similar with 62 hours on the bike in a 15 day period ending three weeks out from the race. So essentially we're talking about back to back 30 hour weeks. Undoubtedly this is probably the point at which somebody will point out that this is 20 hours less than the current king of US gravel Keegan did in the same time period. So clearly that's the difference and I just need to put in the work, bro. And they'd probably include a muscle emoji in there somewhere. But regardless, it's probably a good time to point out that being able to recover from and absorb training is a talent in itself. There are very few people in the world that have the genetics to do back to back 40 hour training weeks and actually recover from that in a timely manner to improve their performance as a result. We don't all respond to training the same. In fact, we found that there is a bell curve of fitness improvement even when subjects are given the exact same training. Most of the time at the elite level, riders aren't training with less volume or intensity because they don't have the work ethic but because they physically can't and still recover. If they've gotten to that level, it's likely that they've tried that and failed. Sorry for yet another side rant. I realized that I probably sound like I'm making a lot of excuses in this video. No, honestly man, these excuses are the best content that you've ever given us. I'm definitely gonna bring up bell curbs or whatever the next time I don't feel like training. Getting back on topic, in this high volume block, these weeks had two tempo interval sessions in them. So four tempo sessions total over the two week period. This is partially because tempo is specific to unbound and that unbound is kind of a battle to see who can hold their tempo power the longest but also because these weeks were so much higher volume than I'm used to and I didn't wanna overdo it with intensity as well and risk overtraining. There was also one major change that I made during this block with respect to where I put my intensity in the week. For those who watched any of my videos about how to structure your training, you know that I generally go for putting the intensity in the week after a rest day or an easy day because you want those intervals to be done at high quality and theoretically this should be the time in the training week that you are the most fresh. I still think that this is generally a good approach but for this block I experimented with having the intensity on the third day of the three day block, essentially meaning that I had two massive rides in my legs before doing intervals. For example, at the end of this block, I had an eight hour day followed by a five hour day and then after both of those rides, I did my intervals and on top of all of that, this was the last day of the two week training block so I had nearly 60 hours of training over a two week period in my legs when doing these intervals and let me tell you something, tempo power has never felt easier. I felt like I could sit at 320 watts all day if I wanted to. This is counterintuitive, I know. I seemingly should have been pretty cooked by this point in my training but I think that the same thing is happening here that I talk about in my videos on block periodization. For those who are unfamiliar, block periodization is when you block most of your intensity for the whole month into just one week. So for example, you might have five intensity days in one week followed by just one intensity day per week for the rest of the month. This unconventional strategy actually has researched and back it up with studies showing greater improvements in groups that followed block periodization over a more traditional approach. Again, I have videos on block periodization that go into more detail but the same thing that seems to happen during these block weeks happened during this high volume block. You may assume that in a week where you had five high intensity days that you'd be pretty wiped out by the end but actually the opposite happens and you feel great. This is what riders sometimes refer to as the stage race effect because it happens during stage racing. People get very impressed that riders are putting out such incredible power numbers so late into a grand tour but if you've ever experienced the stage race effect it actually makes sense. Oftentimes near the end of a training week that has a much higher training load than what you're used to, you actually feel amazing. That is if you're already well trained going into it. The caveat is that the fatigue is delayed and once you finally give your body some rest, fatigue will hit you like a brick wall after a couple of days and you'll feel like total crap on the bike. The theory though is that this shock to the system improves performance more than a more evenly dispersed training load and again, there is evidence to support this. While the research focuses more on block periodization using intensity, I do think that it's possible that block periodization using volume may be equally, if not more effective. Just using myself as an example, it was immediately following this block of training that I believe I was in the best shape of my entire life. I got a top 10 at Gravel Locos which had many of the European heavy hitters that would be at Unbound. At Unbound itself, despite having a horrendous time in the mud section, I managed to claw my way back up to 17th despite riding most of the day solo, just four days after Unbound when I probably should have been laying on the couch. I hit my highest 20 minute power ever of 402 watts and then that weekend I had my best BWR placing ever with a second place just barely missing out on the win in a sprint finish with Adam Roberge. I had hit a peak like I've never seen before after this massive volume block and then I did it again later in the season to PR at Leadville by 20 minutes and get my highest five hour power ever at Big Sugar. Needless to say, come the end of the season, I was sold on volume blocks and this brings me to what I wanna do to improve in 2024. I have to acknowledge that even though I want to improve this year, 2023 was an amazing year for me in terms of the fitness level that I was able to get to so I don't wanna change the formula up too much. I think instead I want to double down on what worked. I plan to implement high volume blocks more frequently this year and for me personally, I actually think that they work better than traditional block prioritization with intensity. This may also have to do with the kind of racing I do which is generally five to 10 hour gravel or mountain bike races. I've also become a lot less stringent about doing intensity after an easy day or a rest day. This advice doesn't necessarily apply to everyone. I do think that riders at a lower fitness level benefit from doing intensity after a rest day but you may have to experiment and see what works best for you. I also feel like the intensity after an easy day rule completely falls apart when we're talking about a block week whether that's an intensity block or a volume block. I'm back in the lifetime Grand Prix again for 2024 and so all of the Grand Prix races are a priority for me but my A races are unbound and Leadville and maybe throw big sugar in there as an A minus race. The reason being is that these races are spread out enough in the season that you can have a proper rest build and taper between them without cramming training and to be honest, unbounded Leadville are simply the biggest Grand Prix races with the most attention. So it makes sense as a professional to target those if they suit you. This of course means that there will be big volume blocks before both of these races especially considering that these are big volume events lasting six to 10 hours. These blocks will likely be two weeks long and I would like to see if I can punch the volume a little bit higher than I did last year. Last year the highest volume week that I had was a 34 hour week and we might see a 40 hour week this year but that's only if my body is responding well and recovering which is a big if. If it is not then I will back it down and not just hit an arbitrary number in training and then find myself in a hole that I can't dig myself out of. On top of this I wanna experiment with having other high volume mini blocks throughout the year and I've actually already done this in January with a 30 hour week and I will say that that is quite a bit more training than I'm used to this early in the year. And I will say that I found out the hard way that the recovery afterwards is extremely important and needs to be fully respected. I didn't quite take enough easy days after this week and my training for the past couple of weeks has suffered as I dig myself out of a hole. This is part of training though. Finding that fine line between too much and too little and constantly refining it when you've gone too far in either direction. As with last year I'll be reporting on my racing on this channel so be sure to subscribe if you haven't already and follow me on Instagram to stay more up to date with my racing in real time. Finally if you enjoyed this video be sure to give it a like and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.