Ryan Collins broke eight WUCA/Guinness world records in 2024. Indoor and outdoor velodrome. The headline number — 46.6 km/h average for six hours on the indoor track — sits well past what a non-professional cyclist is supposed to be capable of. Six hours. Forty-six and a half kilometres an hour. Without a team. Without a wind-tunnel budget. Without the institutional support most pros take for granted.
The other thing about Collins. In 2017, a week before an Olympic team trial, he was hit by a vehicle on a training ride. Six or seven bones broken. Several of them not fractured but destroyed — required full reconstructive surgery. Doctors told him he wouldn't ride again. He came back, set his sights on ultra-distance goals he'd never previously cared about, and seven years later was averaging 46.6 km/h for six hours.
This is a piece about the three specific tweaks that made the records possible. None of them require pro budgets. All of them apply to amateur cyclists chasing personal records on shorter timescales. And the comeback context is worth holding alongside the technical detail because it changes how you read what he was doing.
Tweak one: aero testing without a wind tunnel
The expensive way to test aerodynamic position changes is to book a wind tunnel for half a day at four-figure cost. The pros do this. Some serious amateurs do this. Collins didn't.
What he did instead: a borrowed Notio aero sensor, early-morning straight-line runs on empty roads near his home, and hundreds of velodrome laps with lap-time logging.
The principle behind the velodrome version is precise. Each lap on the indoor velodrome averaged 16 seconds. Riders at this level are repeatable enough that a one- to two-second deviation from a position change is visible in the lap timing. Change the helmet, log the next ten laps, see what happens to the average. Change the arm position, log the next ten, see what happens. The sample size builds across hundreds of laps and the signal-to-noise ratio gets better than most amateurs would expect.
This isn't perfect. A wind tunnel would give him cleaner CdA data faster. But the velodrome method is cheap, repeatable, and honest — and at the level of position changes that matter for an amateur, it's enough to make decisions.
The amateur translation: aero testing on a budget is real. A power meter, a flat course you ride at the same time of day with the same wind conditions, and a stopwatch will reveal more than most riders give the protocol credit for. We laid the full version out in the wind tunnel aero gains breakdown, but the principle Collins is using applies more broadly. You don't need a tunnel. You need a controlled enough environment that you can detect a 1–2% change in drag.
Tweak two: fuelling at 90–100g/hour with hydration separated
The second tweak is fuelling protocol design, and it's where the conversation gets interesting.
Collins's six-hour record protocol: two gels per hour, each delivering roughly 45–50g of carbohydrate, totalling 90–100g/hour. Hydration kept completely separate from carbs — water and electrolytes only in the bottle, carbs only in the gels.
The dose itself isn't unusual at this level. The sports nutrition science has settled on 90–120g/hour for events lasting more than two hours, and the gut training literature shows that figure is achievable for any rider willing to practise it across a few months. We laid out the framework in the carbohydrate per hour breakdown and in our Fuelling Calculator.
The unusual part is keeping the fluids and the carbs separate. Most cyclists use a combined drink mix — carbohydrates dissolved in the water — because it's logistically simpler. Collins prefers separation because, in his testing, the gut response to the gels at his target dose was cleaner without dissolved carbs in the water at the same time. Other riders go the opposite direction and find combined mix works better. Both are valid. The principle Collins lives by is consistency — once you find your version, hold it ruthlessly. Same dose, same timing, every hour, no improvising during the effort.
The lesson for amateurs isn't to copy his exact protocol. It's the discipline of testing your own protocol in advance and locking it in. Riders who change their nutrition strategy mid-event are the riders who blow up in hour four. Riders who walk to the start line knowing exactly what they'll consume and when are the riders who finish strong. The protocol is less important than the practice.
Tweak three: off-bike strength and yoga
This is the one Collins credited most for late-ride durability, and it's the tweak amateurs most commonly skip.
For years, Collins trained 20+ hours a week on the bike and did nothing else. Past three or four years, he added gym work — strength training for muscular adaptation beyond cycling — and yoga two to three times weekly.
The performance transfer back onto the bike was real. The arm cramping that hit at hour 4.5 of his six-hour record, forcing him out of his aero position and costing seconds per lap, traced back to upper-body strength and mobility limitations as much as to fatigue. A six-hour aero hold puts massive demand on shoulders, neck, lower back, hip flexors. None of those structures get trained adequately by riding alone. Riders who don't address them end up forced out of position when it matters most.
The amateur translation: strength work is one of the highest-leverage non-cycling investments you can make for cycling performance. Not for raw power output (though that comes too). For durability. The ability to hold position, hold pace, hold attention in hour three when most amateurs are losing all three. We covered the broader case in Joe Friel's strength training case for cyclists.
Two strength sessions a week and one mobility session per week — yoga or a structured mobility flow — is enough to move the needle for most amateurs. Collins runs three of each. Twenty minutes per session is fine. Consistency over months is what matters, not single-session intensity.
The comeback context
The technical conversation is the meat of this piece. The comeback context is the thing that gives the technical conversation weight.
Collins was a serious athlete before 2017. Olympic-track aspirations. The accident took most of his upper body apart. The bones that weren't fractured were destroyed — a different category of damage that requires reconstruction rather than healing. The recovery wasn't linear. Doctors told him he wouldn't ride.
What he did differently from many comebacks: he didn't try to return to who he was. He set ultra-distance goals he'd never previously cared about. The pre-accident version of him was a sprinter and a track specialist. The post-accident version became an ultra-endurance specialist with eight world records, none of them in his original discipline.
The frame is borrowable for any rider rebuilding from anything. The temptation in a comeback is to try to "get back to where I was." That target is often unhelpful — you're not the same person, the same body, the same life context. Better to ask what's possible now, given what you've got, and set goals that fit the current version of you. Sometimes those goals are smaller. Sometimes — Collins's case — they're larger than the originals because the new context unlocks something the old context didn't.
We covered the same logic in the James Golding comeback breakdown — different injury, different sport, identical pattern. Set goals that fit who you are now, take the smallest achievable step, repeat.
What this means at amateur volumes
If you're not going for a world record, what's the version of this you can apply?
One — test what limits you, with cheap tools. The amateur equivalent of Collins's velodrome aero testing is repeated efforts on a controlled course with a power meter and a stopwatch. Helmet on, helmet off. Hands on the hoods, hands on the drops. Position one, position two. You'll find more free speed than you'd expect. Most amateurs are leaving 5–10% on the table to position alone.
Two — lock your nutrition protocol months in advance. Decide your target carbohydrate per hour. Practise it across multiple long rides. Find the version that doesn't upset your gut at race intensity. Lock it in. Don't change it in the days before the event. The riders who blow up at hour four are almost always the ones who improvised.
Three — add the off-bike work. Two strength sessions, one mobility session per week. Twenty minutes each. The first six weeks will feel pointless. Months three onwards is where the durability shows up. The cyclist who keeps holding position when the riders around them are squirming is usually the cyclist who's been doing the off-bike work for a year.
The closing point
Collins's eight records aren't a story about exceptional talent. They're a story about exceptional honesty. He looked at what was actually limiting his performance and spent his time on the limiting factors, not on the things that made him feel like a serious cyclist. The aero testing was awkward. The fuelling protocol took months to settle. The strength work felt unrelated to the goal until it became the difference at hour 4.5.
Most amateur cyclists chase the wrong limiting factor. They buy aero gear they haven't tested. They obsess over fuelling brands while training the gut poorly. They do more bike volume when the actual limit is upper-body strength they've never addressed.
If you take one thing from this piece: ask what's actually limiting you, not what feels like the cyclist-thing to address. The honest answer is usually less interesting than the cyclist-thing. It's also what produces the records.
We work through this audit with riders inside the Not Done Yet community every month. The breakthroughs almost never come from training harder. They come from finding the limiting factor you weren't paying attention to and giving it three months of focused work.
Find your limiting factor. Do that. Watch what moves.
How to find your actual limiting factor
This piece would be incomplete without a practical answer to the implicit question. How do you find what's actually limiting you?
Three diagnostic angles, run in this order.
One — review your last three target events. What went wrong each time? Not "what would have been nice" — what specifically happened that cost you the result. If the answer is a consistent theme — bonking late, position falling apart, mental breakdown in the last quarter — that theme is your limiting factor. Train it specifically for the next twelve weeks.
Two — pull your power profile and look at the curves. Your one-second peak power, five-second, fifteen-second, one-minute, five-minute, twenty-minute. Compare to where you were a year ago. The curve that hasn't moved or has gone backwards is the curve to train. The curve that has moved forwards isn't your problem.
Three — get an honest external read. Coach, training partner, someone who knows you. Ask them what they think your weak spot is. Listen even if you don't like the answer. Most riders have a blind spot — usually the thing they enjoy least and therefore avoid training. The blind spot is often the limiting factor.
Run all three. Triangulate. The answer is usually clearer than amateur cyclists give it credit for. The hard part isn't identifying the limiting factor. The hard part is committing to twelve weeks of work specifically aimed at it.
That's the discipline Collins ran. The discipline of looking honestly, choosing the right intervention, and holding it long enough for the work to land. Eight world records in a year is what that discipline looks like at the upper end. Even at amateur level, the same discipline produces the breakthroughs that more random training simply doesn't.
The riders who consistently improve year over year inside the Not Done Yet community are running this audit every quarter. The riders who plateau are usually the ones who've never genuinely asked the question.
Ask the question. Find the factor. Do the work. The performance will follow.