How To Train For The Gralloch

So, you’ve entered The Gralloch, and pencilled it in your diary for May 2027. You need to be full fitness. You want to qualify for the UCI Gravel Worlds or give it a really good shot and see what you can do against the others in your age group. Maybe you’ve done it previously and you want to improve your position, or maybe this is your first time and you want to get round without killing yourself and wishing you’d stayed in bed.

As I write it’s early November and you’ve got 6 months to get yourself race ready. More than enough time, right? But have you? Christmas is 6 weeks away, so you’ll more than likely lose a week there (not too important right, need to enjoy yourself, eat loads of food, and have a bit too much to drink). And then it’s New Year, and January. And, like most Januarys the weather will be naff, either snowing, freezing, or pouring with rain. Or, if you’re really lucky, all three!!

Before you know it, it’s February and your fitness is waning, you feel like a bag of spanners on the bike, and when you try to ride hard, it feels like you’ve got an iron lung. Marvellous. Before you know it, it’s April, and you’re wondering if you can ride the sportive instead. Or take up Tiddlywinks.

It’s a familiar pattern I see every year, there’s always several people that start coaching with me in the back end of March, panicking like mad, that their race is in 6 weeks and they feel like a slug or that they only have reverse gear.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t. Conversely, you don’t have to become a monk, pretend you’re turning pro and move to Girona (although that’d be pretty nice and the weather is a damn sight better than most of northern Europe). And, you don’t have to be doing intervals in every session (or just riding easy and clocking up 20 hrs/week, like most of us have time for that, right. Thought not).

So, how should you plan your training for the Gralloch? There are several aspects to the Gralloch. Depending on your age and ability it’s an event of about 4 hours. So it’s long (what I mean here is it isn’t a 1 hour crit, so irrespective of whether you win overall in about 3 hrs or trundle along in 7 it’s a fair old jaunt) – so you need good durability. There’s a long climb at the start that nearly every group rides at full gas (requires high VO2max), there’s technical skills that are required, and you’ll need a high FTP. It’s mainly off-road, so there’s an increased strength component over road cycling (especially upper body) – the vibrations also cause fatigue and then there’s logistical issues of carrying sufficient fuel and fluid, as well as deciding on bike issues such as tyre choice. It’s a lot to think about.

Durability
This is the ability to ride close to your threshold after a set amount of work. Elite riders may want to test their ability after riding a steady 3,000 kJ, while masters’ riders may want to test after say 1,500 kJ. One of the tests I have my athletes do is to do a fresh 20-minute TT – so warm up, test, cool down sorta thing. Then a few days or so later, have them do a steady endurance ride (say 1,500 kJ) and then immediately repeat the 20-mins test. We then compare the two tests. Less than 5% difference is good, while more than 10% difference suggests you need to work on your durability.

You can increase your durability by adding some intervals to your endurance rides. At first maybe the intervals front load the endurance ride, but the real magic happens when you backload the endurance ride with intervals.

VO2max
The start of the Gralloch is dominated by a long climb and drag of about 7 km. From the gun. Apart from needing a solid warm-up, you’re going to need a high VO2max to help with this.

Ok, I know, most people don’t have access to “measuring their expired respiratory gases”, so you can measure your MAP instead at the end of a ramp test. You can test your data here https://www.cyclecoach.com/calculator. The calculator estimates your VO2max and a host of other useful metrics.

To improve your VO2max, you’re going to need to do four to six efforts of 4 or 5-mins duration at ~115% of FTP. Between 1 and 3 times per week.

Such efforts will likely improve your VO2max – there are other types of effort as well that you can do to improve VO2max, these include shorter efforts from multiple 30-sec repeats through to say efforts up to 6-mins in duration.

FTP
As a proxy, you’re wanting to improve your 20-mins power (note that FTP isn’t 20-mins or even 60-mins). Increasing FTP will have a positive effect on lifting the maximal power you can sustain for multiple hours (you can also, separately, work on increasing the % you can sustain for hours as well).

Warm up, 3 – 5 x 8-mins at 100 – 105% FTP with 3 to 5 mins easy between efforts is an ideal starting point for improving your FTP. One to three times per week.

Technical skills
It goes without saying that you’ll need to work on your bike handling skills and being able to ride across various surfaces. Realistically, if you can get outdoors off-road once a week that’d be great. More is going to be better.

Strength work
I’ve previously mentioned how beneficial strength work is – both for increasing endurance cycling performance across a variety of durations from short to long. But potentially there’s also a health benefit of strength work as well. It’s possible that strength work helps offset the damage that cycling does to our bones (there’s no osteogenic loading in cycling, or very little). Squats, leg press, hip flexion, bench press, barbell rows are all really good for us. Twice a week in the winter. Possibly more.

A rider I coached a few years ago, Phil, wasn’t racing The Gralloch, but had an equally important race in May. He turned up for coaching in March, with his fitness having tanked 15%. Dropping this much can be somewhat hard to regain – in fact it can take almost an entire season to regain a true 10% drop in fitness. And, Phil is not the only one – about 40 years ago, I followed the then conventional wisdom to ride only steady during the winter. The following year was a right disaster – took me until September to be back at the front again. I didn’t make that mistake again!
Some of your fitness losses can be mitigated by equipment choices such as a waxed chain, which may save you say 5 W (definitely worth doing). But if you’ve dropped 15 W off your FTP due to naff training, then you’re at a 10 W deficit when you could either be 5 W up, or more if you’d pushed your actual fitness up.

The Gralloch requires that your fitness is high and is strong across several domains – skills, short-term power, VO2max, FTP and durability. If you get the training right, don’t leave it to panic stations in March and begin a nice steady build from here you’ll be setting yourself up to do well.

If you’d like a hand putting this all together, then that’s what we do here at CycleCoach. Check out MAP: The Build.