In 2017, Ryan Collins was a week away from joining the US track program as an Olympic hopeful. He'd just finished what he described as one of the best threshold sessions of his life. He was two miles from home, in his time-trial bars on a two-lane road, when a car turned across his lane.
The next thing he remembers is the hospital. Reconstructive surgery on his upper body. Multiple fractures — six or seven, he's not sure of the exact count. Bones that had been "destroyed" rather than broken. Ligaments severed. The doctor's first words to him afterwards: "You're never going to ride a bike again."
In 2024, Ryan Collins broke eight WUCA and Guinness world records. The headline number, the one that travelled the cycling internet: a six-hour average of roughly 46.6 km/hr on an indoor velodrome. Around 277 km in six hours. The fastest documented six-hour effort on a track.
I sat down with him for the 46.6 km/hr episode of the Roadman Cycling Podcast. He told me there were three changes that did most of the work. None of them required a pro-team budget. All of them are available to anyone willing to execute.
This is the breakdown.
The setup: what changed and what didn't
Before getting to the three tweaks, the context matters. Collins came up through track. The original training program was built around short, hard efforts — pursuit-style work, sprint power, anaerobic capacity. That program had taken him to the edge of the US Olympic squad. It was working.
When he came back from injury and pivoted to ultra-distance, he didn't import the track program wholesale. He didn't keep the high-intensity emphasis and add some long rides on top. He rebuilt the base from the bottom up, then layered the specific demands of six-hour efforts over it.
That's worth noting because most amateur cyclists make the opposite mistake when they want to take on a longer event. They keep their existing program and bolt on weekend long rides, hoping the duration will translate. It usually doesn't. The aerobic infrastructure that supports a six-hour effort isn't an extension of a 90-minute session program. It's a different thing, built differently.
Tweak one: aerobic base, properly
Collins is direct about the first change: he built a deeper aerobic base than he'd ever held in his track years.
What does "deeper" mean physiologically? More mitochondrial density. Greater capillarisation. Higher fat-oxidation capacity. A larger ceiling for sustained submaximal output before the system tips into glycolytic territory. These adaptations are produced almost exclusively by long durations at low intensity. Not Zone 3. Not "kind of moderate." Genuinely low — the intensity that Stephen Seiler has spent 20 years pointing at in his polarised training research.
The mistake amateurs make is the same mistake Collins didn't make. They train a base that isn't really a base. The "easy" rides drift up. The "endurance" rides become tempo. The week looks like volume, but the physiological signal is confused — too hard to drive aerobic adaptation, too easy to drive threshold adaptation, accumulating fatigue without building anything specific.
The corrective is using FTP zones as a hard ceiling on easy rides. If your prescribed Zone 2 upper bound is 195 watts, you ride 195 watts. You don't drift to 215 because the road tilts up or because you feel good. Easy means easy. The discipline is the difference between a base that compounds and a base that doesn't.
For Collins, the base block ran for months before any specific six-hour velodrome work appeared in the program. By the time he was preparing the actual record attempts, the aerobic infrastructure was so deep that the specific work he layered on top — high cadence at race intensity, position-specific holds, fuelling rehearsal — could actually take effect. There was a foundation under it.
If you're targeting a century, a Mallorca 312, or anything longer, the same principle applies. The base isn't the boring part of the program. It's the program. Everything else is what gets layered on top.
Tweak two: fuelling that scales with effort
The second change Collins points to is fuelling.
A six-hour effort at 46+ km/hr is not a fuelling problem you solve with a couple of gels. It's a sustained 80-90% of carbohydrate-oxidation maximum, for hours. That demands an intake protocol that most amateurs would consider extreme — and that elite endurance athletes now consider standard.
The numbers Collins worked up to: 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour or higher, sustained across the full duration. Glucose-fructose blends to push past the single-transporter ceiling that limits glucose-only intake to roughly 60 grams per hour. Liquid-heavy delivery in the early hours when the gut is most receptive, transitioning to mixed solid and liquid as the effort goes on.
This isn't about magical products. It's about training the gut to absorb at the rate the engine demands. The gut adapts. Sustained high carbohydrate intake, repeated across training sessions over weeks, expands the absorption capacity. Riders who try to fuel an event at 90 grams per hour without rehearsing it in training end up with GI distress — the gut was never asked to do that load before, and it can't.
Most amateurs are in the 30-50 grams per hour range. That's a serious deficit on any effort over two hours and an absolute disaster on anything longer. The in-ride nutrition guide and the carbs-per-hour breakdown cover the specifics. The short version: if you're not training your fuelling, you're not training your endurance ceiling.
For Collins, the fuelling change was the one that allowed the training adaptations to actually express themselves. A deeper aerobic base means very little if the engine runs out of fuel at hour three. The two changes worked together. Either one alone would have been less than half the result.
Tweak three: recovery as a primary training variable
The third change is the one most amateurs underrate, and most pros take seriously.
Collins describes recovery — sleep, nutrition timing, mental preparation, between-session protocols — as primary training variables, not afterthoughts. The framing is precise. A primary training variable is something you measure, plan, and execute against. An afterthought is what's left over once the "real" training is done.
Sleep is the headline item. Eight to nine hours, treated as non-negotiable. Below seven hours per night, the data on power output, perceived effort, and adaptation rate gets ugly fast. Cortisol stays elevated. Growth hormone secretion — which happens predominantly in the first half of the night — gets compressed. The hormonal environment that drives muscle repair and aerobic adaptation becomes less favourable. Riders who tolerate sleep debt as a cost of being busy are paying it back in lost performance, every week.
Nutrition timing within the recovery window is the second piece. The 30-60 minute post-session window for carbohydrate and protein intake is well-documented. Glycogen resynthesis rates are highest immediately after exercise and decline substantially within two hours. Collins doesn't leave that window unused. Most amateurs do.
The third piece, which Collins talked about more than I expected, was mental preparation. The six-hour velodrome attempt is, after a certain point, a meditation problem. The body is trained. The fuelling is rehearsed. What's left is the mental capacity to hold a state of focused effort for six hours without unraveling. That's not a separate skill from training — it's something he built deliberately, alongside the physical work.
After a life-changing crash, Collins had to rebuild his identity as well as his body. He talked about the moment the doctor told him he'd never ride again, and how he sat with that for what felt like a lifetime before deciding the diagnosis was a starting point, not a verdict. "I've never just sat here and not challenged the status quo. So they're telling me I'm never going to ride a bike again. Just watch me."
He brought his bike to physical therapy on the first day. He told the therapist whatever protocol they prescribed had to incorporate the bicycle, even if that meant leaning against it for arm strength. The mental architecture that produced eight world records was built in those early sessions, not in the velodrome years later.
What this means for an amateur
The trap is to read a Ryan Collins story and conclude that the lessons don't apply because you're not chasing a world record. The lessons apply more, not less.
A rider with eight to twelve hours a week of training time can't afford to waste any of them. The same three principles scale directly:
Build the base properly. Easy rides at genuinely easy intensity, week after week, for blocks that are long enough to drive real adaptation. Read the zone 2 training complete guide if you want the details. The discipline is in the execution, not the concept.
Train the fuel system. If you're targeting any event over 90 minutes, your in-ride fuelling protocol should be rehearsed in training, scaled up gradually to whatever your target event demands. The gut is a trainable organ. Treat it like one.
Protect recovery like a training session. Sleep, post-ride nutrition, deliberate downtime between hard efforts. These are the inputs that determine whether the work you put in actually compounds.
The pro/amateur gap on these three things is not as big as the social media fantasy suggests. The athletes at the top execute the basics at a level of consistency that most amateurs never reach. The ceiling is genetic. The path to the ceiling is execution.
If you want a program built around exactly these principles — base built properly, fuelling rehearsed, recovery treated as a variable — coaching at Roadman is built for it. And if Ryan's story landed for you, the full episode is on the feed. He goes into the crash and the comeback in more detail than I could fit here.
The version of you that's already in the program is closer than you think. The work is in showing up to the right session, fuelled, recovered, ready to do the thing properly. Repeated.