If you allow me a piece of advice...
truly, for your own good:
A few days ago I was taking part in a non-competitive cycling event, and about halfway through I overheard a cyclist in the group we were riding with, chasing the breakaway, say:
“You can’t imagine how the leading riders climbed that pass. They were ‘sprinting’ uphill.”
With the typical tone of disbelief and doubt used when saying such things...
And I couldn’t hold back at such words:
Flying? Then check how many minutes behind the KOM they were on Strava.
Said and done: 10–15 minutes slower than the Tour de France records on each climb.
The truth is, most amateur athletes have no real idea how far they are from professionals.
For example,in one of the latest articles we saw that Pogacar was estimated at about 7.5 w/kg in the Peyragudes time trial; which (in the average scenario, as I showed in that article) equated to about 96–98 ml/kg/min oxygen consumption if we assume an efficiency of 23%, and that he climbed between 90–92% of his VO2max in that 22-minute effort, 17 of which were uphill and 5 on the flat.
Estimating Pogacar's VO2max through TdF uphill TT data
Although we still have the final week of the Tour left, we all have the sense that, barring a major disaster, the die is cast. Not only because of Pogacar’s dominance, but because of how he’s doing it: he has hardly shown any signs of suffering, responding to rivals’ attacks while seated. It’s now been over two years in which he hasn’t shown a single mo…
7.5 w/kg over 20 minutes is about 3 w/kg more than a high-level amateur competitive cyclist can do. Three watts per kilo more! A sedentary or untrained person will rarely go below 2 w/kg in 20 minutes.
In other words, the difference between a sedentary person and a good-level cyclist (in the top 10% of all cyclists) is smaller than the difference between that amateur cyclist and a Tour de France winner!
This becomes even more serious when we consider the logic that as performance improves, gains become increasingly marginal: the fitter you are, the harder it is to improve, also because we take into account that we’re already doing things right and comparing ourselves with people already above average.
(And we also need to remember that most power meters overestimate power compared with the formulas used to calculate it. To match those estimated 7.5 watts per kilo, many cyclists would need to reach the 8.0 their power meter shows. And if you don’t trust the watts, just open Strava and try riding 1 km at KOM pace on a Tour climb.)
The point I want to make here is that, just as you know perfectly well that someone with 1,5 w/kg over 20 minutes shouldn’t train or eat like you, why are you so determined to copy how professionals train or eat?
The gap between professionals and good amateurs has become so huge in recent years that we should almost treat ourselves as different species when it comes to training. Copying pro training is like copying a tiger’s diet “because tigers are so muscular.”
Yet most amateurs are bombarded daily with content, videos, and ideas about how professionals train, eat (or claim to train and eat), and their tricks... Even sports science, lacking solid training principles, often looks for answers by observing how professionals train (which is where concepts like polarized training, different training distributions, etc., come from).
And what I see, as a coach and educator, is that people are increasingly lost in all this information that isn’t meant for them, jumping from one method to another in search of that secret that will finally give them the extra 150 watts at threshold they need to ride the Tour de France.
I understand professional cycling; I’ve been there and I enjoy watching it, but I don’t like the way the narratives are sold. As I said in other articles, journalists and dominant teams keep changing the narratives and driving people crazy chasing the latest trend: high cadence then torque, ketones, carbs, long cranks then short ones, Zone 2 then intensity, and so on...
If you’ll allow me a piece of advice—truly, for your own good: FORGET everything related to professional cycling training. Enjoy watching the Tour, like a child, but don’t waste a single second thinking about their training, diet, or whether 165 mm cranks are better than 167.5.
Today we can buy a pro’s bike (if we pay for it, of course), we can see how they live and eat... but the reality is that professionals live for this and are willing to sacrifice everything for it; while you have to wake up at 7 to go to work.
You’re copying methods designed for organisms very different from yours, with work and social contexts worlds apart, and even mentally operating on a different plane.
If you want to improve yourself, to succeed in your own terms, you need to learn how to train as an athlete, not just copy what people completely different from you in every way are doing. And that starts with understanding the fundamental training questions: How much should I train? How do I adjust the loads? How am I assimilating them? What stimuli will help me improve in the long run? What paces should I work on?
Of course, I support anyone seeking their maximum athletic performance (always in a way that integrates with their life goals and doesn’t make their life worse or harm their health); but for most people, this pursuit of performance isn’t about copying professionals—it’s about shutting out the narratives we’re sold and doing things slowly, but properly.
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