Build one long ride a week toward roughly 70–80% of the event distance, keep the rest of the week mostly easy with one quality session, and rehearse your fuelling on every long ride. Most people who struggle on the day were not underprepared in fitness. They were underprepared in pacing and eating.
How long the long ride really needs to be
You do not need to ride the full distance in training. Reaching roughly 70–80% of the event, once or twice, in the six weeks before, is enough for most riders — the extra comes from adrenaline, the group, and a taper you actually take.
Build that ride gradually: add around ten percent a week, and take a lighter week every fourth. Match the terrain if you can. A flat five-hour ride is poor preparation for five hours of climbing, even at the same duration.
The week around it
One long ride, one quality session, and the rest genuinely easy. That is the whole structure. The quality session is where sweet spot or threshold work lives; the easy rides are what let you arrive at both of those able to do them properly.
In the final two weeks, cut volume noticeably but keep some intensity — short, sharp efforts keep you feeling like a cyclist while the fatigue drains away. Resist the urge to cram. Nothing you do in the last ten days will make you fitter; plenty of it can make you tired.
Pacing and fuelling — where the day is actually decided
Pacing: the first climb will feel easy and that is the trap. Riding the first hour ten watts too hard is paid back with interest in the fourth. Have a ceiling you refuse to exceed early, especially in a group that is going faster than your plan.
Fuelling: aim for a consistent intake per hour from the start rather than eating once you feel empty — by then it is too late to catch up. Practise the exact products at the exact intensity on your long rides. A gut that has never seen 70 g of carbohydrate in an hour will not learn it on event day.
Your numbers, explained the moment you ask.
The two things that decide a gran fondo — pacing and fuelling — are also the two that are hardest to work out alone, because both change with the length and intensity of the specific ride in front of you.
Peakfy builds each session with the interval profile, exact power and heart-rate targets and carbohydrate and fluid per hour, computed from that ride's duration and intensity. So the long rides in your build are rehearsals of the day, not just distance. And when the plan needs to move because life moved, you can ask what that costs your event — as often as you like, with no counter running.
Questions riders ask
Keep reading
- How many carbs per hour cycling? A practical guide
- Durability in cycling: why your FTP does not predict hour five