Two minutes doesn’t sound like much—until you’re halfway up the climb at National Champs and every pedal stroke fills your legs with that burning feeling. Mastering your pacing for a two-minute effort can be the difference between flying over the top or blowing up halfway.

Recent research on 800-metre runners, the ultimate two-minute specialists (ish), offers surprisingly direct lessons for hill climbers. Studies reveal exactly how elite athletes distribute effort, manage energy, and stay fast when the body is screaming to slow down.

This weekend, riders head to the National Hill Climb Championships, where the race will be won in approximately (just over) 2 minutes. Here’s how you train for and pace it…

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 Build a Bigger Engine (VO₂ Peak Still Rules)

Watanabe’s team found that even in a race lasting only around two minutes, athletes with higher VO₂ peak ran faster. In other words, you can’t fake endurance, even in short, explosive events. The aerobic system kicks in within seconds, not minutes, and it supports sustained output once the initial surge fades. It’s not really a revelation that having a higher VO2 max helps during a short endurance event – but the extent to which it matters does surprise a lot of people. It’s NOT a sprinter’s race!

Hill-climb takeaway:
To prepare, include workouts that stress your aerobic ceiling:

• 3–5 × 2 min uphill at 90–95% max heart rate, with full recoveries.
  
• Longer tempo climbs (4–6 min) at controlled effort to raise aerobic power.
  

A strong VO₂ peak means you’ll hit the climb harder and last longer before the legs “flood with” lactate.

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Train to “clear lactate”

The same study identified lactate removal ability (γ₂) as a crucial determinant of performance. Those who could clear or reuse lactate faster maintained speed better through the second half of the effort. On a climb, that’s the rider or runner who keeps pushing while everyone else fades.

Hill-climb takeaway:
Train your body to tolerate and clear lactate:

• Do repeated short hill sprints (30–45 s) with 30–60 s easy recoveries.
  
• Add “float” intervals—alternate hard 45 s pushes and moderate 45 s efforts without full rest.

These sessions teach your muscles to recycle lactate as fuel instead of letting it shut you down.

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Fast Start, Smooth Fade

Hanley’s analysis of world-class 800 m races shows that almost every top performance follows a fast-start, controlled-fade pattern: an aggressive opening to hit top power early, followed by a gradual deceleration. The secret isn’t a final sprint—it’s slowing down less than everyone else. 

Hill-climb takeaway:

• Launch confidently to get up to race power quickly.
  
• Settle into a sustainable rhythm within 20–30 s.
  
• Focus on holding form as fatigue builds—shoulders relaxed, breathing deep, cadence steady.
  

A small fade is inevitable; the goal is to make it gradual, not catastrophic.

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The Art of the Final 30 Seconds

In the last stretch, you’re no longer chasing speed—you’re fighting to keep it. This is where aerobic strength and lactate clearance combine with mental control. Keep your upper body calm, eyes fixed just ahead, and drive through the burn.

Remember: perfect pacing isn’t even pacing. It’s knowing exactly how much burn you can handle and stretching that line to the summit.

Take a look at the course here and sign up to myWindsock today!

It’s the night before the big dance – and athletes in Kona are currently having their penultimate night’s sleep before the women’s Ironman World Championships in Kona and we’re of the opinion that course records will probably fall. Historical precedent tells us that it’s the first year where it’s within the realms of possibility that the winner of the women’s race in Kona this year will be faster than the male winner from 2014!

A lot has been made of the weather forecast in the triathlon media this year at Kona, it’s going to be pretty windy with the average wind speed picking up to around 30kph in the back half of the bike course and the famous crosswinds on the Hawi descents are looking like they’ll make an appearance.

Even though the wind on course is pretty high, the wImpact on the day is between 0 and 1.5% – this is pretty low and means athletes will only be a maximum of 1.5% slower when compared to a completely neutral day. In 2018 conditions were similar when the bike course record was broken by Daniella Ryf.

Using a system mass of 72kg (that’s bike and rider) and reported rolling resistance and drivetrain losses values that represent the best of the best – a rider with a cda of around 0.19 will need between 210W and 215W to break the course record. This will be a power to weight of around 3.5W/kg.

If you want to play around with the forecast for the Ironman World Championships bike course, click here.

It’s become less fashionable a term recently, on account of its horrific overuse, but marginal gains is the idea that if you make incremental improvements to your setup or training that it will add up to something significant. It was popularised in the early 2010s by Team Sky (now INEOS) back when they used to win stuff. 

Recently, I’ve been on a bit of a buying spree for my TT bike and have been thoughtfully shopping – aiming to prioritise by Watts saved per pound spent, but while doing this I realised that the thing that matters really is time saved per pound spent.

The marginal gains we will test in today’s simulation will be…

• Switching from GP5000 to GP5000 TT, both with latex inner tubes
  
  Independent tests of this set up have shown an improvement of around 1-4W per tyre.
  
• Removing the front derailleur and switching to one chainring
  
  This could save, again, between 1 and 4W in aerodynamic savings.
  
• Adding an aero OSPW system
  
  This has a claimed saving of 2.4W relative to a dura ace set up.
  
• Using a super slippery waxed chain
  
  Wattshop claim their ‘Cratus’ waxed chain can save 3-5W compared to a standard clean chain.
  
• Very moderate weight savings

Using a combination of factors, I’ve also managed to shave 650g off my set up and body weight. 

Before we get started here, it’s worth noting that all of these claims are probably wrong in the context of this specific simulation with this specific setup. However, that’s not really the point of this blog. It’s actually to answer the question of “We know you can accumulate meaningful savings but how much of a difference does it actually make?”

The first step we’ll do is run each saving individually and then finally, we’ll put them all together and see the time difference between the standard set up plus all the marginal gains. 

It’s worth noting that aerodynamic savings scale with speed whereas rolling and drive train resistance savings remain more stable (they’re not actually constant, but for the simplicity of our model approximating them as constant yields acceptable results). 

We will assume that, for the sake of simplicity, saving 1W is the equivalent of riding 1W harder – this is not actually true (as 1W saved at 30kph might be 3W or something at 50kph) so, if anything, this is likely to underestimate the time savings from our marginal gains – especially the aero ones. That said, it makes the simulation much simpler to carry out – so we will make the assumption none the less. 

The final assumption we’ll make here is that our rider is riding at a constant power of 300W – this is not realistic, or optimal, but makes it easier to isolate changes so we’ll do this for illustrative purposes. At the end, we’ll have a perfectly paced simulation – centred around 300W. 

Standard Set Up

After each run, we’ll reset the simulation to the original conditions so when you see a time saving, it’s with respect to our baseline set up.

Weight Savings

As we’ve saved 650g – that’s about 0.7% of our total system mass, we might see a gain in speed as a result of this, considering it’s a pretty punchy circuit. Let’s run the simulation taking 650g off our set up and see what happens. 

Waxing our chain

Let’s see if the Wattshop waxed chain, with a saving of 3-5W (we will use 4W) can save us a decent amount of time… 

Oversize Pulley Wheel

Going “one-by”

Typically, the 1X chainring’s aero savings are dependent on yaw angle but savings between 1 and 4W are common. As such, we’ll see a saving of around 35s here.

Fresh Tyres

This is actually one of the most interesting examples of non-obvious speed improvements. Independent testing has shown the difference to be about 3W per tyre – so a total saving of 6W. Running a simulation with a 6W boost in power we see this… 

All together

In total, these savings add up to 15W (plus our 650g) saving.

Marginal gains AND perfect pacing…

That’s not the end of it though, we all know that riding a course (especially one that’s hilly) with a flat power is not the fastest way to do it. 

As much as it pains us to say (not at all, we love it), marginal gains really do add up, without getting any fitter at all we’ve just saved ourselves almost 4.5 minutes simply by throwing money at the issue and pacing properly. 

Save yourself time and money with a myWindsock subscription today. 

IRONMAN 70.3 World Championships 2025 course preview

This year, the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championships take place in the Spanish seaside town of Marbella. 2025 is the year of “Carbs before Marbs” and you’re going to need it in order to get round this monstrosity of a bike course – with 20m of climbing per kilometre it’s got to be the hardest 70.3 World’s course in history. The course map really doesn’t look that bad but it has 1.5 times the amount of elevation per mile than the “mountainous” IRONMAN World Championships course in Nice – it’s way harder. Of course, myWindsock is the only acceptable tool to quantify exactly how hard this course is.

The hardest thing about this course is the fact there’s long climbs with vicious pinches in gradient that peak over 20%. We can look at the gradient plot and distribution of gradients here.

How to think of the course?

This might be the hardest 70.3 World’s there will ever be – in order to get prepared properly myWindsock is the only place to nail your pacing, planning and post race analysis all in one subscription.

Here at myWindsock we care about two things – predicting how the weather will impact your speed on the bike and riding fast time trials. That’s it. Today we have three tips for you that will help you, backed with some myWindsock science, ride a faster TT without simply pedalling harder. 

Hold your position 

Staying in the aero bars during a time trial sounds like a trivial piece of advice but it’s something that was recently demonstrated by Red Bull Bora riders at the 2025 Tour de France – riding uphill in the aero bars during the mountain time trial to some pretty good success. Being more aerodynamic is typically faster even when speeds are pretty low. 

How much difference does it make?

For this we’ll take the sort of segment you might find in a TT in the UK, a 3.3km drag of around 3%. For a 70kg rider on an 8kg bike with a typical “sat up” cda of 0.35 doing 300W this gives us a ground speed of 26.4km/h and time on the segment of 7:31. 

What happens if we put that same rider in the TT bars and drop their cda to 0.23? Good position discipline comes down to one thing, training. Ride your TT bike a lot, on hard days and easy days – if your time trialing is your primary goal then it shouldn’t even matter if you can do less power, as you’re training the muscles you’re going to use on race day. One of our favourite sessions is to go and ride up the longest climb you can find in the TT bars at a low cadence to really practice recruiting all of those TT muscles. Let’s take a look at what happens on that climb if the rider stayed in the bars…

Pacing 

The old adage of riding fast is about minimising the amount of time you’re riding slowly for is as true now as it ever was. Efficient pacing is a game of energy investment – put more energy in when the resistive forces are lower and you’ll get more seconds back for your power investment. 

How much difference does it make?

For this example we’ll use the world famous (well, moderately well known in Hampshire) P164 time trial course. It’s a rolling 10 in the New Forest with 130m of climbing over 16.1km.

This course doesn’t suit a smooth power output as we used in the example above, as you can see by the elevation profile…

Let’s input a series of pacing rules, that yields the same normalised power but distributing our power slightly differently. myWindsock settings allow us to do this and we’ll impose a series of pacing rules (like “if speed > 60kph, power goes to 0W”).

How to do it?

Make use of the “Where Power Matters Most” graph on your event myWindsock forecast and avoid just doing a flat, smooth power.

Tyres, chains and gears

A clean bike is a fast bike, and a bike with a waxed chain and ceramic bearings is a slightly faster bike on top of that. This final tip is often marginal, but time trials often come down to small margins and that’s half the fun. Let’s delve into the myWindsock advanced settings and see how it impacts our TT on the P164 remembering our well paced effort yielded a time of 22:44, what happens if we fully optimise our tyres and chain?

That’s it then, riding a fast TT is simple – good pacing, good position discipline and spend money. The most efficient pound per second save expenditure you can make is a myWindsock subscription. With this, you can test your pacing and equipment strategy on a given course to help you plan race day down to the second.

This Sunday riders will take on the RTTC National 25 mile TT championships on the N1/25C course in Cambridgeshire. The National 25 Mile Time Trial Championship is part of a long-standing tradition in British cycling that dates back to the early 20th century. In 1922, a group of cycling clubs formed the Road Racing Council (RRC) to bring uniformity to road time trials, which were growing in popularity. Initially limited to founder clubs and those hosting open events, the RRC set out basic rules and recommendations to ensure consistent race conduct across the country. As the sport expanded and modern traffic conditions posed new challenges, the RRC evolved into the Road Time Trials Council (RTTC) in 1937, opening its membership to all cycling clubs and introducing a national framework for managing the sport.

Since then, the RTTC—now operating under the name Cycling Time Trials (CTT)—has continued to oversee and support the sport at all levels, from grassroots club events to national championships. The aim has remained unchanged: to ensure fair, safe, and standardised time trials across the UK, preserving a discipline that has thrived for over a century. The great history of this event amplifies the prestige.

Course Profile

Weather Forecast

The wind direction should play a role in rider’s pacing though, with Sunday forecast to be a cross tailwind on the way out and a cross headwind on the return. The course is an out-back-out-back with a roundabout on the return and the finish line sits at the bottom of the starting hill. 

If you want to play about with the forecast and see how you’d stack up at the National 25 mile championships the forecast is here.

“Feed Remco” signs have been popping up on the roadside – so what is an extra kg or two worth on a Tour de France mountain top finish?

In an article in the run up to the Tour de France, Remco Evenepoel gave an interview to a Belgian newspaper in which he said this, “He stayed off the bike for four months. You can’t just make up for something like that. You can get back to a good level relatively quickly, but it’s those last few percentage points that are crucial. For that, you have to be able to train consistently over a long period. We hope that Remco can gain those last two or three percentage points in the coming weeks. We cannot do magic.” He then went on to say, “He is one-and-a-half kilos lighter than last year at this time of year” and made further comments regarding Evenepoel’s weight, clearly it was a big area of focus for him. 

At the Tour de France, Evenepoel went on to abandon the race citing that he was “empty” since the end of the last warm up race he competed in before the Tour de France. Evenepoel said that he entered the Tour in poor condition. He said, “After the Dauphiné, I haven’t been able to do a single training session either… I couldn’t handle any intensity. Fatigue, my body simply not being good enough this year… It could be anything, I just can’t pinpoint one thing.” We aren’t diagnosing Remco with anything, but what he says seems to correlate with the symptoms an athlete might feel if they’ve been continuously underfuelling. 
This is something myWindsock has been interested in for a long time, as we’ve been absolutely furiously telling everyone for ages that weight doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as air resistance in 99% of circumstances – the line we always use is “as long as you’re not trying to win the Tour de France”, but what if you are?

Since 2010, the winners have pretty much always been between 60 and 70kg so this is the weight range we’ll use for all of our analysis. Some of the heavier riders that won the tour between 1995 and 2010 may have had some pharmaceutical assistance – so we will just ignore them.

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How much does an extra kilogram cost on the Col de la Loze?

Now we have our course, not forgetting that it’s in the context of 21 stages so we should remember that every extra kilo Joule expended needs to be made up at the dinner table.

We will assume a rider is doing 400W and the total weight of their bike and clothes is 6.5kg (this is not realistic but it’s more important to keep constant). As such, we will have our 70kg rider with a system mass of 76.5kg and the 60kg rider with a system mass of 66.5kg. We will keep rolling resistance and drivetrain resistance the same for each virtual rider. 

Now we will imagine two scenarios. One where our rider loses 10kg, from 70kg to 60kg, without losing any power, and another where a rider loses 0.5% of their power with each kilogram of bodyweight and model their time on this climb on this basis. We find the following…

No one is saying that heavier riders go up hill faster, that’s clearly not true. There are hidden risks associated with losing weight and all we are saying is that they’re only worth it up to a point.

Find out what that extra kilogram means on your next ride with myWindsock.

The GC battle will heat up today in the Tour de France with many permutations on the current state of play possible by the end of the day. Van der Poel is just about in yellow on equal time to Pogacar with Vingegaard 8s back and Evenepoel a further 58 seconds adrift. The course is 33km long. and starts and finishes in Caen.

The Course

Ganna’s abandonment earlier in the Tour de France has definitely dampened the chances of a non GC rider winning today, it’s a perfect course for an old fashioned bigger TT specialist but with hardly any of them in the race, other than Tobias Foss, it’s tough to see past one of the big 3 winning.

One easy way to see how much difference pacing can make in a TT (vs just riding a flat power) is to take a look at the Where Power Matters Most plot in myWindsock. If pacing climbs is hard, and pacing is consequential, this plot is riddled with orange shading – as you can see here, that’s not the case. All of this is to say, other than a few corners, this is a test of the ratio of power:aero of these riders.

The other plot we can use to analyse the course is the breakdown of resistive forces during the race.

The blue on this plot represents the proportional importance of air resistance (with the brown and yellow representing other resistive forces) and it’s extremely clear that the vast majority of this TT will be spent battling air resistance. Being lighter than another rider on this course is not helpful which may benefit Pogacar against Vingegaard.

How long will it take?

The first thing we did was to take a look at the “average” rider, seeing as this is the Tour de France, our average rider is anything but your normal average rider, riding at 400W with a system mass of 80kg and an average cda of 0.2, these numbers would win you any Open TT of a similar length.

This plot shows how the time evolves for our “average rider” throughout the day, there is a “fast patch” of day around 3pm which is explained by a simultaneous pressure dip and drop in the forecasted wind speed but at its maximum it’ll make around 7 seconds of difference.

Conditions evolve throughout the day getting faster, then gradually slower. The pressure drops but wImpact rises again due to the wind speed picking up slightly in the afternoon. This might be something Remco Evenepoel manages to take advantage of. His start time is slightly earlier than his main GC rivals as he’s lost 58s so far, but it depends on the exact times at which the forecasted pressure and wind changes actually materialise.

Who’s going to win?

The main question of the day is who is going to win and we’ve done our best, based on recent(ish) TT performances of these riders to predict some time ranges that we think they’ll will come in at. This has yielded a couple of key observations. There is an extremely slim chance that Van der Poel holds on to yellow but it’s not impossible. There’s almost no chance that someone other than Remco Evenepoel wins this TT.

Pogacar could either win or lose almost 90 seconds to Evenepoel, as he did an absolutely terrible TT in the Dauphine but is clearly doing excellent power numbers the moment. Roglic, who has been excellent in medium to long TTs in the past, could win but requires an underperformance from Evenepoel and for Roglic to match his 2020-2022 TT performances which also seems unlikely. Wout Van Aert’s situation is similar to that of the former ski jumper.

We are set for a major shake up in the GC today whatever happens but Pogacar and Vingegaard will be most concerned with the gap they have to each other at the end of the day. Our money is on Evenepoel with Pogacar and Vingegaard losing around 30 seconds. Expect some separation today between the “B tier” TT contenders to the top guys of over a minute.

You can do your own pre stage analysis with myWindsock – keep your eye out on Strava for the riders at Le Tour using myWindsock!

The RTTC National 24 Hour Time Trial championships are a qualifying event for the Race Across America (RAAM). The RAAM is an ultra endurance cycling event which started in the 1980s and for the uninitiated, the route is roughly a line from the west to east coast of America. In relatively recent editions, it has started from Oceanside (of IRONMAN 70.3 fame) and finished in either Atlantic City or Annapolis. 

About the RAAM

The Race Across America, or RAAM, is considered one of the most demanding endurance events in the world. Unlike stage races such as the Tour de France, RAAM is a single, continuous ride against the clock from coast to coast. The route typically covers over 3,000 miles and includes more than 170,000 feet of climbing, taking in deserts, mountain ranges, and endless plains along the way. It first ran in 1982 and has since earned a reputation for testing not only a rider’s physical limits but also their ability to manage sleep, strategy and sheer perseverance. Simply qualifying is an achievement in itself, and finishing places a rider in rare company.

How do I qualify?

Qualifying for the Race Across America (RAAM) isn’t as simple as signing up and turning up. Given the scale of the event and the demands it places on riders, there’s a formal qualification process designed to ensure that entrants are up to the task—not just physically, but mentally and logistically as well.

There are a number of recognised events around the world that serve as official RAAM qualifiers. These include ultra-distance time trials and long-format endurance races which meet RAAM’s standards for difficulty, distance, and conditions. In the UK, for example, the RTTC National 24 Hour Time Trial Championships is one such race. Riders who complete these events within specific time limits, typically based on age and gender categories, may earn the coveted “RAAM Qualified” status. At the RTTC National 24 Hour Time Trial Championships, riders have to complete a total of 380 miles (or approximately 612 km). 

It’s worth noting that qualification for the RAAM isn’t about winning; it’s about demonstrating the ability to safely and consistently cover long distances at pace, with minimal support and rest. The idea is to replicate, at least in part, the demands of RAAM itself and the RTTC National 24 Hour Championships achieve this despite being considerably shorter. 

If you want to prepare for your next ultra endurance event in the same way as world record holders and world class athletes, sign up to myWindsock here.