When he’s not winning double Olympic gold, battling for countless other honours and launching a safety initiative after being doored by a post vehicle, like most professionals Belgian Remco Evenepoel will rack up around 28 to 30,000 training and racing kilometres each year. That’s around 1,000-plus hours of riding, spread throughout his programme. Dig a little further and, thanks to a Remco vlog, it seems that some of these training rides stretch beyond seven hours. Even for a professional, a seven-hour ride is long. In this particular episode, impending poor weather forced Evenepoel to split the ride into two still-voluptuous chunks. It begs several key questions: what’s the physiological and performance rationale behind rides that are longer than any stage or race in the WorldTour? And are there any benefits, or drawbacks, of splitting a very long day in the saddle into two parts? We brought together world-class coaches and physiologists to delve deep into this lengthy process…
More experience, more miles
During the 2023 Science & Cycling Conference in Bilbao, one WorldTour sport scientist told me how he could see a day when riders’ training efforts might tip over eight hours. I was reminded of this during a Lidl-Trek training camp when a team member mentioned how 2019 world road race champion and Classics specialist Mads Pedersen would often extend his training rides if he was feeling good. It’s why I’ve sought out physiological insight from Swede Mattias Reck, who coaches the Dane and several others at Lidl-Trek.
“For many riders in our team, the longest training rides are around seven hours,” says Reck. “This is especially common at training camps where riders are really motivated and want to make a long loop on nice roads. That said, Mads does more six- to seven-hour training rides than most. He needs a great load to enjoy optimal stimuli.”
This might come as little surprise when you view the specimen that is Pedersen, who looks more muscular, more robust, than many of his contemporaries. His 6ft, 70kg-plus frame comes into its own in the Spring Classics and the sprints. He’s 29 years old on December 18, 2024, so has many cycling miles in his extensive bank, many of them racked up in steely Danish winters. So, on a speculative level, it stands to reason that an experienced, fiercely strong rider like Pedersen would need a greater workload than many to nudge his physiology – and therefore performance – to another league.
But what exactly does this mean at the empirical, anatomical level? “If we talk generally, all kinds of training will help both VO2 max and a rider’s endurance,” says Reck. For the unfamiliar, VO2 max, aerobic capacity, is the amount of oxygen an individual can utilise during intense exercise. It’s simplifying things but, broadly, the higher, the better for endurance athletes.
Pedersen is known to extend his team's endurance training rides (Photo: Dario Belingheri/Getty Images)
“However, as you progress through your career, you need extra stimulation,” Reck adds. “There is good correlation between being a good professional rider and the ability to maintain a high power output after they’ve spent many hours on the bike; in kilojoules (kJ) of work done, we’re talking after 3,000, 4,000, 5000kJ… This relatively new scientific concept is called ‘fatigue resistance’ and isn’t possible to reach without a certain amount of hours of training. So yes, very long rides are needed to build enough endurance to forge this resistance.”
Durability is king and queen
Or, for those who pedal in sport-science circles, “durability”. This is a concept Rouleur has dug deep into before, focusing heavily on the work of James Spragg, who is a coach at Tudor Pro Cycling. Spragg’s undertaken several studies into durability with a standout elite statistic: “Professional domestiques tended to display a drop in their power profile after 2,500 to 3,000kJ. Whether this was as a result of a physiological inability to sustain a given power output or a result of their ‘job’ within the team being completed for that particular day/stage is unclear. Interestingly, though, GC riders showed no decline in the power profile even after 3000kJ, suggesting that their fatigue resistance and high relative power-output values underpin their role.”
Further 2023 research by a group of scientists including top Ironman age-group athlete Daniel Plews concluded: “Prolonged exercise elicits progressive physiological changes, such as increased core and muscle temperature, depletion of fuel stores, accumulation of muscle damage and cellular stress. ‘Durability’ is defined as an individual’s resilience to these deteriorations… and has been proposed as a key endurance performance parameter.”
There’s undoubtedly a genetic element to this key endurance performance parameter – Tadej should thank Mr and Mrs Pogačar on a daily basis – but, concluded Spragg, a key strand that linked riders who showed great durability was a huge volume of training. “This, it seems, is more important than intensity when it comes to building durability,” Spragg said, albeit riders should maintain a certain amount of intensity.
The magic of mitochondria
Spragg suggested polarised training was a key contributor to durability. At a basic level, this means spending huge swathes of training time riding at relatively low intensity with a small percentage at high intensity. Why, is down to mitochondria. These are the powerhouses of the cells and are where you generate energy. Or the organelles that determine whether you win or lose the race.
“Fundamentally, training volume as a whole seems to be related to greater mitochondrial volume as a whole,” says exercise physiologist and aerodynamicist at Vorteq, Jamie Pringle. “That’s likely allowing for benefits such as being able to hold a higher percentage of maximum (a higher threshold), possibly better exercise economy (lower oxygen cost) and likely sparing of carbohydrate through greater use of fat as a fuel (although that’s not as relevant to performance as it used to be now that we can feed with such high rates of carbohydrate [more on this later], plus burning more fat actually makes the system slightly less economical, not more). More is better for the muscle, it seems.”
Pringle flags up Professor David Bishop’s pioneering 2014 paper, where the Australian looked to discover the endurance athlete’s nirvana by answering the question: can we optimise exercise training to improve mitochondrial function and content? In other words, mitochondrial efficiency and amount, both of which contribute to cycling performance.
Much of Bishop’s work focused on citrate synthase, an enzyme exclusively located in the mitochondria. High levels of citrate synthase is a sign that a rider possesses a strong, voluminous bed of mitochondria, which results in an engine like Jens Voigt’s.
In a far-reaching study, Bishop concluded, “It may be that training volume is an important determinant of changes in citrate synthase is activity in red, oxidative skeletal muscle [slow-twitch muscle fibres recruited at low intensities], while training intensity is a more important determinant of changes in citrate synthase activity in white, glycolytic skeletal muscle [fast-twitch muscle fibres only recruited at higher intensities].”
This is an academic way of saying great volume is good for endurance, great intensity is good for speed. Which is well known. However, Bishop also concluded that “in type I muscle there is no sign of a plateau; greater training volumes are associated with greater increases in citrate synthase activity… Further research is required to investigate if there is a point where further increases in training volume do not lead to further increases in citrate synthase activity.”
In other words, Bishop discovered no duration end point of which citrate synthase kept rising, meaning the length of a long ride could forever grow. That further research he recommended seemingly doesn’t exist. Not from the confines of a university anyway. For some reason, scientists seemingly struggle to recruit subjects who’ll spend the whole day pedalling away in a laboratory before having a muscle chopped out in the interests of biopsy analysis. Weird that…
Fuelling revolution
It leaves the long ride debate on a cliffhanger, albeit at some point chafing, aching or pure boredom would kick in and curtail an eternal ride. Which is fine, says Bishop, as you can give your powerhouses a boost nutritionally. “There is research to support that low muscle glycogen levels can augment mitochondrial biogenesis,” he told us. That’s the basis of fasted training that really came to the fore during the Team Sky days. You couldn’t read a training interview with a WorldTour rider without glycogen depletion being hailed as the panacea of performance. It’s still used but, says Reck, its days might be numbered.
“When it comes to endurance, fat oxidation and training ‘low, in a fasted state or with very limited carbohydrate intake, the praxis has changed. Fasted training was more popular a few years back but with more research, the feeling is that it doesn’t really make a performance difference.”
The science behind fuelling during training and fat burning is becoming ever more detailed (Dario Belingheri/Getty Images)
“I think part of the problem is that people overestimate how much fat they really burn and underestimate how much carbohydrate they use, even at pretty low intensities,” Reck adds. “This is down to myths or misunderstanding of how to interpret blood lactate. Just because your lactate is low doesn’t mean you’re burning a lot of fat. Many extremely strong professional riders that train 1000 hours each year, with a lot of long endurance rides, can be very carbohydrate-driven when it comes to generating energy and with lactate way below 2mmol.”
Lactate is a by-product of carbohydrate metabolism and so is often seen as a sign of how hard a rider’s working. The higher the millimole figure, the harder a rider is working as lactate builds up in the blood. However, Reck suggests that this doesn’t take into account how efficiently lactate is recycled by professional riders to generate more energy, so the supposition that burning more fat is key to elite endurance performance is flawed.
“In the future, the idea of training to ride while burning very high levels of fat to spare your glycogen stores [for harder efforts of a race like a climb of sprint] will change,” Reck adds. “It’ll be more about how much carbohydrates you can take in during training and racing – we’re currently looking at many of our riders consuming over 130g per hour – and how much of that energy [from gels, bars, blocks and drinks] riders can oxidate in order to ride faster and longer.”
Continuous or chunks?
In Reck’s view, it’s quality feeding that’ll result in longer efforts, greater durability and a stronger peloton. He also touches upon splitting these long days, a la Remco and his weather-interrupted seven-hour ride, and says there’s no real physiological benefit or loss, albeit double training days could be of use for committed but time-starved amateurs.
“More important to me is adding short sprints at the end of easy endurance rides,” he says. “When you start tiring in both head and legs, a few sprints pick you up. It works every time. You have a group, it starts to get quiet after a few hours of just riding steady endurance… Put in some short sprints and everybody gets new energy and starts talking, fooling around a bit!”
There's still room for some sprint efforts in a mega-long training ride (Maximiliano Blanco/Getty Images)
That’s the sociological aspect but, says Pringle, there’s a physiological rationale behind these high-intensity efforts. “It’s possible there are aspects of super-long rides that are uniquely stimulated toward the end of the session, namely training with very low glycogen content in certain muscle fibres and an almost exclusive reliance on exogenous sources of glucose,” he says. “If we can deliberately target those ‘higher threshold’ muscle fibres through being clever with strategies like depleting slow-twitch fibres and forcing the body to recruit those higher-threshold fibres at lower intensities, then there might be scope in that.
“It’s speculative and I’m not aware of any real work that’s done this in highly trained individuals, but it’s possible that is partly what’s happening in most high-volume endurance athletes in their normal day-to-day hard training. They’re always training in a depleted state, so the adaptive signalling is probably high already.”
Where does that leave us? Is longer better? There’s certainly evidence, albeit equivocal, that consistent seven-hour rides forge a more durable athlete over time. But, as Pringle flags up: “It also very much depends on what else is in the programme. If all the rider is doing is long, slow steady riding, and no high-intensity work, then it’s difficult to condition that race-pace specific territory if you never touch it.” It's why even these uber-long rides are punctuated by harder efforts, reflecting the training ideal that content should be race-specific. Just watch out for overtraining, warns Bishop, as longer doesn’t always mean better.
Ultimately, though, riding long away might deliver its greatest payback up top. Riding long forges a mental stoicism that hopefully pays off on the racing stage, perhaps on a cold, lengthy day in Northern France. “Everything I do is consumed by one purpose: 13.04.25,” Pedersen posted recently on Instagram. The date of Paris-Roubaix. If the Dane wins, he can lend a nod to those extra-long rides.
Cover image by Dario Belingheri/Getty Images
