Paris-Roubaix is the best one-day race on the calendar, and it's also the one that breaks the most cyclists' assumptions about what makes a hard day on the bike hard. So when Ben Oliver came on the podcast fresh from riding it — his first year in the Hell of the North — I wanted to get past the romance and into the mechanics. What does it actually take? What do the numbers from the cobbles really tell us?
The answer, again and again, was that Roubaix isn't won by the rider with the biggest engine. It's won by the rider who manages effort, fights for position and stays durable when everyone else is falling apart. And those three things — effort management, positioning, durability — are exactly what you should be thinking about on your own hard days, cobbles or not. It works like this.
Power doesn't matter the way you think
Here's the first myth dismantled. Ben reckoned the opening hour and a half ran at something like 54km/h. Think about what that means. At that speed, on the wide roads of northern France that no team can sit on the front and block, it's almost impossible for a breakaway to get away — and this is one of the most contested early breaks of the season, because historically a rider up the road at Roubaix can go deep. Everyone wanted in. Nobody could make it stick. The most any move got was a handful of seconds before it was reeled back in.
The lesson buried in that is one we talk about a lot but rarely feel so clearly: you can talk about power all day, but bikes don't just go faster because you produce more watts. If the bunch is doing 54km/h, you can't simply ride away at 64 — the physics and the draft don't allow it. A motivated rider with huge power still gets eight seconds and gets caught. What decides Roubaix isn't a number on a screen. It's everything around the number.
For you, this reframes how you think about your own riding. The amateur obsession with FTP — chasing a single steady number — misses that most decisive moments in real riding aren't steady at all. They're surges, positioning, and the ability to repeat hard efforts. Roubaix is that truth turned up to eleven.
The race is for position
If power doesn't decide it, what does? Position. Over and over, Ben came back to the fight to be near the front going into the cobbled sectors.
The reason is brutal and simple. The sectors are narrow, rough and chaotic. Arrive at the front and you control your own line, you stay out of the crashes, you don't get caught behind a split when the group shatters. Arrive at the back and you're forced into a huge, anaerobic effort just to move up through the bunch on the cobbles themselves — burning matches you'll be desperate for later in the day. The fight for position before each sector is the race within the race.
This translates directly to your riding, and it's the same lesson the pros teach on every mountain stage: position yourself before the hard bit, not during it. Before a climb on your club run, before a technical section, before the road narrows — move up while it's still cheap to do so, while you can shelter and drift forward. The rider who's already at the front when it gets hard has saved the effort the rider behind is about to spend clawing through traffic. Position is free watts, and almost nobody fights for it the way they should.
Cobbles get smoother the faster you go
Now the counterintuitive gem, and it's one of those things that changes how you ride rough terrain forever. Ben confirmed what sounds impossible until you've felt it: the faster you go over the cobbles, the smoother they feel, and the quicker the sector is over.
The mechanism is that at speed the bike skims across the tops of the stones rather than dropping into every gap between them. Slow down, tense up, grab the brakes, and you fall into every hole — it's rougher, slower and more exhausting. Commit to the speed and it smooths out. He even noted that the recon, ridden slower, was in some ways harder than race day, when the rhythm of the race carries you across.
This is gold for amateurs, and not just on cobbles. The exact same principle governs gravel and descending. The instinct when terrain gets rough or scary is to slow down and tense up — and that instinct makes it worse. A loose, committed bike at speed handles rough ground far better than a rigid, braking one. Obviously you ride within your skill and your safety margin. But the lesson holds: tension and hesitation are the enemy on rough terrain, and a bit of committed speed is often the smoother, safer line.
Durability, one sector at a time
How do you survive 30 brutal sectors? Ben's answer was quietly profound. You don't think about all thirty. You take them one by one. You get through one, you focus on the next. There's always something to manage — a corner where you lose all your speed and have to build it back, a draggy second half of a sector, a crosswind that means even on a wheel you get no free ride. Time, he said, just flows when you're in the rhythm of the race, because there's always the next thing to think about.
That's durability described from the inside, and it's as much mental as physical. The physical side is real — repeated accelerations out of corners, holding position, absorbing the impacts hour after hour. That's the durability that long aerobic training builds: the ability to still produce your power deep into fatigue. But the mental side is what makes it usable. Breaking an overwhelming task into the next small piece is how you get through a Roubaix, a long sportive, a brutal final climb. Don't think about the whole mountain. Think about the next sector. It's the oldest pacing trick there is, and the pros live by it.
The tech that actually earns its place
For all the marginal-gains talk in modern cycling, Roubaix strips it back to the one piece of kit that decides your day: the tyres. Ben was clear that tyre choice and pressure are among the most important decisions a rider makes for the cobbles.
The logic is the same one that should govern your own rough-road riding. Wider tyres run at lower pressures absorb the impacts, keep the rubber in contact with the ground, and give you grip and comfort that no fancy frame or wheel can match on broken surfaces. Too much pressure and you bounce, you lose grip, you punish your body and risk pinch flats. The right pressure is the single biggest lever you have on rough terrain — and most amateurs run their tyres far too hard out of habit. If you take one practical thing from a man who just rode the cobbles, let it be this: get your tyre pressure right for the surface (the tyre pressure calculator will give you a starting point for your weight and tyre width), and consider going wider and softer than you think. It does more than almost anything else you could buy.
Train the surges, not just the steady
If Roubaix proves that the decisive moments are accelerations and not steady power, that has a direct consequence for how you should train — and it's the practical payoff of the whole conversation.
Think about what Ben's day actually demanded of the legs. Not a long, smooth hour at threshold. A thousand sharp efforts: out of every corner, into every sector, to hold or gain a position, to cover a move, to claw back a gap. The fitness that survives that isn't the ability to hold one number forever. It's the ability to go hard, recover a little, and go hard again — over and over, deep into fatigue. That's repeatability, and it's a trainable quality most amateurs neglect entirely because they only ever ride at one pace.
So build some of it. Over-unders, where you alternate above and below threshold, teach the body to clear and re-load. Short, sharp repeats with incomplete recovery rehearse exactly the accelerate-recover-accelerate pattern of real racing. Even on a club run, practising the surges — closing a gap, jumping after a wheel, then settling — trains the durability that a steady solo ride never will. The cobbles are an extreme version of a universal truth: real riding is variable, so some of your training has to be variable too. The engine that wins Roubaix is built on surges, and so is the one that gets you to the front of your Saturday bunch.
What the cobbles teach everyone
Ben Oliver rode the hardest one-day race in cycling and came back with a lesson that has very little to do with raw power. Roubaix is won on position, on effort managed sector by sector, on the durability to keep producing when you're empty, and on the humble decision of what tyres to run at what pressure. Watts matter — but they're the least interesting part of the story.
You'll never ride the Trouée d'Arenberg. But the next time the road gets rough, the bunch gets nervous before a climb, or a long day starts to break you, ride it like Ben rides Roubaix: get to the front early, commit to your speed, take it one sector at a time, and trust the tyres. That's race craft, and it's the part of the sport no power meter will ever teach you. If you want to test these lessons on real cobbles, the Tour of Flanders sportive and the Liège-Bastogne-Liège Challenge are the two Belgian sportives that demand exactly this kind of riding.
Hear the full Paris-Roubaix breakdown with Ben Oliver on the Roadman podcast. For the engine behind it, read how to build durability, and talk race craft with us on Skool.