The Alex Howes appearance on the Roadman Cycling Podcast is one of the more useful pieces of cycling content available on the realities of professional-level ultra-endurance racing. Howes spent close to a decade at the WorldTour level — completing multiple Grand Tours, racing the major one-day classics — and stepped away from the team-supported pathway to ride as a privateer, with the Tour Divide attempt as one of the centrepieces of his post-WorldTour year.
The conversation Anthony Walsh runs with Howes is the rare ultra-endurance interview that resists the romance of the genre. The pacing, the equipment, the physical cost, and the practical decisions are all discussed in the matter-of-fact register of a rider who has spent enough time in extreme suffering on a bike that he is past the point of finding it interesting in itself. The framing is honest about what works, what does not, and what an amateur attempting the same kind of event should actually focus on.
Listen to the full Alex Howes Tour Divide conversation →
This piece walks through what Howes describes about the Tour Divide preparation, the equipment-versus-fitness framing, the bike fit reality of long-duration racing, and what amateurs can take from the conversation.
What The Tour Divide Actually Is
The Tour Divide is approximately 2,700 miles of off-road bikepacking from Banff in Alberta, Canada, to Antelope Wells on the Mexican border. The route follows the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route down the spine of the Continental Divide. The race is self-supported. No team cars. No crew. No outside assistance beyond what is commercially available to any traveller along the route.
The field includes elite racers attempting the fastest known time — currently in the low 13-day range — and a much larger field of riders attempting to complete the route in their own time, more typically across three to four weeks. The race is widely considered one of the hardest ultra-endurance events in cycling. It is also, increasingly, a bucket-list event for serious amateurs with the capacity to take three or four weeks off work and the willingness to spend that time alone on a bike in remote terrain.
For amateurs evaluating whether to attempt the Tour Divide, the honest framing Howes provides is that the difficulty is not primarily physical. The difficulty is the cumulative cost of multi-day riding in conditions that test every component of the rider's preparation. The fitness threshold to finish is reachable for most serious amateurs with twelve to eighteen months of structured preparation. The equipment threshold, the bike-fit threshold, the navigation threshold, and the mental threshold are higher and less commonly addressed in amateur preparation.
Equipment Beats Fitness
The most useful framing in the conversation is the equipment-over-fitness emphasis. Howes' position is direct — knowing your equipment matters more than fitness for the Tour Divide, and the rider who arrives with the equipment and the experience to manage the days will outperform the rider who arrives with the engine but without the rest.
The mechanism is the duration. A five-hour ride forgives a lot of equipment imperfections. The bike fit that is roughly right will not produce serious problems in five hours. The grips that are roughly right will not destroy the rider's hands in five hours. The shorts that are roughly right will not produce saddle issues in five hours.
The 16-hour day is structurally different. The bike fit that is roughly right at hour five becomes a meaningful problem at hour twelve and a debilitating problem at hour sixteen. The grips that are roughly right become the cause of nerve compression by hour ten. The shorts that are roughly right become the cause of saddle sores that compound across the next ten days. The cumulative cost of small equipment errors across multi-day riding is significantly larger than the cost of any single error in a single day.
The implication is that the preparation amateurs typically focus on — fitness — is the wrong primary investment. The right primary investment is in equipment knowledge and bike fit specifically suited to the event's duration profile. The fitness threshold to finish is reachable. The equipment threshold to finish without catastrophic problems is what differentiates the riders who complete the route from the riders who scratch.
For deeper context on the bike fit issues that show up in ultra-distance riding, see the numb hands fixes piece.
The Pacing Reality
The intensity profile of the Tour Divide is mostly zone 1 to 3 with occasional climbs pushing higher. The rider is not producing peak power for extended periods. The first few days have some intensity capacity available. After roughly a week, the rider is past the point of pushing intensity and is managing the days as a survival exercise.
Howes' framing on the podcast is that the pacing was effectively the same as a Tour de France stage in shape — wake up early, eat, ride at sustainable intensity, take care of the body, sleep, repeat — without the team support infrastructure that makes the Tour de France version sustainable across three weeks. The Tour Divide rider is doing the same kind of multi-day load management, alone, with whatever they can carry on the bike.
The implication for training is that the dominant fitness adaptation that matters is fatigue resistance across multi-day durations. The threshold sessions, VO2 max sessions, and high-intensity work that dominate amateur training calendars produce relatively small returns for an event of this character. The work that pays off is long-duration aerobic riding in the rider's specific equipment configuration, ideally across multi-day blocks that simulate the cumulative cost of consecutive long days.
For amateurs working through training for ultra-distance events, the Badlands training guide and Badlands fuelling strategy cover the same kind of preparation framework for the European ultra-distance equivalent.
The Hand Issue
The most concrete personal cost Howes describes is the loss of meaningful power and coordination in his left hand. His framing is uncertain about the precise cause — likely a combination of cold injury, nerve compression from the bar position, and the cumulative effect of multi-day pressure on the hand. The injury did not fully recover during the race and continued to limit him for weeks afterwards.
The pattern is well-documented in the ultra-distance literature. The combination of sustained hand pressure on bars, repeated micro-vibration from rough terrain, and the cold exposure of high-altitude or early-morning riding compounds across multi-day events to produce nerve damage that can take months to fully recover. Some ultra-distance riders have lost feeling in their hands permanently after sustained compression damage.
The mitigations are the same ones documented in the broader bike fit conversation. Aero bars at the appropriate height to provide an alternative hand position. Frequent variation of hand position across the day. Padded gloves or thicker bar tape. Carbon bars for vibration damping. Suspension stems on the most punishing terrain. The pattern is to give the hands as many positions as possible and to absorb as much vibration as the equipment allows.
For the broader treatment of bike fit and hand issues, see the numb hands fixes piece and the bike fit one change amateurs should make piece.
The Packing Discipline
The packing section of the conversation is one of the most practical parts of the episode. Howes' approach is to start with a wish list, set the bag volume against it, and discard until the wish list fits the bag. The pattern for what survives the cut is consistent across most experienced ultra-distance riders.
Base layers — multiple. The single most important category for staying warm. Dry base layers preserve warmth across cold conditions. Wet base layers do not. Carrying two or three is worth the weight.
Shorts — two pairs. Howes is firm on this. Many riders bring one pair to save weight. The dryness gain from a fresh pair after a wet day is worth the weight cost.
Rain jackets — one good one. Two rain jackets — a light one and a heavier one — is over-packing. The heavier jacket covers the rain jacket category. The lighter one is dead weight.
Gloves — one pair. Multiple glove options for different conditions sounds appealing but adds weight and decision overhead. One reasonably warm, reasonably water-resistant pair covers most conditions. The trade-off is some discomfort in extreme conditions in exchange for simplicity across the rest of the route.
Insulation, rain cover, riding layer — one each. The category structure is one item per category. Anything beyond that is redundancy that the rider will not use.
The underlying principle is the simplicity Howes describes finding satisfying afterwards. The rider who can live with four pieces of clothing for ten days starts to question why they own as much as they do. The pattern is widely reported across long-distance bikepacking and is part of the appeal of the genre for many riders.
The Privateer Pathway
The wider conversation around Howes' move from the WorldTour to the privateer life is one of the most useful framings in the contemporary cycling-pathway literature. The privateer model — racing as an independent rider with multiple equipment partners and no single team — has emerged as a viable post-WorldTour pathway for riders who want to continue racing but are no longer interested in or eligible for the team-supported model.
The framing Howes uses is that the privateer has lots of partners and no bosses. The partners — Cervelo, Skratch Labs, the various event sponsors — provide equipment, financial support, and brand alignment. The lack of a single boss permits decisions like the Tour Divide attempt that would not survive a team-context cost-benefit analysis. The privateer can do the things that do not have to make sense to anyone but the rider.
The trade-off is that the privateer takes on the operational burden that the team would otherwise carry. The training, the equipment selection, the travel logistics, the media work, the financial management — all of these become the rider's direct responsibility. The model works for riders who are temperamentally suited to running their own operation. It does not work for riders who need the structure that a team provides.
For amateurs interested in the broader contemporary cycling pathway conversation, the Jack Burke and Lachlan Morton conversations sit alongside this one as useful complementary reading.
What The Roadman Audience Should Take Away
Three things from the conversation translate directly to the serious amateur.
One. Equipment knowledge beats fitness for ultra-distance events. The bike fit, the bar setup, the saddle position, the packing decisions — all of these matter more for finishing the Tour Divide than the FTP number. Amateurs preparing for events of this character should invest in equipment-specific preparation alongside fitness work.
Two. The bike fit that works for five hours often fails at sixteen. The duration test is the test that matters for ultra-distance bike fit. Amateurs should ride their event-specific position across multi-hour test rides before committing to it for an actual event. The failures that show up at hour twelve are the failures that take riders out of the race.
Three. Pack less than you think you need, but not less than you actually need. Two pairs of shorts. One good rain jacket. Multiple base layers. One pair of gloves. The categories matter. The redundancy within categories beyond the essential items does not.
For amateurs working through structured ultra-distance preparation, the Roadman coaching system is built around the same evidence-based preparation framework that ultra-distance racing requires. For a faster answer on a specific equipment or pacing question, ask the AI coach.
Listen To The Full Conversation
The full episode — including the deeper detail on Howes' specific Tour Divide ride, the family logistics around the privateer travel schedule, and the wider conversation about ultra-distance racing's place in cycling — is on the Roadman Cycling Podcast.
2,700 miles. Self-supported. The bike that worked for five hours did not always work at sixteen. Equipment knowledge beat fitness. World Tour residual legs helped. They did not substitute for the experience of having ridden long enough to know what breaks. The honest version of ultra-distance racing is in this conversation rather than in the romance of the genre.
