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A gran fondo is the purest pacing test in amateur cycling. There is no team, no tactics worth the name, and — for almost everyone — no realistic prospect of winning. What there is, is five or six hours in which you can either ride within yourself and finish strong, or spend twenty minutes feeling like a hero and four hours paying for it.
Power makes that decision objective. It does not make it easy, because the hard part happens in the first hour when everything feels wonderful.
Why a number beats feel
Perceived effort is an unreliable pacing instrument early in a long event. Adrenaline, a fresh body, company and the occasion all conspire to make 85% of FTP feel like 70%. By the time it feels like 85%, you have already spent something you cannot get back.
A power target does not care about any of that. It is a promise you made to yourself in a calm room, and its whole value is that it is inconvenient at the moment you most want to ignore it.
Choosing the number
The longer the event, the lower the fraction of FTP you can hold. These are starting bands for a rider with a current, honest FTP — if yours is a year old or was set on a good day, start at the bottom of the range.
| Expected time | Steady ground | Climbs |
|---|---|---|
| Under 3 hours Short enough that you can afford to bleed into threshold on the final climb. |
76–82% of FTP | Up to 95% on the longest climb |
| 3–5 hours The classic fondo. This is where the discipline matters most, because you feel wonderful for the first two hours. |
68–75% of FTP | 85–90% on climbs, never more |
| 5–7 hours Now durability is the limiter, not threshold. Fuelling decides more of your result than pacing does. |
60–68% of FTP | Around 80% on climbs |
| Over 7 hours Almost entirely an eating and pacing exercise. Any effort you make above the plan will be repaid with interest. |
55–65% of FTP | Barely above steady |
The four rules that decide the day
You are fresh, the crowd is thick, and riders around you are going far too hard. Whatever number you settle on, the first climb is the one where you must ride below it, not at it.
Chasing a wheel uphill costs far more than the shelter is worth — there is almost no draft at climbing speeds. Chase on the flat, where the draft is real, and ride your own number uphill.
The mirror image. Twenty seconds above target to regain a wheel on a flat road can save you half an hour of solo riding. This is the one place where going over the plan is correct.
Thirty short surges at 130% of FTP will wreck you while leaving your average perfectly respectable. The number that ruins fondos is rarely the average — it is the count of unnecessary efforts.
The last of those is the most commonly missed. Riders review a fondo power file, see a sensible average, and cannot understand why they fell apart. The answer is usually in the surges: every acceleration out of a village, every jump to hold a wheel, every short steep ramp taken out of the saddle. Individually trivial, collectively decisive — which is the practical meaning of W′ and anaerobic capacity.
Build the plan before the day
Look at the route profile in advance and decide, climb by climb, what each one is worth. A long steady 8% climb at hour two is ridden at your climbing number and no more. A short sharp ramp at hour five may be worth going over the plan for, because the recovery afterwards is a descent.
Write it down. Three or four numbers on a strip of tape on your stem is a surprisingly effective way of keeping a promise you will badly want to break. How to pace a climb with power covers the within-climb detail — and be sceptical of the profile itself, which compresses horizontally and will make a long steady drag look like a wall.
Fuelling is half the pacing plan
Pacing and fuelling are not separate problems. A perfectly paced rider who ate nothing will blow up on schedule anyway; an over-paced rider who ate well will merely have a hard last hour rather than a catastrophic one. For an event over three hours, 60–90 g of carbohydrate an hour from the first hour is the framework — fuelling long rides and race day nutrition hour by hour have the practical versions, and what a bonk actually is covers what you are avoiding.
Rehearse it
The plan is worth very little if the first time you ride five hours at 70% of FTP is on event day. Do at least two long rides at close to target pace in the build-up — on the same terrain type if you can — and use them to test the food as well as the number. Durability explains why those rides matter more than another interval session.
Moveee will build the plan around your event date and keep the long rides where they belong in the weeks before it — point it at your fondo and it works backwards from there. And afterwards, the power file will tell you exactly which climb you spent the day on. It is usually the first one.
Sources 6
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Abbiss CR, Laursen PB Describing and Understanding Pacing Strategies during Athletic Competition · Sports Medicine · 2008
- 2 Jeukendrup A A Step Towards Personalized Sports Nutrition: Carbohydrate Intake During Exercise · Sports Medicine · 2014
- 3 Blocken B, van Druenen T, Toparlar Y, et al. Aerodynamic drag in cycling pelotons: New insights by CFD simulation and wind tunnel testing · Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics · 2018
- 4 Jones AM, Vanhatalo A, Burnley M, Morton RH, Poole DC Critical Power: Implications for Determination of VO2max and Exercise Tolerance · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 2010
- 5 Maunder E, Seiler S, Mildenhall MJ, Kilding AE, Plews DJ The Importance of 'Durability' in the Physiological Profiling of Endurance Athletes · Sports Medicine · 2021
- 6 Borszcz FK, Tramontin AF, Bossi AH, Carminatti LJ, Costa VP Functional Threshold Power in Cyclists: Validity of the Concept and Physiological Responses · International Journal of Sports Medicine · 2018
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