The Most Valuable Training Tip - According to 100 Cyclists
I asked Reddit how to train for a big Gran Fondo. Here’s what they said - and what I’m doing.
Crowdsourced Wisdom: /r/cycling
Reddit is weird and wonderful — and the /cycling subreddit is no exception. I posted a simple question to the 1.3 million riders there:
“What’s the one thing you’d definitely recommend a recreational cyclist invest in to level up over the next 20 weeks of Gran Fondo training?”
In 24 hours, I got about 108 responses. Some hilarious, some troll-ish, but most genuinely helpful.
🔗 Check out the full reddit thread here! 🔗
🔝 The Top 4 Crowd-Picks:
Time in the saddle + consistency (200+ upvotes)
Indoor smart trainer (36 upvotes)
Structured training plan (28 upvotes)
Buy a house near a lot of hills (26 upvotes!)
Other Thoughtful Suggestions:
A proper bike fitting
Garmin 540 or better + HRM strap & cadence/speed sensor
Tubeless tires
Clipless pedals
Joining a cycling club
Power meter
And my favourite: “Find friends who also like cycling” (A+ advice)
@elcuydangerous
“Spend your resources in consistency. Yes, that is a thing. Figure out your days so that you have time to train, work, eat, and sleep. You will have to make sacrifices. That show you wanted to watch, yeah, you are going to have to put that off. Doom scrolling? Nope you have to get your ass to bed. That second beer on a Friday? Nah, you have to fuel right for that long weekend ride.Not saying you have to kill everything you do for fun, but you will have to make sacrifices to accommodate your training volume, recovery, and fueling.”
@mattfeet
Time in the saddle with an actual training plan.
@mimical
Trying to structure rides on heart rate is dabbling into the dark arts of inconsistent black magic. But yeah, if it's all you got than it's all you got.IMO, if the option is there the most feasible direct drive trainer you can find beats the outdoor power meter. It makes achieving the structures a million times easier, and even if it's a short 20-30 minute ride at the end of the day it's right there, zero rain, no snow, no easy excuses.
🔗 Check out the full reddit thread here! 🔗
What I’m Taking Into Week 1
There’s so much you could buy, test, or get distracted by in this sport. But I’m choosing to stay focused on:
Consistency: Daily movement, weekly long rides, and repeatable routines
Structured training: Gradual progression, AI and human-cyclist feedback
Climbing: Weekly hill days, both urban and gravel
Indoor setup: Frictionless, weather-proof sessions at home. But first - figuring this out and watching money disappear into the financial black hole that is cycling
Last week was a research-and-reset kind of moment. A strong first step toward Whistler. Here’s to 21 weeks of showing up.
Let’s ride. 💪
LC, the moment that you start stringing together serious endurance events for the year, it makes sense to construct not just a structured event training plan, but an Annual Training Plan. The harder the events get and the more of them that you do, the more urgent this becomes.
For harder events, your fitness and strength will peak, then some will rapidly fall away. Yet when you train for 12-24 weeks building it, it becomes tempting to tuck in another event before you lose too much awesome. As days grow warmer and longer, you'll find more opportunities to do so. Finish a second event, and you'll spot a third, perhaps three weeks away, and so on.
Jamming too many events together can quickly cramp recovery, overstrain your body and leave you exhausted and at risk of injury, while too far apart and you can spend a lot of time retraining that you didn't need to do. So a smarter way to do it is to list all the events that you *might* want to do across the season, and rate them by priority, e.g.:
A-ride: a ride you are keen to do as a highlight of your year;
B-ride: a ride you'd like to do as training for an A-ride;
C-ride: a ride you'd do either for enjoyment, or just to keep your fitness.
Where a weekly training plan schedules sessions, an annual training plan typically sketches weekly volume. It can be convenient to break volume into focused months of 'Base', 'Build', 'Peak' 'Event/Race' and 'Transition' to training for the next event. I've included an article from the training planning/tracking app Training Peaks, but there are others and you could even DIY on a spreadsheet. You'd need at least a heart-rate monitor and a fitness watch or bike computer to calculate weekly training volume, but a power meter is substantially better.
I can talk more about calculating training volume if you have interested. It doesn't matter much for individual rides, but matters a lot for week-on-week training, especially when you start chaining events.
https://www.trainingpeaks.com/learn/articles/the-comprehensive-guide-to-creating-an-annual-training-plan/