The Gravel Worlds Course Is Not an FTP Test, and Neither Is Your Saturday

A world championship on the far side of the planet

This weekend the UCI Gravel World Championships go to Nannup, Western Australia, the first time the rainbow jersey event has been held in the Southern Hemisphere (UCI). The elite women race first, on Saturday, October 10: 123.1 kilometers with 3,100 meters of climbing. The elite men follow on Sunday over 140.7 kilometers and 3,625 meters. Marianne Vos, the 2024 champion, is on the confirmed start list, along with Sofia Gomez Villafañe, Erica Magnaldi, and Australians Nicole Frain and Tiffany Cromwell (course and field summary).

We are not going to predict a winner here. Nobody reading this needs a pick. What is worth your attention is the shape of the day, because the shape of the day is the part most of us ignore when we decide how to train.

What the course actually asks

According to the published course description, the route is at least 80 percent gravel, opens with a 9 kilometer paved start, and then works through climbs of one to three kilometers at five to eight percent, with recovery sections of roughly fifteen to twenty minutes between them. Named climbs include Brockman and Ellis Creek, with Arcadia added for the men, and the race ends on a 27 kilometer loop around town with two more climbs in it.

Read that as a training prescription and it looks odd. It is not a steady threshold effort. It is not a criterium of constant surges either. It is a long ride with a handful of sustained pushes up hills, each one a few minutes to maybe a dozen (rough arithmetic: at gravel climbing speeds, one kilometer takes a few minutes, three kilometers takes ten or so, and your speeds will differ), separated by long stretches where you are supposed to be eating, drinking, and getting your legs back.

Two hours or more of that, repeated, is a different animal from the thing most of us test.

The 20-minute number is a lens, not the course

Most of us carry one number around: FTP, often estimated from the best 20 minutes of a ride or a test, scaled down by the usual 5 percent. It is a useful anchor. Zones hang off it, and so does most of the structured work in a plan. This blog has no quarrel with it.

The quarrel is with treating it as a prediction of how a day like Saturday goes. A course made of repeated short climbs mostly asks three other questions:

• How hard can you go for three to ten minutes, and can you do it again after a stretch of easy riding?
• How much does that ability fade after two hours, then three?
• How well do you recover on the flat between climbs, when the only thing separating a good second half from a bad one is whether you ate enough and kept the effort honest?

Your 20-minute best says something about the first question on a fresh day. It says very little about the second and nothing about the third. That is not a flaw in FTP. It is the limit of a single number from a single kind of effort.

Who rides the first climb hardest

Here is the take, and you are free to disagree with it: on a course like this, most of the damage is done by the first climb, not the last one.

The first climb comes when you feel good, the group is fast, and the gap between what you can do for five minutes and what you should do is widest. A climb of a few minutes at a pace that feels almost comfortable when fresh is a withdrawal from an account that has to cover the next two hours. Nobody sees the bill until the third or fourth climb, when the same wattage feels like a different sport.

Most of us have done this on a group ride. It shows up at the shop stop: you look strong for the first hour and then spend the second hour doing arithmetic about how far you are from the car.

The fix is boring and it is a pacing decision, not a fitness one: decide before the start what the first climbs will cost, and hold to it when the wheel in front of you leaves. That is easy to write and hard to do, and it is why the people who win these days are usually the ones who look unhurried through the middle.

Training for the shape, not just the number

You do not need a world championship to take something from this. A Saturday group gravel ride with five or six decent climbs and a coffee stop in the middle has the same structure at a lower volume. If that is the ride you actually care about, here is how to make training resemble it, framed as common coaching practice and not as a law:

Do repeated efforts with honest recoveries. Several blocks of roughly the length of your longest local climbs, with easy riding between them, builds the specific ability to go again. A single long interval trains something related but different.

Put some of them late. Doing the same set after a couple of hours of steady riding is the closest you can get to the race shape without the race. It is also where you find out whether your fuelling works, which is not a separate topic.

Treat the fade as a fuelling question first. The corpus this app coaches from holds a firm position on this: the ride that falls apart in hour four is more often a carbohydrate problem than an aerobic one, and taking carbohydrate at the rate a long day demands is a skill you rehearse in long sessions, not something you improvise on race day. Prescribing more intervals to someone who simply ran out of fuel trains the wrong thing.

Ride easy days easy. The long recovery sections on that course exist for a reason. If every ride in your week is secretly medium, you arrive at the repeated efforts with nothing to repeat.

Where the app fits, and where it does not

A few honest connections to what Training Signals does, and none of them are magic.

If your head unit records a measured normalized power, the ride's variability index shows how surgy or steady it was. For a course like this, that number is the closest thing to a fingerprint of the day: a steady 3 x 10 on a trainer and a rolling gravel ride with short climbs look nothing alike on it, even when average power is similar. It is only there when your source measures normalized power, and the app leaves it blank rather than inventing a stand-in.

The best-effort power on a ride covers the best 1, 5, 20, and 60 minutes, worked out from the ride's own second-by-second power. That matters here because the five-minute window is the one that tells you about the climbs, not the 20. Whether a ride has it depends on where it came from: Hammerhead Karoo, RunGap, and an uploaded .fit file carry it in the file, a Wahoo ride needs full ride detail switched on, and Apple Health rides never will.

And if you ride a Saturday gravel loop that is nothing like a world championship, the plan does not care. The app treats general fitness as a real goal with its own coaching model built around consistency and sustainability, not a lesser version of event training.

The honest limitations

This is one columnist's read of a course description, not a race analysis. We have not ridden Nannup, we do not know the conditions on the day, and the published figures for the climbs describe a route that can change. Elite women and elite men will ride it very differently from the rest of us, and a world championship is decided by tactics, equipment, and luck as much as by anything in a training log.

Nothing here is medical or fuelling advice for your body. How much you eat on a long ride is individual, and a sports dietitian is the right person to ask. The corpus position above is a coaching rule of thumb, not a prescription.

And the training suggestions are general practice, not a plan. If a block of repeated efforts after long rides sounds like too much for where you are, it probably is, and the plan for you is whatever you can recover from.

The takeaway

Look at the shape of the thing you are training for before you look at your number. If the day is repeated short climbs with long gaps, train for repeating, pace the first climb like it is the last, and treat the fade at hour three as a question about what you ate. Then watch the rainbow jersey get decided on Saturday with a slightly different eye: not who has the biggest number, but who still has it on the fourth climb.