Masters Cyclist New Year’s “To Do List”

Written by:

Jim Rutberg

CTS Pro Endurance Coach

Updated On

December 27, 2025

It’s time for a New Year! Here is your to-do list to be faster, stronger, and more fit than you have ever been! And don’t tell me that you’re a year older and therefore you’ll have to accept being slower and less fit. CTS Athlete Frederic Schmid keeps winning US National Championships in every discipline he rides in the Males 90+ category! Your behaviors and habits as an athlete can improve your performance at any age.

So here is your to-do list (in no particular order, and not a comprehensive list) so you can improve upon last year. If you are doing some of them already, you’ve got a head start on those who aren’t!

Get more sleep

One of the best things you can do for your performance is to focus on recovery by getting more sleep. Aim for at least 8 hours or commit to adding one hour of sleep to your current routine. If you have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, take it seriously and focus on your sleep routine. Read more about sleep routines here. This includes creating a set wakeup time (more important than a set bedtime), establishing a consistent pre-sleep routine, keeping the room cool, dark, and quiet; and turning off screens an hour or more before bedtime.

Go see your doctors

Particularly for cyclists over 50, it’s time for regular health screenings. Many of the masters cyclists we work with delay or ignore preventative health screenings because you’re generally healthy. Your high fitness and trim body can create a false sense of invulnerability to things like cancer, high cholesterol, low bone density, and cardiac disease risk factors. If you’ve been riding in the sun for decades, it’s time to see your dermatologist for a skin cancer screening. It’s also time to get on a schedule for regular colon cancer screening, and regular blood testing for cholesterol.

Optimize your training frequency

Training 4 times a week (i.e., twice during the workweek and twice on weekends) is good. Five training days a week is great. Six may actually be too much for some athletes, and 7 is generally not a good idea. Look back through your training history from last year to determine your optimal training frequency and weekly hours. You might find that you performed best with fewer days per week but higher quality workouts when you train. Consistency is often more important for long-term progress than the actual workout you’re doing, so make a schedule you can stick to.

Eat for energy, not weight management

The most successful athletes we work with optimize energy balance and reach their body composition goals with minor changes to eating habits. We rarely implement dramatic, proactive weight loss strategies with athletes. Instead, we focus on training and thoughtful eating and find that weight management often occurs as a natural byproduct. If you are using a proactive nutrition strategy, whether you are focusing on nutrition for energy availability, optimal recovery, weight management, or a combination of all three, thoughtful eating is the key to success. Athletes get themselves into trouble when they eat without thinking. You end up eating more junk food, fewer quality ingredients, and less nutrient density but higher calorie density.

Eat more protein

The current trend in sports nutrition for endurance sports is to consume massive amounts of carbohydrate. Although most of this carbohydrate intake is consumed during workouts, we’re find that the emphasis on high carbohydrates bleeds over into daily nutrition for many people. Carbohydrate is necessary for replenishing glycogen after training, but remember that you can fully replenish glycogen stores within 24 hours by consuming a balanced diet that includes carbohydrate, protein, and fat.

When athletes emphasize carbohydrate in their diets, they sometimes struggle to consume enough protein. Consuming more than 1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight (.45 grams per pound) can be a challenge, not in absolute terms, but in the context of a very high carbohydrate diet. Getting closer to 1.5-2.0 g/kg/d of protein for these athletes can seem quite burdensome, but that’s the protein intake endurance athletes – particularly athletes over 50 years old – should aim for. If you need to reconfigure your diet, consider reducing intake of concentrated carbohydrate sources (e.g., rice, pasta, potatoes) to open up space in your daily eating habits for more protein without dramatically increasing calorie intake.

Recommended reading: Protein – Why Athletes Struggle to Get Enough, Myths about Post-Workout Protein and Recovery Drinks, Protein Tips for Vegan Endurance Athletes, Eating at Night: Nutrition Strategies to Improve Your Sleep, Recovery, and Performance

Fuel rides based on energy expenditure

The recent trends toward very high carbohydrate intakes during endurance exercise (i.e., 90-140 grams of carbohydrate per hour) have led to performance breakthroughs as well as a lot of confusion. Rather than aim for a specific number of carbohydrate grams per hour during all rides, the better approach is to scale your carbohydrate intake based on the type of ride and/or your hourly energy expenditure.

• Zone 1-2/Endurance Ride/Easier Day: Aim to replenish 20-30% of your hourly energy expenditure as you ride. In other words, if you’re riding at 600 kilojoules per hour (roughly equal to 600 calories), aim for 120-200 calories per hour or 30-50 grams of carbohydrate. And for sessions under 75 minutes, you don’t need during-workout calories, just fluids and maybe electrolytes. Read more about nutrition for short workouts.
• Zone 3+/Interval Workouts/Fast Group Rides/Races/Hard Days: Aim to replenish about 50% of your hourly energy expenditure as you ride. During these workouts, your work rate may exceed 800-1000 kilojoules per hour. More importantly, the higher intensity means greater reliance on carbohydrate for rapidly-available energy, which means there’s greater need and benefit from consuming more carbohydrate per hour. For easy math, at 1000 kilojoules per hour, 40-50% replenishment means 400-500 calories from carbohydrate or up to 100-125 grams of carbohydrate per hour.

Why not eat more carbohydrate for all rides? For amateur cyclists, 100-120 grams of carbohydrate is more than you need for 60- to 120-minute club rides and solo workouts. The risks for gastric distress increase as hourly carbohydrate intake increases above about 75-90 grams/hour and consuming more exogenous carbohydrate than you are oxidizing per hour is just not necessary. Experimenting with higher hourly carbohydrate intakes for fast or long group rides and races makes sense, but understand it requires gut training and it may not be necessary, appealing, or very effective for everyone in all situations.

Sign up for a big challenge

There’s nothing wrong with returning to events you know and enjoy, but it’s difficult to sustain passion and inspiration from those events. Go out on a limb and sign up for something exciting, scary, intimidating, or exotic! If you’re not excited and nervous about it, how are you going to commit 100% to preparing for it?

Need some inspiration for 2026 goals? Join CTS Founder Chris Carmichael April 12-19 for The Golden State Epic and experience California’s most spectacular cycling terrain on six unforgettable point-to-point stages from Santa Rosa to Solvang. Or join professional CTS Coaches for the Santa Ynez Spring Training Camp Feat. Solvang Century, March 2-7 in Solvang, California. This camp concludes with the Solvang Century and your choice of a 70- or 100-mile day! And if East Coast riding is more your style, check out the Brevard Cycling Performance Camp, April 22-25 in Brevard, North Carolina.

Other event ideas to keep on your radar for 2026 include:

• Gran Fondo National Series road gran fondos: These events can qualify you for USA Cycling Gran Fondo National Championships.
• Belgian Waffle Rides: Multi-surface cycling races that blend pavement with dirt, gravel, sand, and single-track.
• Lifetime Leadville Race Series: Even if you miss out on the Leadville 100 MTB lottery, there are several MTB and Gravel events from Lifetime that have no entry lotteries.
• Tour of America’s Dairyland: For all the criterium racers out there, Wisconsin is the place to be from June 18-28!
• Gravel Earth Series: If you’re looking for gravel racing with an international flair, check out the Gravel Earth Series. US races include Oregon Trail Gravel.
• Rebecca’s Private Idaho: September in Sun Valley, Idaho with our friend Rebecca Rusch and some of the best gravel routes imaginable.

Learn to use your power meter

First of all, if you don’t have a power meter yet, it’s time to get one. At this point power meters have come down in price and there are great options that measure power at the pedal or crank. Here’s some guidance on choosing the power meter that’s right for you. You don’t need to be a racer, either. Power is a valuable tool for athletes at all levels of sport. But if you get one, learn how to use it!

Power meters are one of the most under-utilized pieces of training equipment out there. We encounter way too many athletes who have power meters on their bikes but who don’t charge or change the batteries (!?), don’t download the data, and don’t upload data to TrainingPeaks or similar software. Many of the athletes who have data that automatically uploads to TrainingPeaks and/or Strava never use their power data to inform their training! You have one of the best training tools available to any endurance athlete (runners and swimmers would kill for such accurate and usable data). You owe it to yourself to leverage your training data to improve your fitness and performance.

Drink more when you train

Most of us ride the same set of routes and drink the same amounts on those routes. The “Hanover Loop” in Colorado Springs is a 3-bottle ride, for instance. This year try consuming an additional bottle on your 2- to 4-hour loops. It can be water, electrolyte drink, or sports drink. That will depend on the rest of your nutrition strategy (i.e., if you are getting calories and electrolytes from food). Look at your power meter data and record your perceived exertion. I can all but guarantee you’ll feel better and your power will drop off less in the final hour of your ride!

Curious about how much you sweat and whether you’re adequately replenishing electrolytes? Consider a Sweat Test. Here’s an article on what to expect from a sweat test and how to use the information to adjust your hydration strategy.

Schedule a training camp

Eat. Sleep. Ride. Repeat. Carve out some time and make training, recovery, and nutrition your top priority for a week. Consider a CTS Cycling Camp or build your own by taking two long weekends with a few half-days at work in between. Here are some additional benefits of a cycling camp.

Record more data types, consistently

There are a lot of tools out there you can use to collect and analyze training and biometric data, but consistency is the biggest hurdle we see in data management. Heart Rate Variability (HRV), for instance, is more valuable when you have consistent, daily measurements taken at the same time of day (morning), with the same equipment (phone camera with HRV4training app works well), in the same position (sitting up). Similarly, training information in TrainingPeaks and even Strava works off of long-range averages. Chronic Training Load (CTL) in TrainingPeaks is a 42-day running average of Training Stress Score.

The quality of the analysis you get from software (and AI) is only as good as your data collection and/or data quality. Coaches are able to account for some of these anomalies and make decisions based on greater context, but even we can do a better job if your data set is more complete.

Subjective data is also important to record consistently. Your power, heart rate, HRV, sleep hours, and metrics like TSS, CTL, and TSB are all objective data points that are great for long-term monitoring. But “how do you feel?” is a crucial question that provides invaluable context for those data points and trends. As coaches, we adjust training based on your subjective feedback more often than we change training because of a sudden change in an objective data point.

Learn to descend

Descents are like free money, yet everywhere I go I see cyclists riding the brakes on descents. You don’t have to take huge risks or be a daredevil. Yet, working on your descending skills can save you a ton of time without requiring any additional energy expenditure. You work hard to build the fitness to be faster on the climbs. Don’t give it all away by riding the brakes on the descents. If you need help with descending, talk with a coach about cycling skills clinics or lessons. You take ski and golf lessons, and skills lessons for road, gravel, or mountain biking are just as effective for improving safety, speed, and fun.

Fall in love with this workout

3×10 SteadyState Intervals (3×20 for advanced riders), with recovery between intervals 5 and 10minutes, respectively. It’s not sexy or complicated, but sustained time-at-intensity increases sustainable power at lactate threshold. This the performance marker that leads to higher climbing speed, less taxing rides in the pack, and faster bike splits in triathlons. Intensity: 90-95% of CTS Field Test power, 92-94% of CTS Field Test Heart Rate, or an 8 on a 1-10 exertion scale.

But… isn’t that Zone 3-4 and the current trend is to stay in Zones 1 and 2 all the time? Yes. If you listen to the Zone 2 gurus long enough, they will invariably admit that higher intensity work is necessary. What we all agree on is that the majority of your time should be spent doing aerobic (Zone 2-ish) intensity riding. Intervals are what creates the differentiation between “keep your hard days hard and your easy days easy”, and 1-2 days per week that incorporate purposeful, higher intensity intervals can be great for your aerobic, lactate threshold, and VO2 development.

Rediscover “rating of perceived exertion”

I know I told you to leverage your power meter data, but it’s also important to tune in to Rating of Perceived Exertion. You must learn to gauge your efforts by listening to your body, not just by the numbers on your handlebars. Too many athletes sit up and drop themselves from a group, not because they couldn’t hack it, but because their power output number climbed to a number that seemed unsustainable. The only way you’ll truly know what you can do is to dig deep and try. The best way to think about training data is that you want to train with data (power, heart rate, etc.) so you can learn to race or pace without it.

Jump into a faster group

You’ll never work as hard as you will when you’re fighting to maintain contact with the back of a group of athletes faster and stronger than you. You’ll improve your drafting and positioning skills, too. If you ride indoors, consider jumping into faster groups on indoor cycling apps like TrainingPeaks Virtual. There is plenty of research that shows athletes push themselves harder in groups and with partners, so take advantage of the group dynamic when you can.

Work with a CTS Coach

Self-serving? You bet. But come on, you spend too much time and energy on your sport to make minimal improvements year after year. Work with a professional coach and make substantial, measurable, and noticeable gains this year! Here are some of the reasons I believe in the value of working with a professional coach. And here are some of the pain points a professional coach can help you solve.