The climb is the most honest thing in cycling.
No draft. No tactic to lean on. No bunch to hide in.
The road tilts up, and within ninety seconds, every story you've been telling yourself about your own fitness gets audited in real time.
Most amateurs assume they get dropped because they aren't fit enough.
They're wrong.
They get dropped because they make the same five decisions, on every climb, that the rider in front of them doesn't.
Climbing isn't a power problem. It's a decision problem stacked on top of a power problem. Fix the decisions and the engine you already own travels twice as far.
Three of those decisions, right now.
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1. How you start.
Adrenaline tells you to match the surge at the bottom. Your ego agrees.
Two minutes in, you feel strong. Four minutes in, you're in oxygen debt. Six minutes in, you're watching wheels drift away.
Wiggins built a career on the opposite of this. He rode the climb, not the riders. He set his pace and let the field come back to him.
Ride the first third of every climb at 5% under your target power. It will feel too easy. That's the signal you're doing it right.
The riders who passed you at the bottom — you'll start collecting them in the second half.
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2. What gear you're in.
The amateur instinct is to grind. Big gear. Heavy load. Cadence dropping toward 60 rpm. Quads filling with lactate by the third pedal stroke.
The pros sit between 75 and 90 rpm on sustained climbs.
Not because it looks pretty. Because it shifts the workload off the muscles and onto the aerobic system. The aerobic system can hold a load for hours. The muscles can't.
Next climb, drop one gear easier than instinct says. If your cadence feels too high, you're probably in the right place for the first time in years.
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3. What you say to yourself in your own head.
This is the one nobody trains. It's also the one that costs the most.
The voice in your head decides you're done before your legs do. It calculates the suffering ahead, panics, and quits in advance.
Stop thinking about the top of the climb. The top doesn't exist yet.
Break the climb into thirty-second blocks. When the voice says you can't hold the pace, ask if you can hold it for thirty more seconds. The answer is almost always yes. Then ask again.
That's how the mental game gets won. One small commitment at a time, until the climb runs out before you do.
—
Three decisions down. Two left.
The other two — your power-to-weight, and your position on the bike — are bigger reframes than one email can hold. So I wrote them up properly here:
Five decisions. All of them fixable.
Most cyclists won't fix any of them. They'll go on blaming their FTP forever.
You're not most cyclists.
— Anthony
ps mark your diary we have a girona road training camp coming up (October 10th -15th) and gravel one in Girona (16th -21st). Details will be announced next week