From Bikepacking to Ultra Racing – Part 1: Training

Vom Bikepacking zum Ultra-Rennen - Teil 1: Training

Many of us know the feeling: the bags are packed, you’re on the bike, you’re riding at your own pace, enjoying the quiet. But maybe you’ve started asking yourself: what would it be like to do this as a race? Not just an adventure, but with a start number. Not just for yourself, but alongside others. Maybe, while dotwatching, you’ve already pictured your own dot moving across the map.

In this two-part series, we’ll show you how to make the step from relaxed bikepacking to your first ultra cycling race.

Part 1: Training – how to prepare physically and mentally for your first ultra race

Part 2: Nutrition – how to fuel your body before, during, and after

Both parts were written by Max Kinzelbauer, an experienced ultra cycling coach and, among others, coach of Christoph Strasser. He created this article exclusively for us to make it easier for as many riders as possible to get started in the world of ultra cycling. His advice is based on years of coaching experience and is here to guide you from bikepacking adventures to your first ultra race.

PART 1: TRAINING

The step from multi-day bikepacking tours to multi-day races is often smaller than you think. Most of the stress happens in your head. Your body can usually handle it already.

Why should there be such a big difference between riding a 1,000 km route on your own without worrying too much about fueling, fitness, speed, etc., and riding the exact same distance in an organized event?

As long as the time limits (cut-offs) aren’t extremely tight, it’s mainly a question of perspective. It’s like a marathon: almost anyone can complete one. Whether you need 3 hours or 8 hours, in the end you’ve still done a marathon. The finishing time is secondary, especially the first time.

What matters is that you decide for yourself:

Do you want to ride it competitively, with a clear result in mind?
Or do you want to finish, collect experience, and see how it feels?

The less structured and less prepared you are, the more relaxed and low-pressure you should approach the race. It’s absolutely fine to say: “I just want to get this done.”

Max’s recommendation:
Choose a race with a distance you’ve already managed well in your own riding. That takes the pressure off, because your body already knows: “I’ve done this before.” Don’t stress too much about fueling and logistics at the beginning — you’ve somehow managed it before.

What you should pay attention to:
The three contact points. Feet. Saddle. Hands.
As long as you’re not dealing with major orthopedic issues there (numbness, pain, pressure points), not much can go terribly wrong. The more training kilometers you have in your legs, the more you’ve learned to control these issues — and the better you’ll feel in the race.

If you want to get stronger: volume, structure — or both

After your first event, you might get more ambitious and want to improve. According to Max, you basically have three options:

Ride more hours.
Train with more structure.
Combine both (usually the best option).

1. Increasing volume

Start with your usual weekly volume. If you ride regularly, take the average of the last 4–5 weeks. If your riding is more irregular, look back at the last 6–8 weeks, find the weeks that had similar volume, and use those as your baseline.

Then:

Increase that volume for 2–3 weeks by about 10–20%.
After that, take a deload week (recovery week) with 20–40% less volume than your normal “base week.”

In practice:
2–3 weeks a little more than usual,
then 1 week less than usual.
This gives your body time to recover and adapt.

Spread your riding time as evenly and as frequently as you can throughout the week. Don’t push everything into one huge Sunday block. Several shorter rides are better. Frequency beats one monster day.

If you’re already at your time limit and can’t add more hours, that’s when point 2 becomes important: structure.

2. Adding structure to your training

Structure means applying specific training stimuli on purpose. It’s not about riding “hard” all the time, but about using different types of sessions in a smart way.

Max breaks it down into three key building blocks that are especially important for ultra:

HIT
Sweet Spot
K3

These three session types train different systems and work well together.

Block 1: HIT (High Intensity Training)

HIT means very hard intervals. The goal is to get your heart pumping, deliver maximum oxygen to your muscles, and put your system under high stress.

Why hard? Because your body only really adapts if you pull it out of its comfort zone. If the training stimulus always stays the same, you eventually reach a steady state where you stop improving.

This is what a HIT session can look like:

Example: 4 × 3 minutes hard at RPE 8–9
(RPE = Rate of Perceived Exertion, your subjective feeling of effort from 1 = super easy to 10 = all-out)
Recovery: 2–3 minutes of very easy spinning between efforts
Later, you can build up to 6–7 × 3 minutes
After that, you can move to longer intervals, e.g. 4–8 minutes per interval

Basic rule:
The total accumulated hard time in one HIT session should be between 15 and 32 minutes.
Examples:

4 × 4 min
6 × 4 min
4 × 8 min
5 × 6 min
6 × 3 min
or any similar combination

When you start doing longer intervals, shorten the recovery to about half the work interval. For example: 6 minutes effort, 3 minutes recovery.

Important:
Recovery is still active. Keep pedaling lightly. Don’t just stop and stand.

There are also very short formats like 30 seconds full effort / 15 seconds recovery, repeated many times in multiple sets. The variety is huge. Max focuses here on the classic versions because they also teach something crucial for ultras: holding steady pressure on the pedals for a set amount of time. You’ll need that later in the race — on climbs and in headwinds especially.

Fueling for HIT:

For sessions up to 90 minutes: about 60 g of carbs per hour is enough.
For harder sessions longer than 90 minutes: up to 90 g carbs per hour, but mainly if you’re pushing high absolute power.
Smaller or lighter riders are often fine with around 70 g/h.

Why carbs? So you can actually complete the intervals with quality. Refilling your carb stores after the session (eating carbs afterward) helps you recover faster.

Block 2: Sweet Spot

Sweet Spot is an intensity between easy and hard. You’re putting pressure on the pedals, but it’s still under control.

Guidelines:

Subjectively: RPE 5–8
Or 83–93% FTP (FTP = Functional Threshold Power, roughly the power you can hold for about one hour)

Interval duration:

At the start: 4 × 5 minutes
Rest duration is flexible: 3–10 minutes, or even longer, is totally fine
Later: 3–4 × 15 minutes with 5–10 minutes rest
Over time (weeks to months): build up to 3 × 20–30 minutes with shorter breaks (10–15 minutes)

Why is this important?
Sweet Spot work improves two things you absolutely need for long-distance riding:

You learn to hold steady pressure on the pedals.
Your energy supply becomes more efficient for long, steady efforts.

Fueling for Sweet Spot:
These sessions place a high demand on your energy system. That’s why 50–70 g of carbs per hour are essential to keep the quality high and to avoid dragging out recovery.

There are training approaches where people deliberately underfuel these sessions. But Max is very clear: for riders who are new to structured training, the quality of the work is far more important than any “low carb experiment.” Underfueling can easily harm your long-term progress more than it helps.

Block 3: K3

K3 refers to Sweet Spot intervals done at very low cadence (about 40–60 rpm). That means lots of torque, lots of force per pedal stroke.

Why is it important?

The powerful, fast-twitch muscle fibers are recruited early.
Those fibers learn to produce energy more efficiently.
At the same time, this kind of work strengthens passive structures: joints, tendons, connective tissue.

That’s why K3 is often called “strength endurance training.” Physiologically it’s not the same as strength endurance in the gym, but the effect on the bike is similar: steady force on the pedals over a longer period.

How to get started:

Don’t start super heavy.
In the beginning: short blocks on gentle climbs,
e.g. 3–4 × 4–6 minutes
Later, after weeks or months of adaptation:
up to 3 × 20 minutes is possible

Very important with K3:
Your upper body must stay calm. You shouldn’t rock, twist, or “fight” the bike. If that happens, you slip into unhealthy positions. So build up slowly.

Fueling for K3:
40–60 g of carbs per hour, depending on session length. There are also low-carb approaches here, but those are more for later in the training process, if at all.

Protein note:
Adequate protein intake supports this type of training. Max’s guideline:

High-volume riders: around 1.5 g of protein per kg of body weight per day
With very high training volume: up to 2 g/kg or more
Older athletes should aim toward the upper end, because natural protein synthesis decreases with age. Several smaller protein-rich meals or snacks throughout the day help keep levels high.

In the race itself, you don’t necessarily have to hit those high daily protein amounts. That’s mainly relevant in training. Another benefit of K3 is that it also strengthens passive structures like tendons and connective tissue, which is essential for ultra-distance durability.

3. Base / Endurance

Base training (sometimes just called “endurance” or “foundation”) is the zone you should be able to ride in for many hours without running empty. A common mistake: people ride this zone too hard.

Guidelines:

50–70% FTP
or RPE 3–5 (clearly below “this is hard”)

Max deliberately leaves out heart rate here. Why? Because heart rate depends on so many factors (heat, sleep, stress, caffeine, hydration). For experienced riders, heart rate analysis can be useful afterward. For beginners, it often creates more confusion than clarity.

Basic rule:
Easy really has to be easy. Otherwise you’ll be too tired later to get quality out of the harder sessions.

4. Putting it all together in practice

Max suggests a logical order for your training week, especially in phases when you’re a bit more ambitious:

First, the hardest and highest-quality session: HIT
Important: Do this in a rested state, e.g. after 1–2 easy days or rest days.
Then a Sweet Spot session
Solid pressure on the pedals, but manageable.
Then a K3 session
Focus on strength and stability.
Then a base/endurance ride
Easy pace, low stress.

For beginners:
Feel free to add extra base days or even full rest days between those sessions. You don’t have to stack them all back-to-back in four days.

Max’s suggested flow:
First the high-quality hard work,
then “controlled hard,”
then strength-focused,
then easy.

Important:
Every 3–5 weeks (depending on how tired you are from both volume and intensity), you should schedule a recovery week. A recovery week means: fewer intense sessions, and the same or even less total volume. In that week, the easy rides must actually be easy. Maybe include one short Sweet Spot session, but keep the total load low.

Why?
Because otherwise your body doesn’t get the chance to repair itself. That recovery isn’t just about muscles. It’s also about passive structures like tendons and connective tissue. And that’s exactly where protein, as Max mentioned, becomes important.

With these fundamentals, you’ve got everything you need to shape your training toward your first ultra race — whether your goal is simply to finish or to push your personal limits.

In Part 2 we’ll look at the other big topic: nutrition. You’ll learn how to keep your energy steady over hours and days, what you should already be practicing in training, and what really matters once you’re in the race.

This article was written by Max Kinzelbauer, an experienced ultra cycling coach and coach of Christoph Strasser. You can learn more about his work here.
@mk_training_max

Image credits:
@lft.crw@jo_fietser
@ohhmyycaptain @maximilianpolitePhotography: @naturbuasch