You did not sign up for this because you love cycling. You signed up because someone you care about is ill, or someone you loved died, or a cause landed in your lap that mattered enough to make you say yes to riding a bike for 50, 75, maybe 100 miles on a Saturday morning. The cycling is the mechanism. The cause is the reason.
That distinction matters more than most training guides acknowledge. Nearly every sportive preparation plan assumes you are a cyclist first and an event participant second. You have a power meter, a training platform, maybe a coach. You want a faster time, a better placing, a personal best.
That is not you. Not yet, anyway. And the preparation you need looks fundamentally different.
This guide is for the person who said yes before thinking about what 100 miles on a bike actually means. For the fundraiser who is juggling donation pages and training rides and a full-time job and a family who would quite like to see them occasionally. For the rider who is carrying an emotional weight alongside their water bottles.
It is also for the experienced cyclist whose mate just signed up for a charity ride and needs proper support, not a training plan downloaded from the internet.
You do not need to be fast
I want to put this in concrete terms, because the fitness industry has a way of turning reasonable goals into anxiety.
Your target for a charity event is not speed. It is not a finishing time. It is the ability to sit on a bicycle for the duration of the event — four hours, five hours, maybe seven — and still function when you get off. You need to be able to pedal at a sustainable pace, eat and drink while riding, get up hills without walking (though walking is fine — more on that later), and arrive at the finish with enough energy left to feel the emotion of what you achieved rather than just wanting to lie on the ground.
That is a lower bar than performance cycling. It is also a completely different training stimulus. You are not building threshold power or VO2max capacity. You are building saddle tolerance, aerobic endurance, and the ability to fuel yourself over several hours. These are trainable in anyone, at any fitness level, in eight to twelve weeks.
The gap between "fit enough to finish" and "trained enough to enjoy it" is about six weeks of consistent riding. Most people stop preparing at "fit enough to finish." They white-knuckle through the event and never ride again. The ones who enjoy it are the ones who put in those extra few weeks — not extra intensity, just extra time on the bike.
A realistic training plan for someone who does not ride
I am not going to give you a spreadsheet. You do not need periodisation or power zones. You need three things: consistency, gradual progression, and one long ride per week.
Weeks 1-4: Just ride
Three rides per week. That is the commitment. Two short rides during the week — 30 to 45 minutes each — and one longer ride at the weekend. The weekday rides can be on a turbo trainer, a spin bike at the gym, or outside. The weekend ride needs to be outside, on the bike you will use for the event.
The intensity should feel conversational. If you can talk in full sentences while riding, you are at the right effort. If you are gasping, slow down. Nobody is watching. Nobody cares how fast you go. What matters is that you finish the ride and feel like you could do it again tomorrow.
Your weekend ride in week one might be 45 minutes. By week four, it should be 75-90 minutes. Build by 15 minutes per week. No more. The temptation to do a massive ride in week two because you feel good is real. Resist it. Your backside, your knees, and your motivation will thank you.
Weeks 5-8: Build the long ride
The weekday rides stay at 30-45 minutes. These are about keeping your legs turning and maintaining the routine. The weekend ride is where the work happens.
Week five: 90 minutes. Week six: two hours. Week seven: two and a half hours. Week eight: aim for three hours or close to it. If your event is under 60 miles, three hours will be near your event duration. If your event is 100 miles, you still need more building — but three hours is a significant milestone for anyone coming from little or no riding.
During this phase, start practising eating and drinking on the bike. This is not natural. Your body needs to learn to process food while exercising, and your hands need to learn to reach for a bottle while keeping the bike steady. If this sounds trivial, it is not. The first time you try to unwrap a flapjack one-handed at 15mph, you will understand.
Weeks 9-12: Event simulation
If your event is 100 miles, your longest training ride should be around 60-70% of the event distance. Not 100%. You do not need to ride 100 miles in training to ride 100 miles on event day. The atmosphere, the feed stations, the company of other riders, and the adrenaline of the day will carry you beyond your longest training ride. But you do need to have ridden long enough to know what happens to your body at hour three, hour four.
Your final long ride should be two weeks before the event. The last two weeks are for rest, not fitness. Ride short and easy. Let your body absorb the training. Resist every urge to squeeze in one more big session. It will not make you fitter. It will make you tired on start day.
A realistic weekly schedule for these final building weeks:
- Tuesday: 45 minutes easy spinning — indoors or out
- Thursday: 45 minutes with a few short efforts — two minutes hard, three minutes easy, repeat four times. This teaches your legs to push and recover, which matters for hills
- Saturday or Sunday: The long ride. Build to four or five hours if your event is 100 miles. Three hours is enough for events under 60 miles
That is nine sessions per fortnight plus rest days. It fits around a job. It fits around a family. It does not require you to become a cyclist. It requires you to be consistent.
The dual stress of fundraising and training
Nobody talks about this, and it catches people out.
You are not just training for a physical event. You are running a fundraising campaign at the same time. That means sharing your donation page, calling in favours, posting on social media, maybe organising a quiz night or a bake sale, thanking donors individually, and managing the emotional labour of asking people for money repeatedly.
Both the training and the fundraising compete for the same hours. Both demand energy. And here is the problem: when training goes well, you feel guilty about not fundraising enough. When fundraising goes well, you feel guilty about missing rides. The guilt runs in both directions and it never fully resolves.
What works: treat your training rides as non-negotiable appointments. Put them in your calendar. Do not move them for fundraising tasks. Three rides per week is not a large time commitment — three to five hours total including changing and showering. You can fundraise on rest days, during lunch breaks, in the evenings. But if the rides start getting pushed and cancelled, your physical preparation suffers and the event becomes something you dread rather than anticipate.
The social energy that fundraising requires is significant and underestimated. Asking people for money is tiring even when the cause is compelling and the response is generous. Protect your rest days from both training and fundraising. You need days where you do neither.
Riding for someone
This section is different from the rest of the guide. It needs to be.
Many charity riders are riding for a specific person. A parent with cancer. A child with a rare condition. A friend who died. The cause is not abstract — it is attached to a face, a name, a set of memories that can surface without warning.
Training will distract you from this most of the time. The focus on effort, on progression, on the mechanical details of preparation keeps the emotional weight at arm's length. But on event day, that weight lands.
It lands on the start line when you see other riders with the same charity jersey. It lands on the first big climb when the effort strips away your mental defences and the thoughts you have been compartmentalising break through. It lands at the finish when the relief and the exhaustion and the meaning of what you just did all arrive at once.
Riders who acknowledge this in advance handle it better. Not because they suppress it — the opposite. They expect it. They give themselves permission to stop, to cry at the side of the road, to sit at a feed station for ten minutes longer than planned. They tell their riding partners that it might happen. They carry a photo or a wristband or nothing at all, but they have thought about what the day means beyond the miles.
If you are riding for someone, know this: the wave of emotion is normal. It does not mean you are falling apart. It means the ride is doing what you intended it to do. Let it arrive. Then keep pedalling.
Nutrition and hydration for someone who has never fuelled on a bike
The rules for charity event fuelling are simpler than the cycling world makes them sound.
Before the event: Eat a proper breakfast two to three hours before the start. Porridge, toast with peanut butter, a banana. Nothing you have not eaten before. This is not the morning for a protein shake experiment.
On the bike: For any event over 90 minutes, you need to eat while riding. The target is 40-60 grams of carbohydrate per hour. In practical terms, that is one energy bar or flapjack plus a banana, per hour. Or two gels per hour if you prefer them. Or jam sandwiches cut into quarters and stored in a zip-lock bag in your back pocket.
The critical rule: eat before you are hungry and drink before you are thirsty. By the time hunger or thirst arrive, you are already behind. Set a timer on your watch or phone for every 20 minutes. When it goes off, eat something or drink something. This feels mechanical and unnatural for the first few rides. By event day, it should be automatic.
What to carry: Two full bidons of water or electrolyte drink. Three or four bars or flapjacks. Two gels for emergencies. A handful of jelly babies or similar sweets for quick sugar if you feel yourself fading. This is more than you think you need. That is the point. Running out of food at mile 70 of a 100-mile ride is not fixable with willpower.
Feed stations: The event will have feed stations. Use them. But do not rely on them exclusively. The food they offer varies — some are excellent, some are minimal. Top up your bidons, grab a banana, refill your pockets, and keep moving. Do not sit at a feed station for 20 minutes unless you are in trouble. Getting back on the bike after a long stop is harder than pushing through at a steady pace.
The thing nobody mentions: Your stomach needs training for this. If you have never eaten on a bike before, your body will protest the first few times. Start practising on your training rides from week five onwards. By event day, your gut should be accustomed to processing food while you are exercising. If you skip this step, you will spend the second half of the event feeling nauseous, or worse, you will not eat enough and bonk — which is the cycling term for running out of energy so completely that your legs stop working and your brain fogs over. It is avoidable. Eat.
Event day: what to expect
You will not sleep well the night before. Almost nobody does. This is fine. One night of poor sleep does not affect physical performance. What affects performance is panicking about poor sleep and then making bad decisions with caffeine or food on the morning of the event.
Before the start
Arrive early. Parking at charity events is always worse than the organisers suggest. Give yourself 90 minutes before the start to park, register, set up your bike, use the toilet (there will be a queue), and eat your breakfast if you have not already.
Pin your number on the night before. Fumbling with safety pins in a car park while your hands are cold and your nerves are jangling is a bad start to the day.
Check your tyres, your brakes, and that your bidons are full. If you have not had your bike serviced in the past month, get it done this week. A mechanical failure on event day is the one thing you cannot ride through.
The first hour
Start slower than feels right. This is the single most important piece of pacing advice for any endurance event, and it is the one that almost everyone ignores. The atmosphere of a mass start, the adrenaline, the riders around you — everything conspires to make you go too fast in the first 30 minutes.
If the first hour feels easy, you are doing it correctly.
Your legs will feel good. Other riders will pass you. Let them. You will see many of those riders again at mile 60, and they will not be smiling. The ones who started conservatively will be the ones riding steadily past the riders who blew up.
Hills
If you have trained on flat terrain and the event has hills, they will feel hard. That is expected. Drop to your easiest gear before the gradient kicks in. Spin your legs. Stay seated for as long as you can — standing burns more energy and raises your heart rate. If you need to stand, keep your weight over the pedals and sit back down within 30 seconds.
There is no shame in walking a hill. Charity events have marshals who expect this. Walk if you need to. But if you have followed the training plan above and your event has moderate hills, you should be able to ride them all. Slowly, yes. But riding.
When it gets hard
Somewhere between hour three and hour five, it will get hard. Your legs will feel heavy. Your backside will hurt. Your motivation will dip. You will think about the distance remaining and it will feel impossible.
This is normal. It happens to professional cyclists. It is not a sign that you have failed or that your training was insufficient. It is your body asking for fuel and your brain looking for an excuse to stop.
When this happens: eat something sweet immediately. Drink a full bidon over the next 20 minutes. Shift to an easier gear and reduce your effort. Talk to the rider next to you. Focus on the next feed station, not the finish line. The bad patch will pass. It almost always does. The riders who finish strong are not the fittest — they are the ones who managed this moment correctly.
The finish
The final five miles of a charity event are unlike anything else in cycling. You will be tired. You will be sore. And then the banners will appear, and the marshals will start cheering, and the significance of what you are doing will hit you with a force that no amount of preparation covers entirely.
Take it in. Do not sprint for the line. Ride the final stretch at whatever pace feels right and let the day land.
After the event
The 48 hours after a charity sportive are strange. The elation of finishing mixes with physical exhaustion, emotional release, and a sudden vacuum where the training and fundraising used to be. You have been working towards this for weeks or months. Now it is done. The sense of anticlimax catches people off guard.
Your body will be sore. Your legs will feel leaden. You might struggle with stairs for two days. This is normal after any sustained endurance effort, especially if it was your longest ride ever. Walk gently, stretch, eat well, sleep.
The emotional crash can be more disruptive than the physical one. You poured energy into a cause, you pushed your body to a place it has never been, and now the structure that held all of that together is gone. Some riders feel flat for a week. It passes.
And then there is the other thing. The thing that surprises roughly half of all charity riders.
You want to do it again. Not for the charity, necessarily — though many riders do return year after year. You want to ride. The thing you dreaded, the activity that was only ever a vehicle for fundraising, has become something you look forward to. You noticed the countryside on a training ride. You felt the satisfaction of a hill you could not climb in week three becoming manageable by week eight. You discovered that your body is more capable than you believed.
If the cycling bug has bitten: welcome. Keep your bike serviced. Find a local club or group ride. Do not immediately sign up for a 200-mile event. Ride for the sake of riding for a few months. The community will still be there when you are ready.
If your mate signed up: a note for experienced cyclists
You ride every weekend. You have a coach, or a training plan, or both. Your FTP is a number you track with the same attention your mate gives their fundraising total. And now that mate — who has never owned a pair of bib shorts — has signed up for a charity sportive and asked if you will ride with them.
Your role on event day is not to ride your ride. It is to ride theirs.
That means riding at their pace, which will be slower than yours. Significantly slower. It means sitting behind them on hills instead of riding ahead and waiting at the top. It means carrying extra food, extra tubes, a multi-tool, and the knowledge of how to fix a puncture quickly and calmly when they are already stressed and cold and 40 miles from the car.
It means knowing the route so they do not have to think about navigation. It means reading their body language — the point where encouragement helps and the point where they need silence and space to just pedal.
It means not checking your Garmin for average speed.
If they want to stop at every feed station, you stop. If they need to walk a hill, you walk with them. If they cry at mile 60 because the person they are riding for is on their mind, you stand next to them and say nothing until they are ready.
This is the best ride you will do all year. Not because of the distance or the terrain or the effort. Because you will be part of someone else's experience of finding out what they are capable of. That is a privilege, and it matters more than any Strava segment.
One more thing
If you are reading this at 11pm on a Tuesday night, three weeks out from your event, panicking because you feel underprepared — you are not alone. Nearly every charity rider feels this way. The preparation is never as complete as you want it to be. The fundraising target is always slightly out of reach. The longest ride you have done is shorter than you wish it was.
The good news: your event will be better than you expect. The atmosphere carries you. The feed stations refuel you. The other riders — strangers who became companions over 80 miles — will pull you through the hard parts. You signed up for this because a cause mattered enough to push you outside your comfort zone. That is a stronger foundation than any training plan.
Check your tyres. Pack your food. Pin your number on tonight.
You are ready.
If you are looking for a community of riders who take the sport seriously without taking themselves too seriously, the Roadman Cycling community on Skool is the place. Charity riders, club racers, people coming back after years off the bike — the common thread is wanting to get better and being willing to put in the work. Come say hello.