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Gravel racing looks, from the outside, like a road race on rougher ground. It is not. The differences are not in the surface so much as in the duration, the isolation and the self-sufficiency, and those three things together mean the rider who wins is often not the one who would win a road race between the same people.
If you are still deciding whether gravel is for you at all — or which bike to take out on a given Sunday — our piece on picking the right surface for the ride is the place to start. This post assumes you have signed up for something long with a number on the front, and you want to know what to train and what to pack.
Four ways it differs from road racing
A typical amateur road race is 2–3 hours. A typical gravel event is 5–9, and the marquee ones are longer. That single fact reorders every priority you brought with you.
Groups split on the first rough sector and mostly never reform. Expect long stretches alone or with two or three others, into the wind, with nobody to hide behind.
Surface changes, short steep pitches and repeated re-accelerations after loose corners mean a lot of small efforts that never show up in your average. Normalised power sits well above average power in a way it rarely does on a road ride of the same length.
Most events run neutral support at best. Tube, plug kit, pump, chain link, food for hours, and the knowledge of how to use all of it while cold and tired.
The hour-five problem
Here is the thing that decides most gravel results. Your FTP, your power curve, your best twenty minutes — all of those are measured fresh. A gravel race asks what you can do after four or five hours of accumulated work, and the answer is a different number for every rider.
Research on professional cycling has made this concrete. When riders' power-duration curves were recalculated after progressively larger amounts of accumulated work, everyone's numbers fell — but the riders who finished highest in the overall standings of stage races were the ones whose numbers fell least. The ability to maintain power output with work already done was a better discriminator of performance level than fresh power was. The field now calls this durability, and it is the physiological quality gravel racing selects for hardest.
Stylised. The direction and the rough shape are well supported; the size of the drop varies enormously between riders and is the whole point of measuring it on yourself. Methodologically, durability is still a young field and there is no agreed protocol for testing it.
The practical consequence is that training which is only ever done fresh prepares you for a race you are not entering. We go into how to read the number on your own files in durability: your power at hour four. For a gravel build, the rule of thumb is simple: put the hard part of the long ride at the end.
Fuelling when there is no feed zone
Road racing lets you get away with poor nutrition because three hours is within reach of what you started with. Gravel does not. At five to nine hours, everything you will burn past the first ninety minutes has to come from your pockets.
The numbers below are the mainstream sports-nutrition position and they are unusually well supported. The reason the upper end needs mixed carbohydrate sources is mechanical: intestinal glucose transport saturates at roughly 60 g per hour, and adding fructose — which uses a different transporter — raises total oxidation rates beyond that ceiling, with measurable performance benefit in cycling time trials.
The day before
8–12 g carbohydrate per kg body mass
For events over about three hours. Not a single enormous pasta dinner — spread across the day, with the last big meal early enough to sleep on.
Hour 0–1
60 g carbohydrate
Start eating before you feel like it. The first hour is when your stomach is most willing and you are least inclined to bother.
Hours 1–5
60–90 g per hour
Above roughly 60 g/h you need both glucose and fructose, because glucose transport across the gut saturates. Mixed-source drinks and gels exist for this reason.
Hours 5+
As much as you can still tolerate
Intake usually falls here, and that is where races are lost. Have something savoury or solid in a pocket for when nothing sweet will go down.
The catch is tolerance. High intake rates cause gastrointestinal distress in riders who have not trained for them, and the gut adapts with repeated exposure rather than on demand. Start at 60 g per hour on long rides and work up over several weeks. Our guide to training your gut to take 90 g sets out a progression, and how to eat on a five-hour ride covers what actually stays down when you are six hours in and sick of gels.
Water is the other half. Most gravel events have two or three water points across a very long day, so plan bottle capacity around the longest gap between them rather than the average. A frame bag or a third cage is not overkill on a 100-mile event in summer.
Tyres, pressure and the surface
Tyre choice matters more in gravel than in any other form of road-adjacent racing, because the surface varies within a single event. The default for most mixed-terrain events is 40–45 mm tubeless with a light file or diamond centre tread and a bit of shoulder; wider and knobblier when the course is genuinely loose, narrower when there is a lot of tarmac.
Pressure is where free speed lives. The intuition that harder tyres roll faster is only true on smooth ground. On rough surfaces, the relationship reverses: at high pressures the tyre skips over irregularities and that energy goes into vibrating the bike and rider rather than into forward motion. Vibration also has a cost you feel rather than measure — whole-body vibration on rough surfaces is measurable and substantial, and arriving at hour six with your hands and forearms wrecked slows you down in ways no power file will show. Our numbers piece on tyre pressure is the general case; for gravel, run lower than feels right and use an insert if you are pinch-flatting.
What to actually train
The specific adaptation you want is holding target power after 2,500–3,500 kJ of work. That means a 4–5 hour ride with 2 × 15 minutes at tempo or threshold placed in the final hour, not at the start when you are fresh.
Gravel rewards the ability to sit just under threshold for a long time far more than it rewards a sprint. Two threshold or sweet-spot sessions a week through a build block is the backbone.
Handling on loose ground is a trainable skill and it is where most of your saved energy comes from. Being relaxed on descents costs less than being rigid on them, and it is faster.
The gut adapts to carbohydrate load with repeated exposure. Rehearse your race intake on your long rides so that race day is not the first time you have asked for 90 g in an hour.
Notice what is missing. There is no sprint work on that list. A gravel race is very rarely decided by a bunch sprint, because there is very rarely a bunch by then, and the selections happen on long sustained efforts rather than on accelerations. If you have limited training hours, spending them on a 15-second peak power number is spending them on the wrong thing.
Reconnaissance and route homework
The single most useful hour of preparation is not a session. It is sitting down with the route file and marking where the surface changes, where the long climbs are, where the water points fall, and where you are likely to be alone into a headwind. Gravel events publish GPX files well in advance and almost nobody reads them properly.
Load the file into Moveee's route planner and you can see the gradient profile and surface breakdown together, which makes it obvious where the day gets decided — usually a sector two-thirds of the way in that looks unremarkable on the map. If you cannot ride the course beforehand, that is the next best thing.
Pacing it
The honest advice for a first gravel race is to ride the first two hours at a pace that feels almost embarrassingly conservative. The early groups go hard because the course is still wide and everyone is fresh, and the riders who go with them are, in the great majority of cases, the riders you will pass at hour six.
Pick a power ceiling before you start — for most amateurs, somewhere around 70–78% of FTP as a normalised figure for the whole event — and treat the first half as a fuel-delivery exercise rather than a race. The racing, such as it is, happens in the last quarter, and it happens between the people who ate enough and paced sensibly. That is a less glamorous description of the sport than the marketing suggests, and it is what the results consistently show.
Sources 8
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Maunder E, Seiler S, Mildenhall MJ, Kilding AE, Plews DJ The Importance of 'Durability' in the Physiological Profiling of Endurance Athletes · Sports Medicine · 2021
- 2 Van Erp T, Sanders D, Lamberts RP Maintaining Power Output with Accumulating Levels of Work Done Is a Key Determinant for Success in Professional Cycling · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 2021
- 3 Hunter B, Maunder E, Jones AM, Gallo G, Muniz-Pumares D Durability as an index of endurance exercise performance: Methodological considerations · Experimental Physiology · 2025
- 4 Thomas DT, Erdman KA, Burke LM Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada, and the American College of Sports Medicine: Nutrition and Athletic Performance · Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics · 2016
- 5 Currell K, Jeukendrup AE Superior Endurance Performance with Ingestion of Multiple Transportable Carbohydrates · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 2008
- 6 Jeukendrup AE Training the Gut for Athletes · Sports Medicine · 2017
- 7 Ryschon TW, Stray-Gundersen J The effect of tyre pressure on the economy of cycling · Ergonomics · 1993
- 8 Edwards PI, Holsgrove TP Thunder road: whole-body vibration during road cycling, and the effect of different seatpost designs · Journal of Sports Sciences · 2020
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