Here's a pattern I see every single summer. A rider trains brilliantly through winter and spring, hits race season lean and flying — and then, over the next three months, the weight creeps back on. Not from bingeing. Not from laziness. While racing. It feels unfair, and it makes no sense until you look at what race season actually does to your training load.
Key Takeaways
The core of it is a quiet calorie mismatch. Your biggest training weeks are behind you by the time racing starts. What replaces them is tapers, race-week freshening, travel days, recovery days — a calendar that burns meaningfully less energy than the block that got you fit. But your eating doesn't get the memo. The portions, the snacks, the extra slice at the café stop: all of it was calibrated to twelve-hour weeks, and it carries on through six-hour weeks without a second thought.
A couple of hundred surplus calories a day is invisible on any given Tuesday. Across a fourteen-week race season it's a couple of kilos, arriving exactly when you wanted to be at your leanest and fastest.
The fix is not a diet. That's the part of this episode I'd underline twice. Slashing intake in-season is how you turn a body-composition annoyance into a performance problem — flat legs, poor recovery, and the genuine health risks that come with chronically under-fuelling hard training. The fix is matching food to the work: carbohydrate scaled to the day, protein consistent every day, and hard sessions fuelled properly without exception.
The Mismatch Nobody Notices
Think about what your calendar actually looks like once racing starts. The Tuesday-night crit is an hour of hard racing — a fraction of the energy cost of the three-hour block session it replaced. Race week means easing off from Thursday. The weekend away for a road race means two travel days bracketing ninety minutes of effort. None of these are mistakes; they're exactly what good race preparation looks like. Fresh is fast.
But add up the week and you've gone from perhaps 4,000–5,000 kilojoules of riding to half that, while breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything in between stayed identical. Your appetite doesn't self-correct as neatly as you'd hope, either — habit and routine drive intake far more than actual energy need does.
That's the whole mechanism. No moral failing, no broken metabolism. Just a season-long mismatch between what the training demands and what the habits deliver.
Fuel For The Work Required
The framework that solves this is one we've gone deep on before with Dr James Morton: fuel for the work required. The idea is that carbohydrate — your main energy lever — should track the day in front of you, not a fixed daily template.
A hard race day or a big training day gets fuelled fully: carbs before, during and after, no hedging. An easy spin or a rest day doesn't need the same plate, so carbohydrate comes down — smaller portions of rice, pasta, bread; fewer riding snacks, because there's less riding. You're not weighing food or logging every gram. You're building two or three day-templates — hard day, easy day, rest day — and matching the right one to the calendar.
Protein is the constant in all of this. It stays high and steady every single day, because recovery and muscle preservation don't take rest days. The dial that moves is carbohydrate; the foundation that doesn't is protein.
The Under-Fuelling Trap
Here's where riders get this badly wrong. They spot the weight gain, panic, and cut everything — including the fuelling around their hardest sessions. Now the Tuesday crit is run on fumes, the weekend race feels flat, recovery drags, and within a month they're slower and no leaner, because the training that drives adaptation has been quietly gutted.
Chronic under-fuelling isn't a shortcut; it's a tax on everything you care about. Poor recovery, declining power, disrupted sleep, illness — the whole cascade we've discussed with World Tour nutritionists across this podcast. If the choice is between carrying an extra kilo and under-fuelling your key sessions, the extra kilo wins every time. Fortunately, that's a false choice. Periodised fuelling gives you both: protected performance and a body composition that trends the right way.
What This Means For Your Riding
Start with an honest look at your current week versus your biggest spring week. If your load has dropped 30–40% and your eating hasn't changed, you've found the leak.
Then build your day-templates. Hard days: fuel properly, before, during, after — this is non-negotiable. Easy days: trim the carbs, keep the protein, skip the riding snacks you're not riding enough to need. Rest days: the same again, a little further. And leave race week alone — carb-loading before an event that matters is doing its job, even when the scale twitches.
The goal, always, is your best racing form. The scale is a lagging, noisy indicator. Power, freshness and how you feel in the final hour of a race are the real scoreboard.
If you're doing the training and the results still aren't coming — weight, power or both — the Plateau Diagnostic is built to find where the system is leaking. Three minutes, free, and it looks at fuelling alongside training and recovery.
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For the full framework behind this episode, Dr James Morton on fuel for the work required is the definitive conversation. What 99% get wrong about weight gain tackles the psychology and physiology of the scale itself. And if you're managing all this past 40, nutrition for the masters cyclist covers how the rules shift with age.
Want to work through your own fuelling with people who actually train seriously? That's what the Roadman community is for.