Common mistakes when preparing for a gran fondo

Every season I see the same mistakes repeated by people preparing for a gran fondo — the long-distance events of road cycling and MTB, but also of trail running and ski mountaineering. They are not mistakes of commitment: the people I coach do train, often a lot. The problem is almost always in the structure of the plan, not in the amount of sweat.

1. Too much volume, too soon

The reasoning is almost always the same: “the race is long, so I need to train long”. True, but volume has to be built progressively, not all added in the first few weeks. Increasing the load too quickly is one of the most common causes of overuse injuries and of chronic fatigue that drags on until race day.

2. No periodisation of intensity

Many amateurs always train at the same intensity — the one that is “hard enough to feel demanding, but not so hard that it really hurts”. It is the most comfortable zone, and also the least effective. Without a real mix of low-intensity sessions (where the aerobic base is built) and genuinely high-intensity sessions, the body does not get the stimulus it needs to improve in a specific way.

3. Underestimating recovery

Recovery is not optional, it is part of training. People preparing for a gran fondo tend to see every rest day as wasted time, when it is exactly the moment the body consolidates the adaptations triggered by the load. Without proper recovery, the risk is not “training less” — it is arriving at the race with a nervous and muscular system that has never really cleared the fatigue it has built up.

4. Copying someone else’s plan

A plan found online or borrowed from a training partner may work for whoever wrote it, but it rarely takes into account your history, your specific weak points and your real starting point. I have seen highly motivated athletes burn out following plans designed for profiles completely different from theirs.

5. Training only the part you enjoy

In mountain events almost everyone trains uphill, because that is where time is gained and where progress shows. Then the race comes and the legs give out somewhere else.

In cycling it is the position held for hours, or the ability to sit on a wheel and go again after every surge. In trail running and ski mountaineering it is the descents: eccentric work is what causes the most muscle damage, and it is why halfway through the race the legs stop responding even when the lungs would still have more to give. Those who do not train descents do not have an engine problem, they have a tissue problem: tissue that has never seen that kind of load.

The principle is specificity: what will happen in the race must have happened in training first, at least a little.

6. Improvising your fuelling

This is the mistake that ruins the most well-prepared races. Perfect plan, top form, and then you hit the wall on the third pass — or stop with nausea from swallowing the wrong bottle.

Race fuelling is trained exactly like a session: grams of carbohydrate per hour, type of product, timing, fluids. There are precise physiological limits to how much you can absorb, and they are limits that shift with practice — I wrote about them in detail in the article on energy systems. The practical rule is just one: nothing new on race day. No new gels, no new shoes, no new strategy.

What to do instead

The foundation is always the same, whatever the discipline: start from a real assessment of where you are today, build a progressive load with genuine variation in intensity, treat recovery as part of the plan rather than a lapse in it, and adjust course when the data — not how you feel in the moment — says a change of direction is needed.

It is not complicated in theory. It is complicated to apply consistently, and that is where the real work is done.