Mastering Amy's Gran Fondo (the UCI World Gran Fondo Champs 2025)

Summary:

In this episode, Ryan Thomas, head coach at RCA, discusses the specific training and preparation needed for the UCI World Gran Fondo Championships. He breaks down the unique demands of the course, emphasising the importance of threshold power and fatigue resistance. The conversation covers key training sessions, race day strategies, and nutrition tips to ensure optimal performance. Listeners gain insights into how to effectively prepare for this challenging event, making it relevant for both participants and those training for similar races.

Key Takeaways:

The UCI World Gran Fondo Championships require specific training due to unique course demands.
Understanding the course layout is crucial for effective training preparation.
Key training sessions include threshold efforts and over-unders to build capacity.
Fatigue resistance is essential for performing well in long events like Grand Fondos.
Nutrition strategies should be practiced during training to avoid issues on race day.
A proper warm-up is vital to prepare for the intense start of the race.
Riders should focus on carbohydrate intake before and during the event.
Incorporating hard efforts into long rides helps simulate race conditions.
Coaching can provide tailored strategies for individual riders' needs.
Consistency in training and nutrition leads to better performance outcomes.

Chapters:

00:00 Preparing for the UCI World Grand Fondo Championships
05:14 Understanding the Course Demands
08:56 Key Training Sessions for Success
13:21 Race Day Strategies and Nutrition
20:03 Final Tips for Optimal Performance

 

RCA Coaching: https://roadcyclingacademy.com/

 

Transcript:

Cam Nicholls (00:00.184)
Welcome back to the RCA podcast where today I am joined by the RCA's head coach Ryan Thomas and I know Ryan is coaching a lot of people at the moment. I he's got about 15 RCA members that are preparing for the UCI World Grand Fondo Championships which is held, are gonna be held in Lawn this year, alongside or in conjunction with Amy's Grand Fondo, so in October. And...

I know there's a lot of people out there preparing for this event. And look, if you're not preparing for this event and you're preparing for a Fondo, either this year or next year, you'll probably get good value out of this discussion irrespective. But we are gonna focus on this event, because it's quite specific, the terrain and the typical training that you would do for a grand Fondo is gonna vary a little bit for this one. I don't know, it's gonna vary for any Fondo event because of the course, but this one's quite unique, which Ryan's gonna get into.

Ryan, talk me through the 15 people that you're coaching for this event. How are you preparing them for this event? What are you doing exactly?

Yeah, so it is a really interesting course and it's quite a demanding course, it's in, there's a few, you want to break the course down in the first case to see what you're actually looking at. And I've done this course myself and I'll be racing the world championships myself as well. So I understand the exact demands, which really helps for something like this and training people for the specific course.

So first thing you would do if you sign up for any Grand Fondo, you want to look at the course and what's going to be the demands of the course. And this one is it's 130 K. The distance isn't huge, but the first eight kilometers, 10 kilometers is straight uphill. Like literally 200 meters after the start line, you're going straight uphill. And it's not a steep climb. It's around four to four and a half, five percent average for that eight and a half K.

Ryan Thomas (RCA Head Coach) (02:05.088)
So it's not a, it's not super demanding from that respect, but that's the first 20 to 30 minutes, depending on what level you are, is going to define your whole race. the physiologically, what you need to be able to do is you need to be able to do a 20 minute to 30 minute full gas effort out of the gun to be able to be in the best group possible. And then you need to train for the rest of it as well. So what that looks like is having a

trying to get as high as threshold as possible in the period in eight weeks leading into it, 12 weeks leading into it, for example. So at the moment we're 11 weeks out, 11 to 12 weeks out as we record this. So now for 12 weeks out towards eight weeks out, we're looking at really building a solid capacity at threshold power and being really good at handling riding at that steady power for 20 minutes. So.

If you haven't got a 20 minute climb or a 30 minute climb in your area, so you need to be able to ride hard for 20 to 30 minutes. And if you can't do that, then you need to start training for something like that. So that's the first part of the course. Second part of the course is like flat undulating, rolly, 30 to 40 kilometres worth. So it's not super demanding physiologically. You're going to be in a group. You're going to be riding zone two, zone three.

some zone four on the front if you're pulling a turn. So physiologically, it's not that challenging. That first part is gonna define the group. And then if you're in the group, whatever group you're in, they're gonna be very similar physiology to you because you've all just done a really hard effort to get there. So you're gonna be matched with the people you're with. So rolling turns is gonna be nice and easy. Third part of the course is another climb. We've got another 20 minute roughly undulating climb.

So it's very different to the first climb. It goes up in ramps. So you get ramps of 10 to 12%, and it flattens off, and then it pinches again at 10%, 8%. So it does that for about 20 to 25 minutes, which is quite hard. It's more of a VO2 anaerobic spike, and then you're sitting back down in tempo threshold. So it's like, think about over-unders for like 25 minutes is kind of what the physiology that you need to be able to do.

Ryan Thomas (RCA Head Coach) (04:27.726)
Once you get to the top of that climb, beautiful 10, 15 minutes, 60, 70 K an hour descent. Really not super technical, it's nice and windy, there's a couple of hard corners in there, but got 10, 15 minutes just to back off the power, recover, get down to the coast road. Then you've got 30 K, 35 K along the coast, which is rolling. A couple of short, punchy climbs, but nothing super hard. By that point, you're just going, giving it your all.

So it's a really interesting course. It's an awesome course. It's an awesome course to race. But the main physiological things that you need to train for is around your threshold because that first 20 to 30 minute climb and then the second climb are the big defining points of the course.

So can you give us a bit of a flavour, and I know you're working with 15 people that all have different logistics and different available training times and, you know, they're different fitness levels, different goals.

how long is a piece of string, but I'm going to ask you a pretty specific question because that's what the listeners want, Ryan. What's some example sessions that you kind of, I'm assuming over-unders is a session that you're probably working with some of your clients on, but could you maybe tell the listeners what does that session look like and what are some other sessions that you're doing specifically to condition the riders for this event?

Yeah, key sessions for this one, think, are your standard threshold, which we're starting at the moment for most athletes, you're starting around four by eights, working to five by eight threshold, and then you're lengthening the threshold effort. So we want to get 10, 12, 15 minute threshold efforts in. That foundational work is really important. In the previous weeks and in this first building phase, you want to do

Ryan Thomas (RCA Head Coach) (06:22.626)
some really good threshold work around sweet spots. So doing those 20, 30 minute efforts at sweet spot sub threshold, getting that ability to actually ride at a sub threshold level for 20 to 30 minutes. Because that sets the foundation for being able to do it at threshold and maybe in slightly above threshold and then do over the under is at over threshold. So the foundational sessions there are two by 20 or three by 20 at tempo sweet spot.

That's the first foundational session that we want to work on. The second session that I would work on in there is threshold. So starting at four by eight threshold power. So what's it?

What's 4x8? Can you give us a, just break down what a 4x8 session looks like?

Yep, 20, 20 minute warmup with a couple of activations in there, working activations, you want to be doing them at sort of what power you're doing in your interval. So two by one minutes or a ramp up to threshold, for example, a four minute ramp, recover. And then we do four by eight minute efforts at 97 to a hundred percent of threshold power with four minutes recovery in the middle there. And that recovery can be descending back down a hill if you've got a nice eight minute hill in your area, or it can just be in.

Design One Power.

Ryan Thomas (RCA Head Coach) (07:42.261)
zone to it.

That's a four by eight is like, that's the first session. If you're to start doing any threshold work, four by eight is usually the one I would go to because it's the easiest to achieve. And then from there, we start either adding a repetition on. So doing five by eights with the same recovery. And then we either start reducing recovery or adding time onto the effort. So there's two different ways you can go there depending on.

what hill you got available, whether you're indoors or outdoors. So that all comes down to your specific context. But we really want to lengthen that time to exhaustion at threshold. We don't necessarily want to, if you're thinking about that session, and a lot of people asked this to me within the RCA, the people that we're coaching, and one day you might feel really good doing a threshold session. Do I increase my power or do I do more?

And at threshold, if we start increasing our power, we're getting up into that VO2 territory. So we're getting a little, slightly different adaptation. For a threshold effort, we kind of want to increase our time to exhaustion. adding an extra two, three minutes onto each effort or doing an extra effort if you're feeling really good that day is, that's going to give you more of a physiological larger threshold capacity or a larger engine rather than lifting the ceiling. We don't necessarily want to lift the ceiling too much in threshold. We want to...

bigger capacity.

Cam Nicholls (09:07.662)
Okay, cool. So they're kind of like a couple of key sessions that you would develop over the course of an eight to 12 week period. And I'm assuming at some point you're sort of taking the sustained sweet spot efforts towards the end and you're turning them into sustained threshold efforts. But where do you factor in the need to be able to deliver a big blow at the...

upfront and then be able to ride pretty solid for two to three hours after that big blow because that's the event, right? So are you incorporating that type of conditioning into the training as well?

100%. A lot of that comes from normal training anyway. So most people, if you're doing an interval session, you're generally very fresh, right? So doing a VO2 session or 30-15 session, which we would incorporate six to eight weeks out to really add on top of your threshold capacity. That type of work you're doing after 10 to 15 warmup and you're going as hard as you can in that type of session. that going out of the gun, I don't think that needs to be trained too much.

I think it's going out of the gun really hard and then doing another three or four hours at the end of it is the thing that needs to be trained because that's the hard bit. Most people will be able to do a pretty hard effort out of the gun and we'll do that regularly in their training because that's what intervals demand. The specificity for that event or preparing for something like that will come on your longer rides on the weekend. So you want to do a specific ride and it's

We're not necessarily looking at a specific physiological adaptation when we're doing these things, maybe a bit of fatigue resistance, but on a weekend you want to do two to three rides where you're doing a similar style of effort of what you're going to be required to for that event. And that can come from doing an event prior. So a lot of people in Australia, there's the Masters Nationals Championships held a couple of weeks before. So it's only 70 kilometres, but it's still a really good top end workout to do.

Ryan Thomas (RCA Head Coach) (11:15.866)
And for example, if anyone's doing that, I would actually recommend doing that workout, doing the race and then doing an hour or two after it if your goal is world championships. So that type of work is really important. But specifically for amies, if you're not doing any racing, you would do a three, four, five hour, depending on what your goal time is for that 130K event. You want to do hard effort at the start. Doesn't matter too much what that effort is. I would say it could be some VO2, it could be some threshold.

just do something quite challenging for 20 to 30 minutes of accumulated work in that first hour. Do two, three hours of endurance and then start doing some efforts towards the end. So do some over-unders or do some 30-30s, 30-15s. So similar, but doesn't need to be exactly what that terrain's gonna demand because we can't predict exactly what it's gonna look like. we're trying to just make, your body used to working hard.

after already doing two hours, two and a half hours, three hours of hard work. So a lot of people will do for fatigue resistance, and I think this is where fatigue resistance gets a bit lost in most people. They'll go and do a two, three hour ride at zone two, and then they'll do something hard. If you do that, you're not reducing any of your top end capacity. It's very aerobically demanding and it's hard on your muscles, but...

You're not taking any of that glycogen storage away. You're not doing what it's gonna be like in a race. You're gonna be spiking over thresholds so many times in that two to three hours before you get to that second climb in the world championships course. You need to replicate that. So you need to do some hard work over threshold, depending on what it is and it'll vary for each person and what their terrain looks like. But do some hard work in that first hour, settle in for an hour or two, then do some more hard work.

replicate the same sort of interval. That's gonna be the best way to prepare you to go hard for that first bit, which you're doing in other parts of your training. But important part is that second climb where most people, people last year who did the course, they're people who were getting dropped from groups. I can probably say that they didn't do that hard start and then hard end. So there's that second climb is the other crunch point that's gonna be defining for you.

Cam Nicholls (13:37.186)
So I recommended to a rider up here that we don't coach but he just rides in the bunch ride and he asked me what I would recommend. What do you think about this strategy, So our local bunch ride takes off pretty easy and it's flat, goes relatively hard on the flats and then it hits this area called Black Mountain and it's quite lumpy, so like that second part of Amy's. So I said to him, I said get on the trainer on Saturday morning.

do it like a Zwift race, which is like typically tempo threshold for like, you know, 20, 30 minutes, get off, get on your bike, potter to, you know, the local bunch ride start, which sort of takes off pretty easy and then do the bunch. And I felt like that was a good sort of way of conditioning himself because he's gonna do this, essentially sweet spot tempo threshold effort out of the gate, then he's gonna cruise for a bit.

then he's going to get the bunch ride cruise for a bit longer then it's going to go fast along the flats and then he's going to hit this like hilly lumpy section and he's going to have to go hard again and then it finishes off pretty flat pretty fast so what do you reckon about that?

Almost perfect.

nice, there you go.

Ryan Thomas (RCA Head Coach) (14:52.718)
Yeah, yeah, I'd be really good. It's a bit hard, like doing an indoor ride and then going outdoors, people would probably arc up against that, I would say. So you'd probably get a bit of resistance recommending that. The other scenario is most people do a local bunch ride on a weekend, whether it's two, three, four hours, whatever it is. The best recommendation in a bunch ride is usually hard, whether you do some chop off in it or whatever it is, but do your bunch ride.

Do some zone two, maybe half an hour for your bunch ride, I it's around three hours. So do your three hour bunch ride. Go, I'd probably miss the coffee because it's not specific for your event. So reduce your stopping time. Go on to another 30 minutes, 40 minutes in zone two. Just let your body recover a little bit from the hard effort, usually at the end of a bunch ride. And then for you, I'd go to Gindya Drive and do some six to eight minute hill repeats or over-unders up Gindya Drive, do three or four of those.

doing a bunch ride, adding in some zone two after and then going, doing some threshold over under style work is gonna be very specific for what you're gonna need to do at Amys.

Yep, cool. And so that's very much touching on the training component. With your members, what sort of carbohydrate strategy are you trying to get them to during, knowing that you should be aiming for somewhere between one to four grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight three to four hours before the event. You're probably not gonna do it three to four hours before Amy's, because Amy starts early, so.

You wanna start conditioning yourself in training to maybe an hour, an hour and a half before you go out, get at least sort of one to two grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight. So it depends on your body weight. Like if you weigh 100 kilos, like getting four grams per kilo is 400 grams of carbs, good luck. But obviously you wanna have a big substantial meal before, you wanna be carb loading the day beforehand. So let's not go too much into that because that's gonna be very variable.

Cam Nicholls (17:00.462)
for the person, but just make sure you're focusing on that if you're listening. You'll wanna have a big meal before and condition yourself in training to be able to tolerate that before you go and ride hard for three or four hours, because if you just do it on event day and you haven't done it before, you'll have a crook guts. But what about the actual, like once you start the ride, because it's gonna be hard to fuel in the first half an hour to an hour, because you're gonna be fighting for wheels, you're gonna be going up the climb.

So what are you recommending? A gel on the start line, 90 grams in the bottles, how big are the bottles? What are you suggesting there?

Yeah. So the preparation and morning of, think something that's often forgotten or neglected is the, if you have a meal two to three hours before and you don't have anything for two hours before the race, you're going to be like, you're not stopping up as you're going. You're still burning energy in that morning. You don't do your warmup. So having for the hour before the start, I would say you probably should have a

a whole bottle of whatever you want to have. I'd just probably have a, what I'll be doing is I'll have my, I'll have my morning, I'll have my breakfast three hours before, and then I'll sit down and relax a bit, just prepare, staying close. So think about an hour before I'm going to start thinking about warming up, getting kitted up. But that one hour before I'll have a bottle of maybe 60 to 80 grams of carbohydrates and I'll aim to finish that before I start. So.

having that topping up within that hour before is really important because you're going to be very depleted if in that first 30 minutes you you're burning that first 20-30 minutes you're burning no fat there's no fat contribution to that because you're going threshold or above so it's all carbohydrates and for someone like myself in that first 30 minutes i'm probably going to burn 80 grams of carbohydrates in that first 30 minutes so if i'm not and i'll be fine because i'm being able to get it in quickly but

Ryan Thomas (RCA Head Coach) (19:04.246)
I'd have an extra gel or an extra something to have either at the top of that, top of the climb. Maybe you have 120 grams of carbohydrates in the first hour because you've got, you've had 70 grams in the first 30 minutes and then the rest of the ride you do 90. So that just because that first 30 minutes is so demanding compared to the rest of it, because you're not going to be able to ride at threshold for the rest of the event, but you're to be riding threshold and dipping into VO2 capacity up that climb.

So I would just have a little bit extra in that hour leading in and be prepared to have a little bit extra in that first 30 minutes. And it's not going to hurt you because your body is using it. Just practice that.

Yeah, good. All right, anything else to add before we wrap up?

Warm up, think is another one. So because you're starting out of the gate, you need to get in a good warm up in. So I'd recommend 20 to 30 minutes and that may seem extreme. But if you're going in there after a five minute roll from your hill down to the course or from your car down to it and you're sitting in the pen for, you're gonna have to line up 20 to 30 minutes before, maybe even an hour before, because the pens at Grand Fondos are insane. You have to get there very early to be at the front.

Where before, however long you're lining up before, make sure you do 20 minute or not minimum. Do a couple of openers, so do two one minute efforts at VO2 for example, do a short neuromuscular acceleration, do a sprint. Just activate the muscles, get your heart pumping and then that'll make that first climb so much easier and less demanding on your body because your body isn't introducing all of these new products to it and trying to get rid of it at the same time.

Ryan Thomas (RCA Head Coach) (20:53.846)
So if you introduce a lot of that stimulus in your warm up, that'll really help on that first climb. And when you get to the top of it, you'll be able to recover quicker because you've exposed your body to that already in the warm up.

Good.

Hopefully it's not a freezing cold day for everyone.

Last year we had booties and they were on our jackets and glass, it was cold. So fingers crossed it's not windy and wet.

Yeah, fingers crossed. All right, well thanks for the advice, Ryan. Look, if you're out there listening and you might be participating in this event and you're thinking, I wouldn't mind some guidance from a coach leading in, even though it'll probably be only a couple of months, but a couple of months is better than zero months, I can tell you that, particularly when you're really wanting to get the most out of an event like Worlds. Make sure you head to the RCA coaching page on www.roadcyclingacademy.com. Check out Hire a Coach.

Cam Nicholls (21:51.054)
where you can work with the coach leading into the event and we will catch you in the next podcast.