The first time I saw Sebastian Breuer, I was at Badlands in 2022 with a mechanical that had ended my race in the first descent. Di2 broken, bike unrideable, watching the front group ride past me up the climb. Eight or nine riders left in front. And one of them on what I assumed were 3D-printed aero bars.
"This guy has like 3D printed Arrow bars," I told my teammates. "We're so badly prepared for this."
I was right and wrong. The bars weren't 3D printed — they were Italian pro-spec gear, the kind you can technically buy but that ships in the colour Breuer was running because he's one of the brand's pro athletes. And he was indeed unbelievably prepared for this. He went on to win the race.
I sat down with him for the Badlands episode of the Roadman Cycling Podcast. We went through his setup, his pacing, his fuelling, and his approach to ultra racing. What follows is the breakdown — what he did, why it worked, and what the takeaways are if you're considering an event like this yourself.
What Badlands actually demands
Before we get to the setup, the event itself. Badlands is 800km, self-supported, across the Tabernas and Gorafe deserts in Andalucía. Most of the route is gravel. Some of it is tarmac. There are climbs that punch up sharply and descents that are loose and technical enough to genuinely hurt you.
The desert sections are the defining feature. There are stretches where there's no resupply for 60-80km. No towns. No water. No food. If you didn't carry it out of the previous resupply point, you don't have it. The temperature is high during the day and drops sharply at night. Most front-group riders don't sleep, or sleep no more than a couple of hours.
The race is won by the rider who can sustain a hard but submaximal pace for 30 hours, fuel the engine reliably across that span, and not break — mechanically, physically, or mentally — when something goes wrong. It's not won by the rider with the most peak power. It's won by the rider with the most disciplined process.
Breuer's setup reflects exactly that. None of his choices were maximal. All of them were aimed at sustainable, reliable, high-percentage performance over a very long duration. That's what ultra demands.
The bike setup, item by item
Let's go through what Breuer ran, with the reasoning.
Frame and groupset. Standard gravel platform. Nothing exotic. The bike was a Rose, a German brand. Mechanical and electronic shifting both work for ultra — what matters is that the components are reliable and serviceable in the field. A snapped Di2 cable in the desert is unfixable. A snapped mechanical cable is workable.
Aero bars. This was the visible difference. Italian-brand aero bars, pro-spec, that Breuer also runs at Unbound. The bars themselves matter less than the position they enable. A good aero position on a gravel bike at 25-30 km/hr costs significantly less power than holding the hoods. Over 30 hours, that compounds into hours of saved time.
Bags. Big seat-pack and frame bag. Breuer's choice was to carry mostly food in the bags rather than overnight gear. He wasn't planning to sleep — no bivvy, no sleeping kit — so the bags were essentially mobile pantries.
Hydration. A hydration pack on the back with 2-3 litres of water. Two water bottles in the frame. One bottle under the down-tube — filled with coffee for the night riding. The coffee bottle is one of those small choices that says everything about how he was thinking. Caffeine timed for the hours the body wants to shut down. A small specific solution to a large general problem.
Drivetrain. CeramicSpeed UFO chain. Breuer's framing was telling: "That was one of the most important things on my bike because I never had to take care of my chain. It was the same like Unbound and that's that's really nice because 800ks through the desert is yeah that's crazy for the chain." The chain isn't faster in any dramatic sense. It's a removed worry. In ultra, fewer things you have to think about means more attention you can spend on the things that matter.
The composite picture is a bike built for the specific demand. Not flashy. Not over-built. Optimised for the only outcome that matters in ultra: getting to the finish line in front, with the body and bike intact.
Pacing, decisively
The pacing answer was the cleanest moment in the conversation. Breuer rode at roughly 190-200 watts. That's well below threshold for him — he estimated his FTP at around 360 watts, which puts the racing pace at around 53-55% of FTP. Upper Zone 2.
Most amateurs think this is too easy. It isn't. Ultra-distance racing rewards the rider who can hold a sustainable pace for the full duration. The math is simple. A rider who goes out at 240 watts will collapse at hour eight or ten. A rider who holds 195 watts for the full 30 hours moves further than the rider who held 240 then crawled.
The pacing is set by the duration, not by the rider's perceived effort. Ultra is a fuelling and pacing problem, not a strength problem.
For amateurs targeting their first ultra, the discipline of pacing under target watts in the first six hours is the single biggest predictor of success. The body feels good. The legs are fresh. The temptation to push is real. The riders who give in are the ones who DNF. The riders who hold the prescribed number — even when it feels boringly easy — are the ones at the finish line.
Use FTP zones as the discipline tool. Calculate your sustainable wattage for the duration. Hold it. Don't negotiate. The race is won in the second half, not the first.
Fuelling for desert constraints
The fuelling story has two layers — the physiological and the logistical.
Physiologically, Breuer was eating regularly across the full duration. Bars and gels in the bags, accessible while riding. The intake target was high — ultra riders at the front of races are typically fuelling at 80-100 grams of carbohydrate per hour, sustained over 30+ hours. That requires a gut that's been trained to absorb at that rate. You don't show up to Badlands and discover whether your stomach can handle 90 grams an hour. You rehearse it for months in training.
Logistically, the desert was the constraining variable. No resupply for long stretches meant carrying enough water and food to span those gaps. Breuer's strategy was to refill aggressively at the larger towns — Almería was the example he used — buying everything available and carrying it out. The principle was simple: never enter a desert section under-supplied. The cost of carrying a slightly heavier bag is trivial compared to the cost of running out.
For amateur ultra riders, the lesson is that fuelling is a logistics exercise as much as a nutrition exercise. The plan needs to account for the actual route — where the resupply points are, what's open at what hours, what happens if a station is closed when you arrive. The riders who DNF Badlands often DNF because of fuelling failures that were planning failures one step removed.
The carbs-per-hour breakdown and the Badlands 800km fuelling guide cover the specifics. Train the gut. Plan the logistics. Carry more than you think you need.
The coach question
One detail from our conversation worth lifting out. Breuer doesn't pretend to be his own coach. "I don't really know much about training because I have a coach and he's taking care of me. So I just have to ride my bike."
That framing is important. Breuer is one of the most successful ultra-distance gravel racers in the world. He's won Badlands. He's competed at the front of Unbound. And he doesn't claim expertise in his own training. He has a coach. The coach handles the program. He executes.
The point isn't that pros need coaches and amateurs don't. It's the opposite. Pros have access to enormous resources and still choose to delegate the program design to specialists. Amateurs have less margin for error, more competing priorities, and less training time to optimise — and yet many self-coach because they assume the principles are simple enough to figure out.
Self-coaching can work. It works best for riders who are willing to be honest with themselves about their data, their fatigue, their progression. Most riders aren't. The self-coached cyclist mistakes post covers the common failure patterns. The pattern Breuer's quote points at is the most common: assuming the program is the easy part and the execution is the hard part. The truth is closer to the opposite. The program design is hard. Executing a well-designed program is easier than executing a poorly-designed one.
If you're targeting a serious ultra event, coaching at Roadman is the structural decision worth considering. A coach reads your file, builds the program, holds you accountable for execution. The cost is small relative to the cost of training for 18 months and DNFing because the structure was wrong.
What this means if you're considering ultra
A few practical positions.
The bar to entry is lower than it looks. Breuer is a fast rider, but his setup is replicable on a moderate budget. The aero bars are the biggest investment. Everything else is standard ultra-distance gravel kit. You don't need pro-spec gear to finish Badlands. You need a reliable bike, a fuelling protocol you've practised, and a pacing discipline you can hold under fatigue.
The training is endurance, not intervals. The ceiling for ultra is built by long rides at sustainable intensity. Big aerobic base. Slow-twitch mitochondrial density. The capacity to hold a moderate effort for hours without metabolic drift. Read the polarised training guide and the ultra-cycling training piece to see how the season should look.
The mental game is the differentiator. Most riders who DNF an ultra DNF mentally before they DNF physically. The work to prepare for that side is real. Practising long, lonely rides at night. Getting comfortable with the dark hours where the body wants to stop. Building the mental rehearsals that get you through hour 22.
The full conversation with Sebastian — including his approach to recces, his time at Unbound, and what's next for him — is in the Badlands episode. The other community-pillar conversations cover gravel and ultra from different angles.
If Badlands is on your list, the year to start preparing is now. The training compounds slowly. The decision to commit doesn't.
