After more than a thousand podcast episodes and conversations with some of the smartest coaches and scientists in endurance sport, I have a confession. I spent years making the exact mistakes that every one of those guests warned me about. This episode is about the things I got wrong in my own training — not because I want to beat myself up about it, but because I reckon if I made these mistakes, a lot of you are making them too.
Mistake number one: I worshipped volume. More hours on the bike meant more fitness. That was my operating assumption for years. If someone told me they were riding 15 hours a week, I wanted to ride 17. The problem was that most of those hours were junk miles. I was riding in the grey zone — hard enough to accumulate fatigue, easy enough that I was not creating any real training stimulus. When Professor Seiler talks about the polarised model and the importance of keeping easy rides truly easy, I know exactly who he is describing. I was that rider. Riding easy felt like not training. So I did not do it.
Mistake number two: I let ego control my intensity. Every group ride became a race. Every easy day drifted into a moderate day because I could not handle seeing someone ride past me without responding. Recovery rides were Zone 2 for the first 20 minutes and then somebody attacked a hill and I went with them. The result was that I never actually recovered. My baseline state was always slightly fatigued. And when I showed up for a properly hard session — the kind that should have made me faster — I could never hit the numbers because I had already spent my matches chasing wheels on Tuesday.
Mistake number three: I ignored strength training. This is the one that annoys me the most because I was literally sitting across from coaches who were telling me to get in the gym, and I would nod, agree, and then not do it. The gym felt like time away from the bike, and I prioritised saddle time above everything. Years later, when I finally committed to two gym sessions a week, the difference was immediate. More power on climbs. More stability in the saddle. Fewer niggly injuries. All the things those coaches promised.
Mistake number four: I treated nutrition like a secondary concern. I underfuelled on rides because I thought riding hungry would make me leaner. I skipped post-ride protein because I could not be bothered making a shake. I tried to lose weight through restriction rather than through proper fuelling. When I finally got that right — when I started eating more of the right things rather than less of everything — I lost 7 kg in 12 weeks while eating more food than I had in years. My power did not drop. My energy went up.
The biggest mistake of all? Not asking for help sooner. I self-coached for too long, stuck in my own echo chamber, repeating the same patterns and expecting different results. An outside perspective — whether it is a coach, a structured plan, or a mate who tells you the truth — cuts through years of trial and error.
You do not need to make all these mistakes yourself. That is the whole point of this podcast.
Join the free Roadman community: https://www.skool.com/roadmancycling