Grand Tour Training: Inside Alison Jackson’s Tour de France Femmes Preparation

Written by:

Adam Pulford

CTS Head Cycling Coach

Updated On

August 4, 2026

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Grand Tour Training: Inside Alison Jackson’s Tour de France Femmes Preparation

The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is only five years old but it has already become one of the biggest races – if not the biggest – on the calendar. I’ve been working with Canadian pro Alison Jackson for several years and a stage win at this year’s TDFF is one of her biggest goals for this season. A two-time Olympian, 4-time Canadian National Champion, stage winner at the Vuelta, and winner of Paris-Roubaix, Alison is racing this year’s TDFF for the St. Michel–Preference Home–Auber93 UCI World Tour team. Winning a stage of a nine-day stage race is very different from winning a single-day race like Paris-Roubaix or a National Championship Road Race.  

Here’s a look at how I built Alison Jackson’s Tour de France Femmes training, and what any rider chasing a big goal can take from it.

Volume: The Foundation Everything Else Is Built On

Cyclists must build capacity before they can gain speed and power. This means Alison’s training for nine days in August started with months of sub-threshold riding over the winter and spring. Accumulating hours and kilojoules of work was the name of the game, on all types of terrain. Most of those hours were at an easy intensity, but that cumulative volume builds the durability an athlete needs to handle bigger training loads later. And for stage racing, durability is essential for having race-winning legs past Stage 3.

I measure the aerobic work in kilojoules to make sure athletes create the required dose of training stress to move the needle forward. Because AJ is 37 years old with more than a decade of training and racing in her legs, she needs a big energy expenditure to continue building fitness. At minimum, AJ needs about 10,000 kJ per week for aerobic work if we want to build fitness or CTL. Less kJ than that to simply maintain systems, but in order to build, that’s about her starting point. For any of you tracking kJ during training, you know this isn’t a light week! 

From previous race files, we know AJ does about 20,000 – 25,000 kJ of work during a TDFF, and racing includes long aerobic periods, prolonged threshold efforts, and massively hard efforts way above threshold. To prepare for the volume of intensity, harder training weeks with high-power intervals and race simulations reached workloads of 15,000 to 20,000 kJ.

• ~10,000 kJ minimum per week for baseline aerobic development (building CTL)
• 15,000–20,000 kJ in harder training weeks with more intensity mixed in
• 20,000-25,000 kJ during TDFF

Intensity: Where Alison Jackson’s Race-Winning Speed Comes From

Your aerobic foundation may get you into the peloton, but high-intensity training is what creates race-winning performance. In the build phases of AJ’s training season, I shifted the training focus towards intensity. I was able to leverage the depth of her long-term fitness and keep her aerobic volume relatively high while incorporating more intensity.

Not all intensity is created equal, and the type of hard work changed as the season progressed:

• Early build: Mostly Zone 4 and Low Zone 5
• Late build: Zone 5–6 and true Max efforts
  

Zone 4 and Low Zone 5 efforts are mostly aerobic (hard aerobic, mind you) with some anaerobic contributions. I use both extensive (longer efforts at lower end of power ranges) and intensive (shorter efforts at higher end of power ranges) to increase power at threshold (intensive) and extend time-to-exhaustion at threshold (extensive).

Zone 5-6 efforts are short, very hard efforts with substantial anaerobic contributions. Anaerobic work carries a much higher training stress and strain than aerobic work. That’s why I plan it separately and carefully from Zone 4-5 work and make sure to balance it with enough aerobic volume that the base doesn’t erode. Go too hard, too often, and you lose the very engine you spent months building.

Strength Training: Year-Round and Periodized

For AJ and pretty much all the pro, emerging elite, and age-group athletes I work with, strength work follows an almost inverse pattern to the endurance calendar:

• Base and early build: heavier lifting
• Late build: shift toward power and velocity
• Race season: maintenance — neither overdone nor neglected.
  

The biggest mistake athletes make with strength training is stopping it once racing starts. Modern endurance training incorporates strength training year-round. The intensity, focus, and specific exercises may change, but lifting never drops out completely. With the athletes I work with, as the season progresses, my input becomes less about prescribing every set and rep and more about guiding the athlete on what to focus on within each phase.

Specificity: Sharpening The Steel

Races are won in the moments when you can separate yourself from everyone else in the pack. That could mean putting out more power on a 20-minute climb or packing a stronger sprint after 4 hours on the bike, or maybe coping with heat stress better than your breakaway companions or having the durability to recover more completely between stages.

Throughout the build phases and into the racing/specialization phase of the late spring and early summer, I collaborated with AJ’s performance team to address specific demands we anticipate at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

The interventions below were important components of her TDFF preparation.

Heat Training

As race environments have gotten hotter, heat adaptation has become a bigger piece of the puzzle. The physiological payoff is real: heat training expands plasma volume, which improves cooling. Increased plasma volume can also stimulate the body to create more red blood cells (similar to altitude training) to increase oxygen carrying capacity.

Ideally, I’d schedule heat training using the following framework:

• Phase 1: A two-week block of daily heat exposures about 8–10 weeks out from the main event. After this block we can either maintain the adaptations with intermittent heat exposures every 2-3 days, or let the adaptations fade if the mental/physical stress of the intermittent heat exposures is hindering training or recovery.
• Phase 2: A second, more concentrated 10–12 day block of daily heat exposures roughly 3 weeks out, followed by intermittent heat exposures for maintenance all the way into the TDFF.
  

This is one aspect of training that requires a lot of attention and flexibility. Heat training is a stressor, so it must be weighed against the need for recovery and its impact on fundamental training. Staying heat-adapted year-round is an approach some athletes take, but it isn’t necessarily the best strategy, even for a WorldTour rider, because sometimes you just need time off, from everything. And in the off-season or early base season, the cost of being heat adapted isn’t worth the benefit.

Altitude Training Camp with Skratch in Boulder, CO

Elite racers use altitude training camps to stimulate red blood cell production and increase oxygen carrying capacity ahead of races at either sea level or higher elevations. The TDFF only reaches altitudes above 6,000 feet (2,100 meters) for a few kilometers at a time, but those can be some of the most important kilometers of the race.

Alison has experienced mixed results from altitude camps. Heat training is usually better for the specificity of races she does. She rarely competes at higher elevations, isn’t a climbing specialist, and we get similar red blood cell benefits from heat training. Altitude camps are great for the “camp effect”, though: lots of work with teammates, relationship building, distraction-free environment, etc.

For 2026, the St. Michel–Preference Home–Auber93 team collaborated with Allen Lim, renowned coach and founder of Skratch Labs, to put together an altitude camp in Boulder, Colorado. Importantly, this camp was more than just riding around in thin air. It included HePox Tech, (a new & improved intermittent hypoxic training tool), blood testing, and lots of education and real-world testing on hydration and fueling strategies.

The race simulations and short-sided competitions were the most exciting aspects of the Boulder camp for me. As AJ points out in the video interview I recorded with her, racers spend a tremendous amount of time developing fitness and precious little time practicing race-day tactics and strategies. Depending on the number of race days in an athlete’s calendar, you might only get a few dozen opportunities to race finales. During the Boulder camp, riders divided up into smaller squads to race against and with each other on courses and segments resembling key portions of the TDFF. Athletes learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and their communication styles and needs.

Taper Strategies: The Art of Arriving Fresh

Tapering only works if the training that came before it was well structured and hard enough to create the stress and fatigue that will dissipate over the course of the taper period.

For Jackson, a two-week, exponential fast-decay taper tends to work best. Here’s the blueprint of Alison’s taper, which is essentially the same framework I use for most endurance cyclists:

• Drop volume by 50%: For Alison, this ranges from 41–60%
• Keep intensity high: AJ’s high-intensity efforts were as high as, or higher than, prior training during her taper.
• Reduce total time-at-intensity: For AJ, we slightly reduce total time-at-intensity by shortening the interval workouts a bit.
• Maintain training frequency (days per week): Endurance and easy rides get shorter, but the daily routine stays constant.

Most sessions during the taper were short and light, designed to maintain AJ’s energy systems while allowing her body to recover and supercompensate from the prior training block. In Alison’s case, that was the Boulder camp. Even within the taper, we incorporated a few sessions with higher volume and race intensity to avoid staleness and keep her sharp for the demands of a Grand Tour.

What Amateurs Can Take From This

You don’t need a WorldTour training load or a Tour de France on your calendar to apply these principles to your preparation:

• Organize your training. A structured plan prevents burnout, staleness, boredom, and plateaus. If you enjoy the process, let building and tinkering with your plan become part of the hobby. If you don’t, that’s exactly what a coach is for.
• Heat training is accessible. If you’re training or racing in hot conditions (or racing at elevation but living at lower altitudes), it’s one of the more attainable “marginal gains” out there.
• Lift year-round. If you’re going to strength train as an endurance athlete (you should, btw!), then periodize strength training with your endurance training, just inverted: heavier in base and early build, more power-focused late in build, maintenance in season.
• Incorporate real race practices! Bike races aren’t just fitness contests, they’re games, one-on-one and one-against-many competitions! When you have sufficient fitness, you can direct your focus toward playing the game and racing for the win. Practice helps you learn to read a race, understand what it takes to win, and recognize the tactic or strategy you should execute in specific situations.

Alison Jackson is successful because she is a great racer who has worked hard to create the fitness and power to back up her tactics and strategies. That is perhaps the greatest lesson for amateur and age group athletes right now, in an era so focused on data and fitness metrics. In the real world between the barriers, race reps beat data tables most of the time.