How to ride a hilly sportive you're underprepared for

You entered a sportive with a lot of climbing in it, life happened, and the training did not. The event is in a few weeks and the honest assessment is that you are not ready for it. The useful question now is not how do I get fit in time — you mostly cannot — but how do I ride this thing well enough to finish it in reasonable shape.

That is a different skill, and it is largely a skill of restraint. Almost everyone who has a genuinely miserable day at a hilly sportive did the same thing: they rode the first two hours at a pace their fitness could not fund, and then paid for it for five more.

What the last four weeks can and cannot fix

Be clear about the arithmetic before you build a plan around hope. Aerobic fitness — the thing that actually carries you through six hours of climbing — is built over months. Four weeks will not meaningfully change it.

What four weeks can do is narrower, but real:

• Sharpen what you already have. A modest dose of high-intensity work produces measurable changes in trained cyclists within a few weeks, though the literature is about improvements at the margin, not transformations.
• Get you fresh. A proper taper — reduced volume, intensity retained — is one of the best-supported interventions in endurance sport. A meta-analysis of tapering studies found performance improvements of a few per cent, which is a larger single gain than anything else available to you in four weeks.
• Rehearse the day. Fuelling, gearing, clothing, sitting on a bike for a long time. All of this is trainable in a month, and all of it is where underprepared riders lose the most time.

What four weeks cannot do is raise your threshold enough to matter, or build the durability that lets a rider hold decent power in hour five. That capacity — resistance to the deterioration in your physiology over a long ride — is now recognised as its own trainable quality, and it is built by riding long, repeatedly, over a long time. You do not have that. So plan as if you do not.

Pacing: the whole event, in one rule

Ride the early climbs far below what feels possible. Not slightly below — far below, to the point of mild self-consciousness as people ride past you.

The physiology behind this is unusually tidy. Efforts above your critical power draw on a finite reserve of work, and that reserve is finite regardless of how you spend it: research on pacing strategies found that riders reached exhaustion having completed essentially the same amount of work above critical power whether they went out hard, held steady, or built into it. You cannot outsmart the budget by arranging the spending differently. On a hilly course, every steep ramp you take hard is a withdrawal from an account that does not refill quickly.

If you ride with power, pick a ceiling before the start and do not exceed it on any climb in the first half, no matter how brief the climb is or how slow the ceiling makes you. If you ride on feel, use breathing: if you cannot speak a full sentence, you are over the line. Moveee's power profile will give you an FTP estimate from your own rides, which is a better basis for that ceiling than a number you last tested in March.

Gearing is the cheapest fitness you can buy

An underprepared rider on a steep climb has one physical problem: at a gear that is too big, the only way to keep moving is high force at low cadence, and that recruits exactly the muscle fibres that drain glycogen fastest. Muscle glycogen depletion is directly implicated in fatigue at the level of the muscle fibre, and once it is gone, it is gone for the day.

Fitting a bigger sprocket or a smaller chainring does not make you fitter. It changes the way the same climb is paid for — more revolutions at lower force — and that is the trade an underprepared rider wants. The table below is arithmetic: gear development at a 700 × 28 rollout, and the cadence each combination demands at two realistic climbing speeds.

Fuelling starts in the first hour

This is the single largest lever available to an underprepared rider, and the one most often left unused. Riders who eat late are not saving anything — they are simply arriving at the deficit later with less time to fix it.

The joint position stand from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada and the ACSM recommends around 30–60 g of carbohydrate per hour for exercise of 1–2.5 hours, and up to 90 g per hour beyond that, from multiple transportable carbohydrate sources. For a long hilly sportive, treat something near 60 g per hour from the first hour as the working target, and practise it on your long rides before the event so your gut is used to it.

The feed stops on a sportive are not a nutrition plan. They arrive when the organiser decided, not when your stomach did, and the queue at the second one is usually long. Carry what you need.

A sensible four weeks

• Weeks 1–2: the longest rides you can realistically manage, ridden slowly, with climbs in them. Volume and time in the saddle, not intensity. This is also where you rehearse eating 60 g an hour.
• Week 3: reduce volume, keep some quality — a couple of sessions of sustained climbing efforts at a pace you could hold for twenty minutes. Nothing heroic.
• Week 4: taper. Volume down substantially, a few short sharp efforts to stay awake, and rest. Resist the urge to cram. A fitness deficit cannot be closed in the last week, but freshness can be won or thrown away in it.
• Throughout: ride the gearing you will race, in the clothing you will wear, eating what you will eat.

If the course profile is published, riding it indoors once is worth more than another interval session — knowing where the steep pitches actually are changes how you pace them. Moveee Indoor will ride a course file in the browser, which is the cheapest reconnaissance available to someone who cannot travel to the route.

On the day

Start at the back of your group, or in a slower one. Let the first hour feel like a warm-up that never quite ends. Drink and eat on a schedule you set before the start, and keep to it even when you feel fine — especially when you feel fine, because feeling fine at hour two is not information about hour five. When a group comes past, let it go unless matching it costs you nothing.

And if it goes badly anyway, stop at a feed stop, eat properly, and give it twenty minutes before deciding anything. A large share of sportive abandonments are fuelling problems wearing the costume of a fitness problem.