Why Most Amateurs Get Season Planning Completely Wrong
Most serious amateur cyclists do not plan their season. They react to it.
A mate sends a WhatsApp link to a gran fondo in June. Looks incredible. Sign up. Three weeks later, a local crit series appears on the calendar. Why not. Then someone mentions the Etape du Tour and suddenly there are four "must-do" events scattered across five months with no logic connecting them.
The training that follows is equally reactive. Cram fitness before the first event. Recover badly. Panic about the next one. Train through fatigue. Arrive at the one that actually matters feeling flat, heavy, and wondering where the form went.
This is not a motivation problem. It is a planning problem. And it is fixable.
The coaches behind Grand Tour winners — people like Dan Lorang, who has built the season plans for Pogacar and Roglic — do not start with training sessions. They start with the calendar. They pick the target, count backwards, and let the timeline dictate the training. Everything else — intensity distribution, volume, recovery, taper — follows from that single decision about which event matters most.
Joe Friel has been writing about this in The Cyclist's Training Bible for decades. His central argument has not changed: the amateurs who perform best are the ones who plan their season like a project with a deadline, not a collection of loosely connected rides.
The difference between a good season and a wasted one is rarely talent or even hours on the bike. It is structure. And the good news is that structure is something you can build in a single afternoon with a calendar, a pen, and a clear understanding of what actually matters to you this year.
Step 1: Choose Your A Event — The One That Actually Matters
This is the single most important decision in your entire season. Everything else — every training block, every recovery week, every long ride in the rain — exists to serve this one event.
Your A event is the race or sportive where you want to produce your absolute best performance. Not your most convenient performance. Not a decent showing. Your best.
For some riders, this is obvious. You have been eyeing the Marmotte for two years. Or you finally got a spot in the Etape du Tour. Or your club championship falls in August and you want to be competitive rather than just present.
For others, it takes a bit more honesty. What event, if you performed brilliantly, would make the entire year feel like a success? That is your A event.
A few rules about picking it:
Pick one. Not two, not three. One. You can run a double-peak season if you are experienced and the events are spaced eight to twelve weeks apart, but Joe Friel is clear that most amateurs perform better with a single peak. Splitting your focus splits your results.
Make sure it scares you a little. Your A event should sit at the edge of your current ability — close enough that proper preparation could bridge the gap, far enough that you cannot show up undertrained and wing it. If you already know you can cruise through it comfortably, it is a B event at best.
Give yourself enough runway. You need 16 to 24 weeks of structured preparation counting backwards from your A event. If the event is in eight weeks and you have not started building, it is too late to make it an A event this year. Be honest about timelines.
Write it down. Put it on the calendar. Tell someone. The moment your A event exists as something other than a vague intention, the rest of the plan has a foundation to sit on.
When I had Joe Friel on the podcast, he made a point that stuck with me: the A event is not just a date on the calendar. It is the lens through which you evaluate every other decision. Should I do that midweek chaingang? Depends — does it serve the A event or does it compromise recovery before a key build session? Should I sign up for that sportive next month? Only if it helps you arrive at A day in better shape than you would otherwise.
That clarity is worth more than any interval session.
Step 2: Set Your B and C Events — Supporting Roles, Not Competing Priorities
Once you have your A event locked, the rest of your race calendar becomes much simpler. Every other event falls into one of two categories: B events or C events. The distinction matters enormously.
B Events: Dress Rehearsals
B events are the ones you care about but do not peak for. You want to perform well. You will taper slightly — maybe pull back volume for three to five days beforehand. But you will not rearrange your entire training block to be in peak form.
Think of B events as dress rehearsals for A day. They serve specific purposes:
Testing race legs. A B event four to six weeks before your A event tells you where your fitness actually sits under race conditions, not just on a turbo trainer staring at numbers.
Practising nutrition and pacing. The long sportive where you trial your fuelling strategy and pacing plan is worth more than a dozen solo rides trying to simulate the same thing.
Building race sharpness. There is a specific fitness that comes from pinning on a number and riding with other people at effort. You cannot replicate it in training.
You want two to three B events in a season, spaced sensibly around your A event. One early (to test base fitness), one in the middle of your build phase (to sharpen), and optionally one after your A event if you want to extend the season.
Dan Lorang structures his riders' seasons with what he calls "race preparation blocks" — short competitive efforts that serve the primary goal. Even at the World Tour level, riders do not peak for every race on the calendar. Most races are preparation for the ones that matter. The same logic applies to your local calendar.
C Events: Training With a Number On
C events are the ones you show up to with no expectations beyond having a good time and getting a training stimulus. Club time trials. Local chaingang results. A charity sportive your partner signed you up for.
You do not taper for C events. You do not alter your training. You ride them as you find them — sometimes that means showing up with tired legs from a big training week, and that is perfectly fine.
C events keep cycling fun. They give you social rides with a bit of edge. They let you practise group riding, cornering, and race-day logistics without the pressure of needing to perform.
The mistake amateurs make is treating every event like an A event. They rest for a week before a local club race, smash themselves to pieces on the day, then spend the following week recovering. That is two weeks of disrupted training for an event that should have been a footnote in the season plan.
Here is a practical framework for your calendar:
- 1 A event (peak performance, full taper)
- 2-3 B events (good performance, minor taper, strategic purposes)
- As many C events as you enjoy (no taper, no disruption, just ride)
Write them all on the same calendar. Colour-code them if it helps — red for A, amber for B, green for C. When you step back and look at the year, the structure should tell a story: everything builds towards the red date.
Step 3: Count Backwards From Your A Event — Macro Periodisation in Practice
This is where it stops being a wish list and becomes an actual plan.
Take your A event date and count backwards. The number of weeks between today and that date determines everything — the length of each training phase, the intensity progression, and the number of recovery weeks you can afford.
Joe Friel calls this reverse engineering, and it is the most practical concept in his entire body of work. You do not start from today and hope you arrive at A day in good shape. You start from A day and build the timeline that guarantees you arrive prepared.
Here is the basic framework for a season built around a single A event:
If you have 24 weeks (six months):
- Weeks 1-10: Base phase (aerobic foundation)
- Weeks 11-18: Build phase (event-specific intensity)
- Weeks 19-22: Peak/Specialisation phase (sharpening)
- Weeks 23-24: Taper and race week
- Post-event: Recovery phase (1-2 weeks)
If you have 16 weeks (four months):
- Weeks 1-6: Base phase (condensed but non-negotiable)
- Weeks 7-12: Build phase
- Weeks 13-15: Peak/Specialisation
- Week 16: Taper and race week
- Post-event: Recovery phase
If you have 12 weeks (three months):
- Weeks 1-4: Base phase (abbreviated — assumes some existing aerobic foundation)
- Weeks 5-9: Build phase
- Weeks 10-11: Peak
- Week 12: Taper and race week
- Post-event: Recovery phase
Notice something. No matter how compressed the timeline gets, the base phase never disappears entirely. You might shorten it, but you cannot skip it. More on that in a moment.
Within each phase, the standard mesocycle structure applies: three weeks of progressive loading followed by one recovery week. This is the rhythm that Professor Seiler's research consistently supports — the body needs regular offloading to absorb training stress and make adaptations. Skip the recovery weeks and you are just accumulating fatigue, not fitness.
So a 24-week plan might look like this in practice:
- Base block 1: 3 weeks load, 1 week recovery
- Base block 2: 3 weeks load, 1 week recovery
- Base transition: 2 weeks (shifting intensity upward)
- Build block 1: 3 weeks load, 1 week recovery
- Build block 2: 3 weeks load, 1 week recovery
- Peak block: 3 weeks (reducing volume, maintaining intensity)
- Taper: 7-10 days
- A event
Lay this out on a calendar. Literally draw it. Block by block, week by week. When you see it in front of you, the season stops feeling like a vague ambition and starts feeling like something with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The Four Phases — What Each One Actually Means in Practice
Most cyclists have heard the words "base, build, peak, taper." Far fewer understand what each phase is actually doing to their body and why the sequence matters.
Base Phase: Building the Engine
The base phase is the most misunderstood and most frequently cut short phase of the entire season. It is also, by a distance, the most important.
During the base phase, you are building your aerobic infrastructure. That means:
- Mitochondrial density. More mitochondria in your muscle cells means more capacity to produce energy aerobically. This only happens with sustained low-intensity training — the kind that feels almost too easy.
- Capillary development. New blood vessels grow around trained muscle fibres, improving oxygen delivery and waste removal. This is a slow process. It cannot be rushed with intensity.
- Fat oxidation. Teaching your body to burn fat as a primary fuel source at moderate intensities. This spares glycogen for the moments when you actually need it — the hard efforts, the climbs, the final kilometres.
- Lactate clearance. A bigger aerobic base means your body processes lactate more efficiently, which means your threshold rises without you ever doing a threshold session.
Professor Seiler's decades of research with Norwegian endurance athletes have shown that approximately 80 percent of training time should sit in zone one and zone two during the base period. The remaining 20 percent can include some tempo and threshold work, but the vast majority of your riding should feel conversationally easy.
The amateur mistake is almost universal: riders cut the base phase short because it does not feel like real training. They are bored. Their mates are doing intervals. Strava segments are taunting them. So they skip ahead to the build phase after four weeks instead of eight or ten, and they pay for it in July when their form plateaus three weeks before A day.
The base phase is not dead time. It is the foundation that determines how high the build phase can take you. A taller building needs deeper foundations. The same applies to your season.
Practical base phase structure:
- 4-5 rides per week, mostly in zone 1-2
- One longer ride (2.5-4 hours depending on your A event demands)
- One ride with some muscular endurance work (tempo, low cadence strength efforts)
- Strength and conditioning off the bike (2 sessions per week — bodyweight exercises, single-leg work, core stability)
- Total weekly hours: build progressively from your current baseline, adding no more than 10 percent per week
Build Phase: Adding the Event-Specific Work
The build phase is where training starts to feel like training. You have the aerobic base. Now you layer event-specific intensity on top of it.
If your A event is a flat crit, the build phase emphasises VO2max intervals, repeated surges, and high-power repeatability. If it is a mountainous gran fondo, the build phase shifts toward sustained threshold work, climbing intervals, and back-to-back long days. If it is a time trial, the build phase is all about sustained power at or just below threshold.
The key principle is specificity. Dan Lorang, when I asked him about how he builds programmes for riders like Roglic, was very clear: the build phase has to simulate the demands of the target event. Not in a vague "ride harder" sense, but in a precise replication of the specific efforts, durations, and recovery patterns that the event will demand.
For most amateur A events — sportives, gran fondos, hilly road races — the build phase looks something like this:
- 3 key sessions per week: one VO2max session (short, sharp intervals above threshold), one sustained threshold or sweet spot session (longer efforts at 88-95% of FTP), one long endurance ride with event-specific elements built in (climbs at race pace, practice fuelling, pacing work)
- 2 easy rides: genuine zone 1-2, protecting recovery between key sessions
- 1 rest day: completely off the bike. Not active recovery. Off.
- Strength and conditioning continues but reduces to maintenance (1 session per week)
The three weeks on, one week off mesocycle rhythm continues through the build phase. During the recovery week, reduce volume by 40-50 percent and drop the VO2max session entirely. Keep one moderate intensity session to maintain sharpness, but the primary goal is letting your body absorb the work from the previous three weeks.
The build phase typically runs six to eight weeks — two full mesocycles. By the end of it, you should be hitting numbers in training that are close to what you will need on A day.
Peak and Taper: Sharpening the Blade
The peak phase is the shortest and most counterintuitive phase. After months of building fitness, you now deliberately reduce the workload.
Not because you are getting less fit. Because you are shedding fatigue.
Fitness and fatigue accumulate simultaneously. After a strong build phase, your fitness is high but your fatigue is also high. The peak and taper strips away the fatigue while preserving the fitness. What is left is form — that feeling of being light, sharp, and powerful that every cyclist chases.
Friel's taper protocol for amateur cyclists typically looks like this:
- Two to three weeks out from A day: reduce total volume by 30-40 percent. Maintain two key intensity sessions per week, but reduce the number of intervals. If you were doing 5x5 minutes at VO2max, drop to 3x5 minutes. The intensity stays. The volume falls.
- Race week: reduce volume by another 30-40 percent from the previous week. One short, sharp opener session two or three days before A day — 4-5 short efforts at race intensity with full recovery between them. The rest of the week is easy spinning.
- The day before: easy spin of 30-45 minutes with a few 10-second accelerations. That is it.
The biggest mistake during the taper is panic training. You feel fresh and think you are losing fitness, so you do a massive ride four days before the event. This is self-sabotage. Trust the process. The fitness is in the bank. Your job in race week is to let it compound.
Recovery Phase: The One Everyone Skips
After your A event, you need a genuine recovery phase. Not "I'll ride easy for a couple of days." A proper recovery block.
One to two weeks of significantly reduced volume and intensity. No structured training. Ride when you feel like it, as far as you feel like it, as easy as you feel like it. If you do not feel like it, do not ride.
The recovery phase exists for two reasons. First, your body needs to repair the damage from a peak effort. Second — and this matters more than most people realise — your head needs a break. The psychological fatigue from months of structured training is real. Ignoring it leads to burnout, and burnout ends seasons faster than any physical injury.
If you have B events later in the season, the recovery phase transitions into a short rebuild period before the next training block. But the recovery itself is non-negotiable. You earned it. Take it.
Fitting It Around a Real Life — Work, Holidays, and the Kid's Sports Day
No plan survives contact with reality entirely intact. The amateur cyclist is not a professional with a team managing logistics. You have a job. You have a family. You have a calendar that does not care about your training plan.
The coaches who work with age-group athletes know this. When I asked Dan Lorang about the biggest difference between planning for a World Tour pro and planning for an amateur, his answer was immediate: the constraints. A professional's constraints are physical — how much load can the body handle. An amateur's constraints are logistical — how much training can life absorb.
The fix is not to pretend those constraints do not exist. It is to plan around them from the start.
Step one: block out the non-negotiables first.
Before you fill in any training phases, mark the weeks you know are compromised. The family holiday in May. The work conference in April. The three days in August when you have the kids and no childcare. These are not disruptions to your plan. They are the plan. Build around them.
Step two: build buffer weeks.
For every eight-week block, assume one week will not go as planned. That is just reality. A work deadline explodes. Your kid gets ill. You wake up with a sore knee. If you have built a buffer week into the plan — a flexible week that can absorb disruption without derailing the entire block — you can lose seven days and still stay on track.
Practically, this means planning your season as if it is one to two weeks shorter than it actually is. If you have 24 weeks, plan for 22. Use the surplus as insurance.
Step three: protect the key sessions, not the total volume.
When a busy week forces you to cut something, cut the easy rides first. Keep the two key intensity sessions and the long ride if you can. If you can only do three sessions that week instead of five, make them the sessions that move the needle most. Volume is nice. Key sessions are essential.
This is what Professor Seiler calls "minimum effective dose" thinking. His research shows that training frequency below three sessions per week starts to erode fitness. Above that threshold, more is better but not essential. Three well-chosen sessions in a compressed week will maintain your trajectory. Doing nothing for a week because you could not manage the full plan is the worst possible outcome.
Step four: communicate with the people around you.
Your partner needs to know when the big training weeks are coming. Not because you are asking permission — because if the people around you understand the structure, they can support it. "I need three long rides in March and April but it calms right down in June" is a conversation most partners can work with. "I might need to ride a lot at some point, I'll let you know" is a conversation that breeds resentment.
The Mid-Season Reset — What to Do When the Plan Falls Apart
It will happen. Every season hits a point where the plan and reality diverge beyond what a buffer week can fix.
Maybe you got ill for three weeks. Maybe a nagging knee became an actual injury. Maybe work went sideways and you barely touched the bike for a month. Maybe you simply hit a wall — motivation evaporated and the structured plan started feeling like a prison.
None of this means your season is over. It means you need a reset.
First, assess where you actually are. Not where you were supposed to be — where you are. Do a field test or use your most recent hard efforts to gauge current fitness. Forget the plan for a moment and look at the data in front of you.
Second, recalculate the timeline. How many weeks remain until your A event? If you have eight or more, you can still put together a meaningful block. If you have fewer than six, you may need to adjust your A event expectations — not abandon it, but recalibrate what "success" looks like.
Third, simplify. The mid-season reset is not the time for a complex periodisation scheme. Strip it back to essentials: rebuild aerobic base for one to two weeks (low intensity, moderate volume), then move directly into a condensed build phase focusing on the two or three sessions per week that most specifically target your A event demands.
Fourth, and this is the one most people miss — reset your expectations without resetting your commitment. The plan changed. The goal can still stand. "I will not be at my absolute peak for the Marmotte, but I can still finish strong and enjoy it" is a completely valid and worthy target. Abandoning the season because you missed six weeks of a 24-week plan is like quitting a book because you skipped a chapter.
Friel writes about what he calls "salvage plans" — condensed programmes designed to recover a disrupted season. The principles are simple: prioritise quality over volume, keep intensity distribution honest (do not try to compensate for lost weeks by going hard every day), and respect recovery even when time feels short. Especially when time feels short.
Monthly Check-ins — When to Adjust and When to Trust the Process
A season plan is not a contract. It is a living document. The best plans include built-in review points where you step back, assess, and decide whether to stay the course or make adjustments.
Once a month is the right cadence. More often than that and you are tinkering rather than trusting. Less often and small issues become big ones before you notice.
Here is what a monthly check-in should look like:
Review the Numbers
Look at your key metrics over the past four weeks. Not every ride — the trend lines.
- Chronic training load (CTL): is it trending upward during build phases and holding steady during recovery weeks? A flat CTL during what should be a progressive build phase means you are not loading enough. A CTL that is climbing steeply with no recovery dips means you are heading for a breakdown.
- Heart rate at steady state: for a given zone 2 power, is your heart rate dropping over time? That is aerobic progress. If it is rising, you may be accumulating fatigue.
- Key session performance: are your interval powers holding or improving? Stagnating interval performance despite increasing training load is an early warning sign of overreaching.
Check Against the Calendar
Where are you relative to the plan? If you are on track, brilliant — keep going. If you are behind, identify why. Was it a one-off disruption (recoverable) or a structural problem (needs addressing)?
Common structural problems:
- Consistently missing the long ride because weekends are too busy. Fix: move the long ride to a different day or split it into two medium rides.
- Unable to recover between hard sessions because they are too close together. Fix: space key sessions by at least 48 hours, ideally 72.
- Total volume is right but intensity distribution is wrong — too much time in the grey zone. Fix: make easy days properly easy. Professor Seiler's test is simple: if you could not repeat tomorrow's ride today, it was not easy enough.
Assess How You Feel
Numbers are important. But so is the subjective stuff that does not show up on a power curve.
- Are you looking forward to riding or dreading it?
- Are you sleeping well?
- Is your appetite normal?
- Are you picking up minor illnesses — colds, sore throats?
- Is your resting heart rate elevated?
These are signals that your body is either thriving under the current load or struggling with it. No amount of data can replace honest self-assessment. If you feel brilliant and the numbers are moving in the right direction, trust the process and keep going. If something feels off — even if you cannot pinpoint exactly what — that is worth investigating before it becomes a bigger problem.
Make One Adjustment, Not Five
The temptation during a monthly review is to change everything. Resist it. If something needs adjusting, make one change and observe the effect for the next four weeks. Adding more volume, changing your interval structure, rearranging your weekly schedule, and starting a new nutrition protocol all in the same week means you have no idea which change made a difference.
Coaching — whether it is self-coaching or working with someone — is ultimately a process of small, deliberate adjustments over time. The season plan gives you the structure. The monthly check-ins give you the feedback loop. Together, they keep you moving in the right direction without overcomplicating things.
Putting It All Together — A Season Plan You Can Actually Execute
The whole process, stripped down to its essentials, looks like this:
- Pick your A event. One event. The one that matters.
- Place your B and C events. Two to three B events that serve a strategic purpose. As many C events as you enjoy.
- Count backwards from A day. Map out base, build, peak, and taper phases. Use the 3:1 mesocycle rhythm within each phase.
- Block out the life stuff first. Holidays, work commitments, family obligations. Build around them, not over them.
- Add buffer weeks. One per eight-week block. Non-negotiable.
- Set monthly check-in dates. Put them in your calendar. Treat them like appointments.
- Write it down and share it. Tell your partner. Tell your training mates. Accountability makes plans stick.
You can do all of this in a single afternoon. One afternoon of planning that gives the next six to twelve months of training a purpose, a direction, and a structure that survives the reality of a busy life.
The amateur riders who consistently perform well at their A events are not the ones with the most talent or the most time. They are the ones with the clearest plan and the discipline to follow it — adjusting when they need to, trusting the process when they do not.
Your season is not something that happens to you. It is something you build.
If you want help building your season plan — or you want the accountability of a community of serious amateur cyclists who are all working towards their own A events — the Roadman Cycling community is where we do this stuff every day. Structured training, expert-backed coaching, and a group of riders who are all proving that they are not done yet. Come and have a look: https://www.skool.com/roadmancycling