You have booked the camp. You have the flights. You have told everyone at the club. And now you are thinking about how to actually make it count.
Good. Because most riders treat a training camp like seven consecutive hard days and then wonder why they come home wrecked, get ill, and ride worse for the next month. The intention was fitness. The outcome was a hole they dug with their legs.
A training camp is a compressed training block. Done well, it delivers two to three weeks of training adaptation in five to seven days. Done badly, it delivers fatigue you carry for weeks and a vague sense that you wasted your money. The difference between those two outcomes is not talent or fitness. It is structure, nutrition, and recovery — three things that are entirely within your control.
The Hard-Easy-Hard Pattern
The single biggest mistake at training camp is riding hard every single day.
It feels logical. You have come a long way. The roads are beautiful. The group is flying. You paid for this. Of course you should make the most of every ride.
But training does not work that way. Adaptation happens during recovery, not during the effort itself. The effort provides the stimulus. Recovery provides the response. If you stack stimulus on top of stimulus with no recovery between them, your body never gets the signal to adapt. It just gets the signal to survive.
A well-structured camp follows a hard-easy-hard pattern across the week. Here is what that looks like over seven days:
Day 1: Moderate. A shakeout ride. Three to four hours at a comfortable pace. You are finding your legs after travel, testing your bike setup, and settling into the group. This is not the day to prove anything.
Day 2: Hard. The first key ride. Four to five hours with structured climbing or a long tempo block. This is where you lay down the first real training stimulus of the week.
Day 3: Easy. A genuine recovery day. Two to three hours, flat or rolling terrain, at a pace where you can hold a conversation without thinking about it. If you are breathing hard on the recovery ride, you are doing it wrong.
Day 4: Hard. The second key ride. This is usually the biggest day of the camp — the long mountain day, the gran fondo route, the ride that everyone came for. Five hours, serious climbing, proper effort.
Day 5: Easy. Another recovery day. Your legs will tell you this was the right call. Coffee ride pace. The follow car is practically overtaking you. Perfect.
Day 6: Hard. The final key ride. Slightly shorter than day four but with more intensity — intervals, a race simulation, or a climb at threshold. You are spending the fitness you built earlier in the week.
Day 7: Easy spin or rest. Thirty to sixty minutes of flat spinning or a complete rest day before travel. Your camp is done. The work is in the bank.
Three hard days. Three easy days. One transition day. That is the pattern. It sounds conservative until you realise that three properly hard rides in a week, backed by proper recovery, delivers more adaptation than seven medium-hard rides where you were too tired to actually push on any of them.
Nutrition Demands: You Are Not Eating Enough
This is the part where camps go wrong most often, and it is the most fixable problem of the lot.
On a big ride day at camp, you will burn between 3,500 and 5,000 calories. On a five-hour mountain day with 2,000 metres of climbing, it could be more. That is two to three times what most riders burn on a normal training day at home.
Most riders under-fuel at camp by 30 to 40 per cent. They eat what feels like a lot — a big breakfast, some bars on the bike, a decent dinner — and still arrive at the next morning's ride with depleted glycogen stores and legs that feel like they belong to someone else. By day three, they are in a deficit so deep that no amount of coffee can fix it.
Here is what fuelling properly at camp actually looks like.
Breakfast: 800-1,000 calories. This is not a croissant and a coffee. This is a large bowl of oats or rice, two to three eggs, toast, fruit, and a coffee. Carbohydrate-heavy with enough protein to start the day right. Eat breakfast at least ninety minutes before the ride starts. If your stomach cannot handle a big meal early, get up earlier.
On the bike: 60-90g of carbohydrates per hour. Every hour. From the first hour. Not just when you feel hungry — by the time you feel hungry, you are already behind. This means gels, bars, drink mix, rice cakes, or whatever you have trained your gut to handle. If you have not practised high-carb fuelling in training, a camp is not the place to start at 90g per hour. Start at 60g and work up.
Recovery meal: within 30 minutes of finishing. A shake with 30-40g of protein and 50-60g of carbohydrates is the quickest option. A proper meal with chicken, rice, and vegetables works too, but you need to eat it fast. The recovery window is real. Your muscles are most receptive to glycogen replenishment in the first 30 to 60 minutes after exercise. Miss it and you are playing catch-up for the rest of the day.
Dinner: substantial. A large meal with protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables. This is not the time for a light salad. Pasta, rice, potatoes, bread, meat or fish, and more vegetables than you think. You are rebuilding glycogen stores for tomorrow. Eat until you are full and then eat a bit more.
Protein across the day: 1.6-2.0g per kilogram of bodyweight. For an 80kg rider, that is 128 to 160 grams of protein spread across breakfast, the recovery shake, lunch if you have one, and dinner. Training volume at camp is two to three times your normal load, and protein requirements scale with it. Four meals plus the recovery shake is the minimum to hit this number without resorting to supplements at every turn.
Hydration. One 500ml bottle per hour on the bike as a baseline, adjusted upward in heat. An electrolyte mix in at least one bottle per ride. And drink water at every meal, not just on the bike. Dehydration compounds across days at camp. A two per cent fluid deficit on day two becomes a five per cent deficit by day four if you are not actively replacing what you lose.
Recovery Between Rides
Nutrition is the foundation of recovery, but it is not the whole picture. What you do in the hours between rides determines whether you start the next day's ride fresh or fatigued.
Sleep is the single highest-leverage recovery tool at camp. It is also the one most riders sabotage. Late dinners that do not finish until 22:00. A glass of wine that becomes a bottle. Unfamiliar beds in shared rooms. Early alarms because the group wants to beat the heat.
Prioritise eight hours of sleep on the nights before key rides. That means being in bed by 22:00 if the alarm is at 06:00. It means limiting alcohol to one glass on recovery-day evenings and nothing on the nights before hard days. It means earplugs and an eye mask if the room is not dark enough. This is not glamorous advice. It is the advice that actually works.
Compression garments after rides. Put compression socks or tights on within an hour of finishing and keep them on through the afternoon. The evidence on compression is mixed in laboratory settings, but the practical experience of riders who use them at camp is consistent: legs feel fresher the next morning. At worst, it does nothing. At best, it gives you a measurable edge on day four.
Elevate your legs. Twenty minutes with your feet up against a wall or on a pillow after the ride. Simple. Free. Effective at reducing the pooling of blood in your lower legs after hours of pedalling.
Avoid standing around after rides. The post-ride social hour where everyone stands in the car park comparing Strava files is terrible for recovery. Sit down. Better yet, lie down. Talk about the ride from a horizontal position.
Stretching and mobility. Ten to fifteen minutes of gentle stretching after each ride, focusing on hip flexors, hamstrings, and lower back. Not aggressive stretching — just enough to maintain range of motion. A foam roller or massage ball for your quads and glutes is worth the suitcase space.
The Key Rides: What to Focus On
Your three hard days are the engine of the camp. These are the rides that deliver the training stimulus your body will adapt to in the weeks after you get home. They need to be intentional.
Ride with purpose, not just with effort. A five-hour death march where you blow up at hour three and limp home is not a productive training ride. A five-hour ride where you ride steady for four hours and then hit the final climb at threshold is. The difference is pacing, and pacing starts with knowing what the ride is for.
On a climbing day, the purpose is sustained effort at or just below threshold on the climbs, with genuine recovery on the descents and flats between them. You are not racing the group up every climb. You are riding to your numbers — or your perceived effort, if you do not train with power — and accumulating time at intensity.
On a tempo day, the purpose is accumulating two to three hours of riding at 75-85 per cent of your FTP. Not smashing it. Not cruising. Riding at the effort that feels uncomfortable but sustainable. The kind of effort where you could talk, but you would rather not.
On an interval day, the purpose is short, sharp efforts with full recovery between them. Five-minute climbs at 105-110 per cent of FTP, repeated four to six times with the descent as recovery. Or 20-minute tempo blocks with 10 minutes easy between them.
Here is where it gets really interesting: the accumulated fatigue of riding multiple days means that a threshold effort on day six of camp is a much harder stimulus than the same effort on a fresh Tuesday at home. Your body is working harder to produce the same power. That means you do not need to go deeper at camp than you would at home. The volume and the accumulated fatigue do the extra work for you.
The Easy Days: Why They Matter More Than You Think
Most riders know, intellectually, that recovery days are important. But most riders also ride too hard on recovery days.
An easy day at camp is not a steady endurance ride. It is actively easy. Zone one. Conversation pace. A pace that would embarrass you if your club mates were watching. The kind of ride where you stop for coffee after an hour and do not feel guilty about it.
The purpose of the easy day is to promote blood flow without creating additional training stress. You want your legs turning over. You want your body flushing metabolic waste. You do not want to dip into glycogen stores that you need for tomorrow's hard ride.
If you have a heart rate monitor, keep it below 65 per cent of your maximum on recovery days. If you train with power, stay below 55 per cent of your FTP. If you use neither, ride at a pace where your breathing is completely normal and you could sing if you wanted to.
Two to three hours is plenty. Flat or gently rolling terrain. No sprints for town signs. No chasing the group up a false flat. If someone in the group pushes the pace on a recovery day, let them go. They are spending tomorrow's legs today, and you are not.
The good news: recovery rides in places like Girona are not a hardship. The coastal roads north of the city are flat, the views are absurd, and there is a coffee stop every five kilometres. An easy day in Girona is better than most people's best day at home.
Coming Home: The Recovery Week and the Adaptation Window
This is the part most riders get wrong, and it is the part that determines whether the camp was worth the money.
The adaptation from a training camp does not happen at the camp. It happens in the two weeks after you get home.
During the camp, you are loading your body with training stress. Your muscles are damaged. Your glycogen stores are depleted. Your immune system is suppressed. Your central nervous system is fatigued. You are, physiologically, worse than when you arrived.
The adaptation — the part where you actually get faster — happens when you remove the stress and let your body rebuild. This is called supercompensation, and it takes 10 to 14 days.
Here is the protocol.
Days 1-3 after camp: rest or very easy spinning. Thirty to forty-five minutes of zone one riding, or complete rest. Your body is in deep recovery. Respect it.
Days 4-7: easy endurance rides. One to two hours at an easy pace. You are testing your legs, not training them. If you feel good on day five, that is excellent — do not celebrate by doing intervals. Stay easy.
Week 2: return to normal training. Gradually reintroduce your normal training structure. A tempo ride mid-week. A longer endurance ride at the weekend. By the end of week two, you should be back to your normal schedule and, if the camp was structured well, you should be hitting numbers you were not hitting before.
What not to do: resume hard training immediately. Riders who fly home on Sunday and do Tuesday intervals are the riders who get ill on Thursday. The immune suppression from a heavy training block takes five to seven days to resolve. Training hard on a suppressed immune system is how you catch every cold going around and spend a month unable to ride at all.
What not to do: panic about fitness loss. Your power numbers will be lower for the first week after camp. Your legs will feel heavy. Your RPE for any given wattage will be higher than normal. This is not detraining. This is fatigue. Let it clear and the fitness will reveal itself underneath.
Girona: Why It Works for a Training Camp
Girona has become one of the most popular training camp locations in Europe for good reason. Within 30 minutes of the city, you have coastal flats for recovery rides, rolling hills in the Gavarres for tempo work, and serious climbs in the Pyrenean foothills — Rocacorba, Mare de Deu del Mont, Els Angels — for the hard days. You do not need a transfer bus to reach different terrain. It is all there.
The weather in October is warm enough to ride comfortably in a jersey and shorts most days, cool enough that you are not battling heat stress on the climbs. The roads are quiet after the summer tourist season. The food is excellent, which matters more at a training camp than most people realise.
The Roadman camps at Can Sagnari run in October 2026 at EUR995 per person. Coached pace groups, structured rides, a follow car on every ride, and the kind of week that actually produces fitness rather than just fatigue. If you have been thinking about a camp, this is the one.
What to Bring: The Performance Packing List
A camp derailed by a mechanical on day two is a waste of money and time. Pack for the riding, not just for the social photos.
Bike spares: spare inner tubes or a tubeless repair kit with plugs and sealant, a multi-tool, two spare quick links for your chain, spare brake pads (disc brakes chew through pads on long descents), a spare derailleur hanger, and electrical tape. If your bike has electronic shifting, bring a charging cable and top up every other night.
On-bike nutrition: bring your own gels, bars, and drink mix from home. Do not assume you can buy your preferred brand locally. Your gut has been trained on specific products. Switching to whatever the local shop stocks on day one of a camp is a recipe for stomach problems on day two. Bring enough for the full week plus a buffer.
Recovery kit: compression socks or tights, a foam roller or massage ball, electrolyte tablets for the evenings, and a good quality sleep mask plus earplugs. If you use magnesium before bed, bring it.
Riding kit: two full kits per riding day is ideal, but at minimum bring enough that you always have a dry, clean kit for the next ride. Three pairs of bib shorts, four jerseys, arm warmers, a gilet, a light rain jacket, and a warm base layer for early starts or high-altitude descents. Chamois cream in quantity. Your skin will thank you on day five.
Off the bike: comfortable shoes for walking, loose clothing for the evenings, and a light jacket for dinner if you are eating outdoors. Camps are not formal. Nobody cares what you look like at the dinner table. They care whether you can still walk to it.
Making It Count
A training camp is an investment — in money, in time away from home, and in the physical toll of a week of hard riding. The riders who get the most from it are not the ones who ride the hardest every day. They are the ones who ride hard on the right days, eat enough, sleep enough, and then go home and let their bodies do the work.
Three key rides. Three recovery rides. Eight hours of sleep. More food than you think. A recovery week when you get home. That is the formula. It is not complicated. It is just disciplined.
If you want to talk training camps, race preparation, or anything else about getting faster on a bike after 35, the Roadman community on Skool is where those conversations happen every day. Real riders, real questions, no nonsense. Come and join us: https://www.skool.com/roadmancycling
