What Coaching an Ultra Champion Taught Me About Everyone’s Training

By Ric Stern

I have to admit something: I can be a snob.

Mostly about non-cycling things, such as coffee (I need freshly roasted beans, and can be bribed with good ones), or music (give me proper rockabilly and the founding fathers of jazz, blues, and country). I can be precious about that sort of stuff.

But cycling? I always told myself I wasn’t a snob about cycling. I’ve tried to embrace all of it: road racing, time trialing, riding to the store, commuting, riding with your kids. All of it. I’d even chastised friends who sneered at people doing sportives (like a gran fondo) or triathlons because they weren’t “proper cycling events.”

And then I caught myself doing exactly the same thing.

The rider I turned down

A few years ago, a rider named James Hayden approached me for coaching. He wanted to be coached for the Transcontinental Race.

I’d never heard of it. He explained: a self-supported ultra-distance race across Europe, thousands of miles, riders carrying their own gear, sleeping where they can, no support crews. And I thought — come on, that’s not a race, that’s a bunch of people touring from A to B. Not proper racing. I told him I was busy and couldn’t help, and I more or less forgot about him.

He came back the following year and asked again. Same answer from me, roughly: still sounds like a touring ride, not really my thing.

Officially, I was a bike-racing snob. And what makes it worse is that years earlier I’d lived in France for a few months and stood at the roadside watching Paris-Brest-Paris — another ultra event — genuinely amazed at how fast those riders were going and how long they’d been out there. I’d shouted encouragement. And then I’d completely forgotten the lesson.

The second time James asked, I finally agreed, if I’m honest, partly just to stop the conversation coming around again. I had, at that point, only a vague idea of what I was letting myself in for.

He was not the slow tourer I’d lazily assumed. James was a full-on racer who happened to do unsupported ultras. How fast? He’d ridden a 25-mile time trial in 46:56, which is a shade under 32 mph, held for 25 miles. I’d be delighted to average that for five miles!

We won the Transcontinental. And somewhere in the middle of it, glued to a screen, dot-watching him crawl across a map of Europe through the night, I got completely, unexpectedly hooked. It remains one of the most exciting things I’ve ever watched. I’ve coached a good number of ultra riders since, across the Transcontinental, the Trans Pyrenees, All Points North, and the British 12- and 24-hour time trials. The snob was thoroughly cured. And, of course, James went on to a second Transcontinental win the following year.

Here’s the thing, though. Coaching James didn’t just teach me about ultra racing. It sharpened four lessons that apply to every rider, including you, whatever you ride.

1. Beyond about 90 seconds, it’s all about the ceiling

Here’s what surprises people most: training for a race that takes days is, in the important respects, not that different from training for much shorter events.

Once an event lasts longer than roughly 90 seconds, performance is largely governed by your aerobic ceiling — your VO2max and MAP — and how much of it you can sustain, your FTP. So a huge part of preparing James for a multi-thousand-mile race was the same thing I’d do for a road racer or a time trialist: lift that ceiling. Make FTP and MAP as high as possible.

Whatever you’re training for, whether it’s a crit, a sportive, or a gravel ultra, raising your ceiling is rarely the wrong answer. The distance changes how you use the engine. It doesn’t change the value of building a bigger one.

2. Durability is everything

The quality that separates ultra riders — and, increasingly, the quality that separates good riders at every level — is durability: the ability to still produce decent power when you’re already deeply tired.

You build it with a lot of steady, sub-threshold work, what we call MIET (moderately intensive endurance training) and what others call sweet spot, accumulated patiently over time. It’s not glamorous, and it’s not the hard intervals people fixate on. But it’s what lets you hold your power in hour six of a ride, or lap 40 of a crit, when everyone around you is fading. Durability is the quiet quality that wins races and finishes big rides, and almost every rider undertrains it.

3. You have to learn to eat junk

Here’s a lesson you won’t get from a sports-nutrition textbook. In an unsupported ultra, you eat what you can find, and what you can find at 2 a.m. in a rural gas station is not a carefully formulated gel. James told me about stuffing his face with ice cream and chocolate simply because that was what was on the shelf.

The wider point applies to all of us: fueling is a skill you train, not an afterthought. Your gut can be trained to take on more, and the ability to eat — the right things when you can, whatever’s available when you can’t — is often what determines whether you finish strong or fall apart. Most riders under-fuel and wonder why they’re flat. Practice eating on the bike the way you practice anything else.

4. Be willing to sleep in a hedge

The last one, I’ll admit, I’ve never mastered — and never intend to. Ultra racers sleep where they land: a bus shelter, a grass verge, a hedge. One rider I coached slept in a public restroom with his feet against the door so no one could come in. James and riders like him will grab an hour anywhere and carry on.

Me? Count me out entirely. One rider I coach keeps trying to persuade me to do an ultra with him. Not a chance. I’m perfectly happy being the person who plans it, not the person sleeping in a ditch at 3 a.m.

But there’s a real lesson buried in the joke, and it’s the one that ties the other three together: the riders who do well at hard things are the ones willing to be uncomfortable, prepared, and adaptable — to train the unglamorous stuff, fuel on whatever’s available, and keep going when it stops being fun. You don’t need to sleep in a hedge to take that on board.

This is the first in a short series on ultra and endurance riding, and what it can teach the rest of us. Over the coming weeks I’ll dig into durability, fueling for the long haul, pacing and the mental side, and how to prepare for your first big one.

Want James’s side of it? He wrote a piece for my own blog, in his own words, on how he approaches winning bike races — well worth a read if this has piqued your interest: How to Win Bike Races, the James Hayden Way.

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Ric Stern is founder of CycleCoach and has coached athletes to World Championship gold, Commonwealth medals, and Paralympic podiums across 29 years.

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