Rescheduling Peak Fitness For An Earlier Goal Event

By Jim Rutberg,
CTS Pro Coach,
co-author of “The Time-Crunched Cyclist”,
“Training Essentials for Ultrarunning”

SBT GRVL’s date change from mid-August to June 26-29 was one of the biggest shakeups to the gravel cycling calendar for 2025. Athletes who were planning their long-range training scheduled to peak for a long gravel event in August need to adjust to peak two months earlier. This is not an uncommon adjustment for goal-oriented athletes. Plans and schedules change and life happens. Whether you’re prepping for SBT or you need to reschedule peak fitness, ramp up your training and fitness faster than originally intended, here is a guide to adjusting your training in smart, safe, and effective ways.

Increase weekly training hours with indoor cycling

Consistency is king for boosting the effectiveness of training, even if you maintain the same average weekly training volume. In other words, if you are riding 8 hours per week you’re better off with a consistent training frequency and pattern as opposed to randomly dropping in training sessions. Indoor cycling is a great way to encourage consistency and frequency because you can ride inside at times when outdoor cycling is less convenient or less safe (e.g., night, pre-dawn, ultra-low temperatures, snow/ice, etc.).

Need help incorporating indoor cycling? Attend the free “Keys to Training for 100+ Mile Gravel Races with CTS” webinar on January 29 and start a free 20-week training plan that features structured workouts that can be completed on TrainingPeaks Virtual!

In the bigger picture, increasing training hours is all about increasing “training availability”. Indoor cycling increases training availability by expanding the hours at which you can ride. You can also increase training availability by expanding your cycling modalities (road, MTB) or off-bike exercises (hiking, trail running).

Schedule a training camp

At its core, a training camp is an opportunity for concentrated training volume. Often, a one-week training camp features 2-4x a cyclist’s normal training hours, which creates a significant stimulus for adaptation. Of course, you need to account for this high-volume week with a recovery period afterward, but incorporating a camp into your late winter or early spring training program can jump your fitness forward by a significant amount.

What kind of training camp should you sign up for or create on your own? Ideally, either a road or gravel cycling camp that focuses on long mileage days on the bike. If your event features a lot of climbing, then a training camp in a mountainous area would be ideal. But the high volume of Zone 2 and endurance work is the true game changer you’re after, even if the terrain isn’t a perfect match.

Another benefit of a training camp is the opportunity to get away from the tasks and stresses of everyday life to focus entirely on an “eat, sleep, ride, recover, repeat” lifestyle for a week or a long weekend.

Add more Zone 3 intervals

Zone 3 (i.e., Aerobic Tempo, Sweetspot Tempo) gets unfairly denigrated by people who are dogmatic about polarized training. People are critical of Zone 3 because they feel it is a “grey zone” that draws too much energy from carbohydrate sources and encourages the production of lactate (even though it’s at a sustainable rate balanced by lactate clearance). However, Zone 3 efforts are below FTP or lactate threshold, and accumulating time-at-intensity in Zone 3 is a time-efficient way to increase aerobic workload. Tempo and Sweetspot Tempo are good intensities for everyone, but especially for athletes who are time-crunched and not really able to add hours or training sessions to their week, and athletes who can’t fit a training camp into their schedule.

Will Zone 3 intervals hurt your training more than help it? No. This argument is based on the ideas that 1.) Zone 3 reduces time spent optimizing your ability to burn fat through zone 2 training, and 2.) Zone 3 efforts make you too tired to execute high quality intervals in Zones 4 and above (i.e., “hard days hard”). There are many routes to the same destination, meaning all training zones matter and have merit when utilized appropriately. Endurance athletes are already great fat-burning machines, and when circumstances (e.g., short on training time, reduced training timeline, etc.) require a more rapid buildup in workload, then Zone 3 can be highly effective. The key is to use Zone 3 for a period to accumulate time-at-intensity for a distinct purpose. What you don’t want to do is gravitate to making most of your endurance rides Zone 3 for entire season.

Add long weekend ride twice per month starting now

Adding a 4-plus hour long ride to your schedule twice a month starting in February is a good idea if you’re ramping up for a peak performance sooner than you originally planned. These rides are a good way to incrementally increase your monthly training hours (see the first tip in this article). They are also good for experiential training. Time-in-the-saddle helps you adapt to your bike fit, test and refine nutrition strategies, and handle your bike when your arms and hands are fatigued.

These long rides help to develop “durability”, too. Durability is sometimes also referred to as “fatigue resistance” and is essentially your ability to maintain power or pace as rides increase in duration. Everyone goes slower as rides get longer; that’s natural. The goal of durability training is to combine physiological adaptations, along with pacing, nutrition, and hydration strategies to minimize the drop-off during long rides.

Consider heat training or heat acclimation (depending on location)

This recommendation is only applicable to people living in colder climates. You may not have much natural exposure to high temperatures before SBT GRVL in June 2025, or whatever late spring event you’re preparing for. If this is the case, you’ll want to incorporate some heat acclimation protocols in the two months before your event. These activities are “extra credit” and should not take precedence over the fundamental training strategies mentioned above. For more information on how to execute heat acclimation protocols, read this.

Maintain Perspective

Lastly, remember that your preparation for the 2025 SBT GRVL or any endurance event started long before now. The training you have already completed over months and years is part of your overall athletic capacity. And even if you can’t fit the changes above into your schedule and that means you’re unlikely to reach the fitness level you hoped for, you can still have a great day on the bike with the fitness you have on that day. When circumstances get in the way of optimal training, we often have athletes reflect on the entirety of their training process – over the course of years – to recognize they have strength from seasons, not just from this most recent period.