Tadej Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel are destroying every rule of modern racing, and they’re underlining the chapter titled “durability” in the training manual, too.
The Pogi era of hyper-performance and super-aggression has made “durability” the Holy Grail of elite performance.
“Durability has had to become a much bigger focus of how we train,” Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe head of performance Dan Lorang told Velo.
“It’s not the rider who can push the most when they’re fresh who wins races. It’s who can push the most after five hours and many thousands of kilojoules of work,” Lorang said. “That’s totally changed in the past few years. It wasn’t so much like that.”
Durability – sometimes also called “fatigue resistance” or “physiological resilience” – describes an athlete’s resistance to deterioration over time.
After all, VO2 Max figures and lactate levels from a fresh lab test aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on after 200km of all-out racing.
Even more so now that Pogačar, Van der Poel, and the new breed of aggressor are pulling the peloton’s legs off from kilometer zero.
“The crazy big attacks are going earlier, and the whole peloton is at a higher level,” Lorang said. “Racing is made hard, all of the time.
“That means the energy requirements have totally changed. We have to adapt to that in everything we do for preparation – in nutrition, psychology, training, all of it.”
Durability has become the governor of the most brutal monuments and the must-win Tour de France.
Yet incredibly, even in the $50 million budget, Formula 1-sophistication WorldTour, nobody really knows how to improve it.
A post-pandemic paradigm shift
Racing got turned up to “11” when the peloton emerged from the COVID pandemic.
Raw watts and power-to-weight ratios increased, and aggression accelerated to match. It was a paradigm shift that saw “finals” start earlier and attacks go harder.
“Saving matches” became as antiquated as down-tube shifters.
“These new super-talents race like when they were in the juniors, even though the racing is two or three hours longer,” Jayco-AlUla trainer Peter Leo told Velo. “Riders come to the finish with a much higher [physiological] load than they used to.
“That means durability, or trying to make riders resistant to fatigue, has to be the focus of the program now.”
And it’s not only in cycling.
The evolution of professional endurance means marathon and ultra-trail runners, mountain athletes, and swimmers are all looking for the key to fatigue resistance.
From fatigue and fitness to carbs and cadence: The complexity of durability
But being “durable” isn’t as simple as completing your intervals, sleeping nine hours per night, and slurping 150 grams of carbohydrates per hour.
Explainer: What is durability, and why it matters
It requires excellence in every component of the performance puzzle.
Fueling, hydration, substrate utilization, conditioning, physiological thresholds, and even cadence have all been cited as components of “durability.”
“Durability isn’t a unified performance marker. A lot of things play into it. That makes it incredibly hard to train,” Leo said. “In fact, we’re not really sure how to do it.
“It’s about glycogen intake, and how much you can absorb. It’s about muscular endurance. It also depends on your efficiency, your training status, and the race demands,” Leo continued. “And then you need different durability for a grand tour compared to Flanders or Roubaix.”
It makes for a complex equation that the WorldTour is struggling to solve.
“With these guys like Pogačar, the focus on durability has become stronger. So it’s frustrating that there still isn’t a clear model for training it,” said John Wakefield, who works alongside Lorang in the Red Bull training staff.
“We all have our theories, but we need more research before we really know how to target it. Until then, we all adopt our own, probably different, approaches.”
‘There’s some question of whether durability is something that’s really trainable’
There are wildly different theories for how best to dial up durability.
The most common, and most common-sense, of these involves loading short, explosive intervals into the back-half of a long ride. These are kept at around five minutes or less, as it’s understood that ranges of resilience are most apparent in fast-twitch, high-intensity efforts.
Other ideas conflict and contradict.
Some trainers in the WorldTour advocate for a shift toward “in the middle” sweetspot training, which directly butts up against other suggestions for super-polarized workout plans.
Elsewhere, some advocate for promoting fat metabolism and an all-day engine, contrasting a slew of suggestions for a high-carb, high-output training strategy.
Or maybe it’s all of the above?
A study released this spring only got as far as suggesting “more is more” in this path to this kingmaker of pro competition.
“The mechanisms responsible for superior resilience are unclear, practical ways to evaluate it remain to be developed, and interventions to improve it are still uncertain,” concluded the paper published in March by Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.
The paper goes on to suggest athletes need to raise every pillar of performance – VO2 Max, efficiency, and metabolic thresholds – to become durability demons.
Thar’s easier said than done for elites already zapped out at 30 hours per week.
“I think there’s some question of whether durability is something that’s really trainable,” Leo said. “It’s the type of attribute you get from racing. Because racing is so hard, it shapes you.
“But that doesn’t mean you don’t try,” Leo continued. “You can definitely prepare a rider to better absorb these huge workloads of modern racing. For example, if you improve efficiency, if you improve substrate utilization, if you improve lactate threshold. You improve every other part of durability and raise the overall level.”
‘Durability is something that we have to understand’
Jeroen Swart, performance co-ordinator of the UAE Emirates super team, once told Velo that “durability is the new marker of elite performance.”
It’s what Swart and WorldTour scouts increasingly look for when they’re searching for the next super-talent.
And while durability is a relative mystery to the world of endurance, it’s only a matter of time before somebody unlocks its secrets.
“We are seeing that durability is something that we have to understand. Not just as a coaching community, but specifically within the team,” said Tim Heemskerk, who works with Jonas Vingegaard and Matteo Jorgenson at Visma-Lease a Bike. “When you see what Pogačar does, it’s obvious we have to try to understand it.”
“Training more specifically for this modern way of racing is something we plan to look at closely in the off-season,” Heemskerk told Velo. “We’ll also be looking at it for the Tour de France.”
Or maybe durability really is just an ethereal, untrainable super-power?
Is it a genetically-gifted blessing that separates GOATS like Pogačar and MVDP, Kilian Jornet and Courtney Dauwalter, from the chasing herd?
You can bet Heemskerk and every endurance researcher are hoping to prove that theory wrong.