Every grand tour used to contain a long flat time trial but these days they’re becoming more and more rare. Truthfully, we miss them and the organisers of the Vuelta must have been reading our minds because they’ve bought it back, though we’d prefer for it to be 50km like the good old days.

The course map

The wind map and surface friction

Anyone who’s ridden their bike in coastal European towns will be familiar with the wind. We’ve all left a town into the open areas and found ourselves suddenly being thrown around by the wind between hedgerows and buildings. That’s why we developed the surface friction mapping at myWindsock.

The race is forecasted to be majority tailwind which means that the windiest part of the day is actually the fastest.

There’s a ten second difference between setting off at 15:00 compared to 17:00, so there’s not a lot in it but we’ve seen world tour time trials of this distance won by smaller margins.

How hard is it to gain two minutes?

To have any chance of winning this Vuelta, Roglic will have to ride this TT about 2 minutes faster than Mas. Given this will be the target, how good a performance is actually needed to pick up two minutes on a “bad” time trialist?

A bad time trialist in the Vuelta is a pretty good time trialist:

Enric Mas will probably not mind us saying that, relative to other riders at his level, he’s never been the best time trialist. Reportedly, he weighs about 61kg and has a sustained 40 minute power of around 370W. Let’s say he’s about 4% lower power on the TT bike than the road bike (this is the upper end of “average”) then we can guess he will ride around 355W for this TT. We’ll assume his cda is 0.2, it’ll likely be a little lower but as he’s not a TT specialist he will also sit up a bit, so that’ll drag his average cda up slightly. We will assume his mechanics have him on fast tyres and a fast drive-train.

In order to challenge on GC, a top GC rider will need to produce a time of 38 minutes and 30 seconds. What kind of performance does this require? Let’s go back over some of our assumptions and put them into “peak TT Roglic” mode.

Back in the day, Roglic wasn’t just a ‘good for a GC guy’ time trialist, he was great. He’s reported to be at a weight of 65kg, which is a couple of kg heavier than Mas. During this Vuelta, he’s been climbing at a similar, but slightly slower, rate as Mas. Based on his track record though, we can estimate him to be slightly more aerodynamic as well as have a slightly lower power loss in the TT position.

We will assume his sustained 40 minute relative power is 1% lower than Mas at the moment, based on their climbing performances so far during this race. This gives him an estimated 390W to play with, but we’ll assume he loses only 2% of this relative to Mas in the TT bars instead of Enric’s 4% drop off. That means our estimated TT power for Roglic during this TT is 383W. We will also assume a cda of 0.19, we could be more aggressive with this estimate but he’s currently struggling from the impacts of a crash in training before the Vuelta started.

Now, in order to get that two minute gap back, he will have to take some risks on pacing. Let’s now assume he’s magically slightly more aero at 0.18 and loses no power in the TT bars. This is essentially the best possible day that Roglic could conceivably have…

This blog scratches the surface of how World Tour Cycling Teams use myWindsock to prepare for time trials. If you want a detailed look at Stage 18 of the Vuelta – you can check out the forecast here.

myWindsock’s new version, surface, allows you to customise the information panel on the right hand side of the user interface. While, of course, your account comes pre-installed with a large array of pre built panels focussing on many aspects of cycling including weather, aerodynamics, terrain and more – each rider is different and this blog will focus on how to go about setting up your own panels.

Panel Basics

The pre loaded Panel Library comes with six options…

1. Default – A broad overview of the course.
2. Performance Deep Dive – Focussing on effort and power delivery.
3. Wind Analysis – This is self explanatory.
4. Course and Terrain – Focusing on the elevation and physical aspects of the course.
5. Race Plan – A panel designed for race preparation
6. Aerodynamics and CdA – Focussed on aerodynamic analysis
   

Users are also able to update the pre loaded panels, as well as design their own from scratch. Today, we’ll focus on editing the Race Plan panel to go from the default panel to one more focussed on triathlon.

Editing a Panel

There are two ways to edit a panel, the option from the drop down menu or the text input option.

In order to decide what to prompt the panel we need to decide what we want to know in order to prepare for the race. Preparing for a triathlon is a unique challenge as we need to carry a lot, it’s not actually a maximal effort and we need to get the gearing correct. It’s also, in the case of professional racing, a “semi drafting” race where some advantage is to be gained by being among a group of riders even if they must stay 20m apart. This means that energy investment is less linear than during a pure time trial as energy applied at seemingly non optimal points in the course might actually make sense in the context of non-draft triathlon.

How many charts is too many?

For a course that’s 90km with mountains, it’s possible to summarise all the pacing and race preparation information between 5 and 10 charts. The exact charts you feel you need prepared is left for the user.

The first thing we will do is add two charts, one which has an elevation profile and a second which shows us the distribution of gradients during the ride.

Editing Panels is a new feature on myWindsock, to check out this forecast click here.

The interval sessions that appear in your training plan are sometimes in significant disagreement with the terrain around you. This can make route planning extremely difficult. The demands of races dictate your training sessions, but the demands of your training sessions can dictate your route. This blog will take you through how a training session can be planned using myWindsock.

The session we will plan today is a roughly 2.5 hour ride in Andorra with 12 x 3 minutes low cadence intervals with 1 minute between them. This means the climb needs to be long enough to do the whole block, steep enough to tolerate low cadence training but shallow enough that the rest in between is easy enough at a normal cadence.

Before the 12 x 3 minutes we have a warm up including 4 x 12s sprints with 48s rest and after the 12 x 3 minutes we have a 1 hour block of “zone 2” – so we’ll need a pretty much continuous up hill for that too.

The warm up

The goal is to get down as low as possible between 20 and 30 minutes while finding a small climb to do the warm up sprints on. The warm up starts with 15 minutes easy pedalling, and the road down hill is quite easy to pedal the whole way down as it’s pretty straight and pretty wide, so we’ll pop that into myWindsock and see how far we can get in 15 minutes…

3 minute efforts

The bottom of the longer climbs the other side of the tunnel start at around 1200m above sea level. The intervals total 48 minutes and during this our rider will climb at a rate of 1100m/hour so we need to gain around 900m for the duration of the intervals.

The Zone 2

The pleasant way back is via the Col d’Ordino but this doesn’t take me an hour.

From Ordino town to the very top will take about 35 minutes and bring the total ride duration to just under 2 hours and 10. That means we need to descend down the other side and ride back up toward the starting point. We’ll be at the bottom of the descent two hours and 15 minutes into the ride with 25 minutes of up hill riding to go which conveniently will take me right to the front door of my favourite cafe.

After planning the route in myWindsock, I’m able to send it directly to my bike computer as the two are connected.

You can sign up to myWindsock here to plan your training sessions perfectly.

This coming weekend the RTTC National 10 Mile Championships are taking place on the O10/1 course near Doncaster in South Yorkshire. The women’s and junior races takes place on Saturday and the men’s race is on the Sunday. Both days the first rider is off at 10am and the riders will be on course until around 11:20 on the Saturday and 12:10 on the Sunday. The course is identical both days though the weather forecast varies slightly.

Both days are currently slated to be dry, temperate and relatively windless so our forecasts will focus mostly on which day is the fastest. We will set up the riders each day as the same, with a cda of 0.21, a system mass of 75kg and an average power of 300W then see how the time evolves across the start time of each day.

The forecast

The margins are tight, and both days are pretty fast. Due to the shortness of a 10 mile TT it’s not an unrealistic scenario that the podium could be split with just a handful of seconds. We should expect to see some pretty fast times though, with good conditions for racing forecast.

You can prepare for the National 10 with myWindsock here.

On Sunday the 16th of August the RTTC National 12 hour time trial championships will be held in Monmouthshire on the R12/16 course. The first riders roll out at 6:01 and will be on the gas for the following 12 hours, completing as many laps of the course as they can in that time.

The Weather

A 12 hour time trial is quite a bleak endeavour, even for the most enthusiastic riders there’s always at least one portion of the race that leaves you questioning why you entered. Nothing would accelerate that moment quite like the freezing cold and the rain, however conditions appear to be on the side of the participants this year.

The Elevation Profile

One of the toughest things about a long time trial is the back breaking work of spending 12 hours in the TT bars. Every time you sit up, you lose a couple of metres from your result. Steeper hills and low wind speed sections can give riders the opportunity to sit up without paying a penalty.

As you may have noticed from the graphs, myWindsock has a new look thanks to our surface platform, which is currently under development. One new feature of this is we can write extensions, which are small snippets of code in a “high level” language called Lua. A high level language is one that’s reasonably close to written english, making the syntax easily decipherable such that learning to write these extensions can be done by anyone curious enough to try.

An example of extensions

We can use these extensions to take a look at the average speed changes as a rider sits up more or less frequently. Setting up a time interval, we can see what happens to the average speed if our rider sits up for 60s at the following intervals (for an 80kg system mass with an “in position” cda of 0.23 riding at 240W)…

• Every 3 hours: 40.1kph
• Once an hour: 40.1kph
• Every 30 minutes: 40.0kph
• Every 10 minutes: 39.6kph

All of the CTT courses are available in myWindsock. You can check it out here.

It’s well understood in cycling circles how good you need to be to win World Tour men’s races with a summit finish, but the data as to how fast you need to ride up a hill in the women’s field is a little more sparse and not reported on as widely. In 2026, the Tour de France Femmes goes up Mont Ventoux and the QOM on Strava is currently held by Illi Gardener with a time of 57:35. While Illi isn’t a World Tour rider, she’s an extremely accomplished climber having won the British Hill Climb Championships three times. As such, we can expect a similar-ish time from the fastest women in the Tour de France Femmes this year.

Mont Ventoux – The Segment

The QOM has a VAM (a measure of climbing speed) of almost exactly 1400m/hr. We can see the peak climbing performances from the women’s world tour mapped below.

A power to weight ratio of 5W/kg on 8.6% will lead to a VAM of (wind dependent, of course) around 1600m/hr, which will lead to a climbing time in the 50-52 minute range though this assumes no wind. The stage leading into the climb is pretty straightforward, which will lend itself to fast climbing.

How fast do you need to be?

The following table shows you the power to weight ratio, power at 60kg and the time you might expect to ride the climb on Stage 7 in order to achieve the listed results. We are assuming that, as is the case each year, the level continues to rise and it’ll take an all time great climbing performance to win the stage. For a climb of this length, that’ll be around 5.1W/kg to win the stage.

To win	5.1W/kg	306W	56:24
Top 20 on the stage	4.7 W/kg	282W	1:00:01
Top half of the field	4.5 W/kg	270W	1:02:06

All in, if you’re riding a climb of around an hour in length above 4.5W/kg, you’ve got what it takes to get round in a mountain stage of the Tour de France Femmes, presuming your bike handling and race sense is up to scratch. In order to win a mountain top finish you’re likely having to ride an hour long climb at or in excess of 5W/kg.

Top teams and riders will be using myWindsock to prepare for the stage. You can too by clicking here.

Tour de France Femmes 2026 Route stage 4 preview: Gevrey-Chambertin – Dijon. The race’s only individual time trial and the only course preview that takes account of the weather!

The first major GC shakeup is expected in the first stage of the Tour de France Femmes in the TT that takes place in the land of mustard, finishing in Dijon.

For the first 7 kilometres, the riders head straight towards Dijon. A left-hand turn in Marsannay-la-Côte takes the riders onto a false-flat drag uphill. Gradually, the gradient increases until they reach the climb proper. This is the Lacets de Marsannay, officially a 1.8-kilometre climb averaging 6.9%, although it is perhaps more accurately described as a 3-kilometre drag averaging 5.7%. This TT’s profile is not dissimilar from the men’s ITT stage a couple of weeks back, where we saw Remco Evenepoel deliver a clinic in how to time trial on a 5% gradient.

The route continues on rolling terrain for another 2 kilometres or so, before a 6-kilometre descent takes the riders to Dijon. There are no bends to speak of in this section, allowing the riders to descend at breakneck speeds and make full use of gravity. The descent will take place in the aero bars – important for assumptions for our prediction. The race finishes in the city centre of Dijon.

What will it take to win it?

Last year’s Tour de France Femmes was without a time trial (which should be illegal), however three years ago there was a similarly profiled lumpy TT in which Reusser prevailed. This year, our opinion is that Vollering will take victory, however we’re going to forecast what it’ll take to win.

In order to win this TT, we think a rider will need to hit the climb in the TT bars at around 6.2W/kg, which for a 60kg rider is a staggering power of 372W. This, combined with a world class cda of 0.175 on the flat and assumptions that the mechanics are setting the riders up perfectly, leads us to a predicted winning time of 26:37.

The starting point for this prediction was that, in order to be competitive with the performance of Vollering (assuming she’s here in peak shape), a rider will need to hit 6.2W/kg on the climb without breaking their aero position. They’ll go over their Critical Power and start using up their W’ allowance – essentially emptying the tank over the crest of the climb and holding on toward the finish.

The above time split used a Critical Power of 350W and a W’ of 16kJ for a 60kg rider. This particular pacing strategy leaves that rider with a minimum W’ balance of roughly 2kJ – which tells us there’s scope for a rider to potentially go harder than this on the climb. If this estimate is wrong, we’re forecasting that it’s more likely to be too conservative and it’s possible a rider will go toward the 26 minute mark, though breaking this seems unlikely.

The fact that the finish is tailwind descent also reduces the consequences for imploding on the time, as there’s a a pretty hard limit on the amount of time you can lose on that descent. In fact, if you stop pedalling after the top of the climb, you’d lose less than a minute on the run in to town with this pacing strategy. This means that riders may be more inclined to take a risk in their pacing on the climb, which further increases the chance our prediction will be beaten.

There’s only one time check on course, at 9.7km just before the proper crest of the hill. We should not expect massive swings from the intermediate check to the finish.

Riders hoping to be in the overall GC battle will need to ride the course under 28 minutes. This will limit their losses to around 90 seconds, anything more than that and you’re pretty much fully out the game. Race day conditions currently point to net tailwind for most of the TT which will help limit the losses of the weaker time trialists.

Join the many professional cyclists and teams using myWindsock to prepare here!

Runners are getting faster, whether it’s shoe tech, altitude or something in the water there’s no denying that the times are getting fast. As we know, aerodynamic resistance increases with the cube of speed which means the impact of aerodynamics becomes important very quickly. Recently, we’ve seen an example of this.

When Josh Kerr broke the mile world record he added his name to a list of record holders that had not been changed for 27 years. Clocking 3:42.66, the British 28-year-old took 0.47 off the world record running at a speed of 25.93 km/hour.

Kerr’s attempt was planned months in advance. Rather than quietly targeting the record, he publicly committed to it, building an entire training cycle around running one mile faster than anyone in history. Every decision was made with a single objective in mind.

Training, of course, was the foundation, but the margins came from everything around it. Kerr and coach Danny Mackey leaned heavily on physiological data, monitoring sleep, recovery and heart rate variability to balance workload and reduce the risk of overtraining. Away from the track, he installed an altitude chamber in his bedroom and an oxygen-enriched training room at home, allowing him to maximise adaptation between sessions.

World records aren’t solo efforts, and Kerr’s was no exception. Two pacemakers guided him through the opening laps at precisely the speed required for a 3:42 mile split, allowing him to settle into rhythm saving energy while drafting behind them. Kerr went through the first 400 metres in 55.3 seconds and then through 800 metres in 1:51.1.

By the final lap, with the pacemakers gone and a roaring London crowd behind him, the race became a battle against history. Kerr accelerated down the back straight and pulled clear of rival Yared Nuguse. Forty-five seconds later, he crossed the line in 3:42.66, becoming the fastest miler the sport has ever seen.

Josh Kerr didn’t visit a wind tunnel once during the preparation for this attempt, as far as I can tell. Should he have? He ran just shy of 26kph, speeds more commensurate with cycling than running. Aerodynamic drag in running is worth between 10 and 15 percent of the total work done against resistive forces. Perfect drafting is worth around a quarter of a second per lap, though this was “banked” and he used the first three laps worth of energy saving to empty his anaerobic energy stores in the final lap. This is about 0.75s worth of energy saved, slightly more time than the amount he broke the record by – it’s clear drafting helped him here.

During the final lap, without drafting, Josh Kerr ran 54.9 for the final 400m, this is a speed of 26.2kph and at this pace a 5% reduction in cda would save him a 10th of a second. To put that into “time trialese”, that would mean finding a saving of around 3W, this begs the question as to whether or not Josh Kerr should be wearing aero socks and aero sleeves.

The key takeaway for normal runners here is probably headwind related. It’s pretty hard for us mortals to get up to an air speed of 26kph unless we’re running into a headwind, but the energy savings of drafting if we’re running into a headwind can be significant, in the realms of 5 to 10 seconds over the course of a 5k Parkrun.

We’ve heard through the grape vine that some runners are using myWindsock to prepare for races, do the same by clicking here.

The second race against the clock has just taken place in this year’s Tour de France and it was an interesting watch from the perspective of an amateur time trialing enthusiast. The course started in Évian-les-Bains and was relatively short at only 26.1km in length, but the terrain made it truly challenging. The first 10km was completely uphill, with riders ascending the Côte de Larringes (a 9.6km climb at an average 4.2% gradient, though in real terms it was 9km at 5% then a plateau). From there, the road went back down again into a rolling, net downhill run-in to the finish in Thonon-les-Bains.

The synopsis was simple – a hard climb, a fast descent then a flat-ish bit. Watching the riders prepare and execute their races, as well as a little bit of insider knowledge, we took away some tips from watching the pros that can help you prepare for your next time trial.

The race played out as we might expect, the hilly course proving too difficult for the time trial specialists. World champion Remco Evenepoel stormed to victory, stopping the clock in 32:19 to claim his second stage win in a row with what we think might be the best time trial performance in history.

1. The harder the effort, the harder the warm up

The club 10 is a staple in basically every single myWindsock user’s diet and, while this race was a little longer than 10 miles, it was a similar-ish duration. One thing we noticed from the images of the riders preparing is how hard they looked like they were going on the turbo.

Riders interviewed afterwards were talking about how hard they went on the climb, with one saying his plan was to do the first 10 minutes at over 550W.

The harder the race, the harder the warm up should be – especially in instances like this, with a fast start. Riders were doing around an hour in some cases, though the literature suggests this isn’t necessary. Some time in each energy system progressively with one or two 15s efforts at the end is probably all you need, but don’t be afraid to go very hard, pop a gel afterward to replenish your depleted glycogen stores.

2. Don’t pace it evenly

The hard climb at the start takes us nicely onto the fact you should not pace any time trial evenly unless it’s a dead straight line with no elevation, corners or speed changes – and even then you should ride hard at the start to accelerate yourself. In order to simulate Remco’s 32:19 on this course, we had to input some obscene numbers. The average power we estimated for him on this course is around 405W, though this is heavily weighted in the first half of the course.

If we take that same average power of 405W but just ride a flat pace over the course, with other conditions all exactly the same, the time predicted comes out as 34:15, just shy of two minutes slower!

3. Climb in the TT bars – even when going slowly

All of the top riders rode the climb hard, but stayed in the bars. There was no standing up and swinging the bike around underneath them.

4. Use myWindsock to prepare

A quick look on Strava after every stage will show you that a decent proportion of the World Tour peloton are using myWindsock. We also know that many of the teams are using it to prepare for time trials and road stages. If you want to be as the best – click here.

Every year, the heat becomes a bigger topic of the Tour de France than the year before. This year, it’s become such a problem that, friend of myWindsock, Victor Campenaerts has foregone his socks. France has always been pretty warm in July and heat has always been a problem at Le Tour, but it does feel like it’s starting to get dangerous with ever increasing temperature management protocols from participating teams.

The other factor worth bearing in mind is that France is a massive country, at least in European terms. Every Brit can recognise the vast climactic differences between Scotland and Cornwall – if you drove this distance from Calais, you wouldn’t even reach Toulouse. If the Tour spends more time in the south these days, it may appear as if it’s getting hotter than it is in ‘real terms’.

We need to investigate if France is getting hotter as well as if the route is getting hotter too. For this, we will require a very specific set of skills and a slightly odd need to investigate such issues. If only there was some kind of website that would allow us to investigate this sort of thing…

Is France actually getting hotter in July?

France’s capital city is Paris, which in Summer can get quite warm and seeing as large urban populations typically have slightly more robust historical record keeping, we will use this as our initial benchmark. The data we’re using for this graph is from the French government and you can investigate it yourself if you like.

Since 1960 we see a slight upward trend of the daily average temperature with clear signals of heatwaves. Daily highs above 25 degrees have become more common and this has been felt more clearly since 2010. The microclimate of one city’s temperature gauge is not indicative of a broader pattern but if you were to ask the question of “are riders more likely to be sprinting up the Champs Elysees while warm today or in the past?” the answer would be that today is likely to be hotter.

Is the route getting hotter?

The below weather map is from France on the 12th of July 2026 in the afternoon. You can clearly see that the temperatures are distributed quite unevenly but there’s a rather warm patch in the middle. Le Tour actually went straight through this purple patch today and they shortened the stage by 30km as a result of this. It may be the case that routes have to be written with the temperature in mind in the future.

If we were planning the Tour de France, obviously we’d think about the weather first, seeing as that’s all we ever think about at myWindsock. This year, riders have been particularly unlucky in that they’ve been racing during a “heatwave”. Meteorologists typically declare a heatwave when daily maximum temperatures exceed a location’s specific average threshold for three or more consecutive days. As the average temperatures are drifting upward, heatwaves themselves are also getting hotter.

Certain parts of France’s geography are predisposed to heat and organisers should think about avoiding sending the race there in July. The final stage is an evening lap of Paris, which isn’t usually too hot especially as the riders don’t actually race it particTularly hard until the final hour of the race.

What should organisers actually do?

France is gradually warming up, along with the rest of Europe. Heat waves are becoming more common and they’re obviously both more likely and more severe in July. It seems that the position in the calendar is part of the problem, during the pandemic of 2020, organisers had no problem moving the race – ostensibly for the safety of the public and riders. A Wikipedia dive would show you that Le Tour has always taken place in July but there’s no obvious reason as to why that is.

It seems to me the organisers have two choices, one is to move the race to September or May while the other option is to stick to the edges, north and mountains of France and ditch the heat basin in the middle if they’re going to insist on the race continuing to take place in July.

The best way to plan the Tour de France would be with a myWindsock subscription. That way organisers could check historical temperature records along the route of each stage to make sure they’re not putting riders in danger.