- We've discussed quite a few times recently on the channel
whether being a pro cyclist these days is actually easier
than it was in the past.
And one thing that gets brought
up time and time again is
that modern training methods just aren't quite
as epic as they used to be.
Back in the days of Fausto Coppi,
Eddie Merckx, and Bernard Hinaut,
riders would head out on literally hundreds
of kilometre training rides day after day.
And on these epic rides,
they would include some frankly insane
and brutal training methods as well.
So I felt oddly inspired to give it a go myself.
(intense music)
(music lessens in intensity)
If you're gonna an epic old school training session,
you might as well attempt one from one
of the greatest cyclists of all time, Fausto Coppi.
If you're not familiar with Fausto Coppi,
here's a very brief history lesson.
His nickname was Il Campionissimo,
the champion of champions.
And if that doesn't already tell you enough,
check out his palmares, five-time Giro D'Italia winner,
two-time Tour de France winner,
five-time Il Lombarida winner,
three-time Milan-San Remo winner,
world road race champion,
and a Paris Roubaix win in there as well,
along with many, many others.
And if that doesn't sound astounding, factor in
that when Coppi should have been hitting the best form
of his career, the Second World War broke out,
effectively robbing him, and everyone else,
of his six greatest years of his career.
The thing that defined Coppi though was
how he would win the races.
Another pro at the time, Rafael Geminiani,
once famously claimed that you didn't need a stopwatch
to measure the gap to second place,
you could use the clock on a church tower.
Such were his margins of victory.
And once Coppi had attacked,
the rest of the race would rarely see him again.
But how did he get so strong?
We think we may have found the answer
in one of his favourite training sessions.
It's not a complicated session,
but its brutality lies very much within its simplicity.
Coppi would ride solo for 150 kilometres
before meeting up with a group of strong amateurs
and asking them to relentlessly attack him
for a further 100 kilometres.
It sounds awful, doesn't it?
And that's where I become a guinea pig again
because I get to try it out.
(intense rock music)
Fausto Coppi was from the Piedmont area of Italy,
where you had a good mixture of flat roads
on the plains to the north, or a slightly hillier ride
if you headed south towards the coast.
With this in mind, I've tried
to replicate something similar using the app komoot.
Now you may have heard
of one of Fausto Coppi's most famous training quotes,
"Ride your bike, ride your bike, ride your bike."
And it turns out, he wasn't referring
to riding mile and mile on end, he was actually referring
to the specificity of his training.
Basically, if you want to get good
at doing one thing, do that one thing a lot.
And if you think about how a bike race often pans out,
steady at the start before a gradual ramp up
in intensity, lots of attacking and a lack of control,
Fausto Coppi's epic training session starts
to make quite a bit of sense.
As to the length of these training rides,
well it's important to remember
that races back then were quite a bit longer
than they are now.
Take for example the 1947 Giro D'Italia
that Fausto Coppi won.
Nine of those stages were over 200 kilometres in length.
And three of those were over 260 kilometres.
So a pro back then did need to focus on their long rides.
And that's quite different to how pros train today.
These days it is actually rare for a pro to train much more
than five hours day after day after day.
Instead, with the advancements in training knowledge,
structured intervals are the focus
and it's rare for a pro to do much more
than three to four hours on a daily basis.
So I'm coming to the end of the first part of my ride now,
which I've got to be honest is really weird.
150 kilometres would be a really long ride
for me these days, so the idea
of adding another 100 kilometres is a bit daunting.
And they're gonna attack me for the entire ride.
We put a call out to a few local riders
for help for the next part of this video.
But, because it's the middle of the week
and we're in the middle of nowhere,
we've ended up with a pro, an ex-pro,
and what looks like an aerodynamic specialist.
Look at his bars if you don't know what I mean.
They've agreed quite happily to attack me
for the next 100 kilometres.
This part of the ride I think is deceptively clever
because depending on what sort of session I want to have,
I can choose to respond to the attacks straight away,
giving me a sprint workout,
or I can drag out the efforts for 10 to 20 minutes
and slowly reel them all back in,
creating more of a threshold type workout.
Let's see how it goes.
(upbeat rock music)
So that brings me onto my next point.
This isn't just a physical workout.
It's also a mental workout as well.
And more specifically, it's a tactical workout.
And the reason for this is I need
to constantly make the calculation
as to what sort of rider is attacking me.
If they're a time trialist,
I cannot afford to let them get a gap.
I have to sprint and get straight
on top of it and shut down their effort.
Otherwise, I'm gonna be chasing for a long, long time.
And conversely, if there was a sprinter attacking,
I don't need to get on it straight away.
I can reel them back in
with my superior time trial strength myself.
And that makes it very, very specific,
constantly analysing the situation
that's changing on the road.
If you compare that to modern training methods,
pros these days have to think
about something completely different,
power numbers and perhaps uploading a GPX route
to their head unit.
And I think it's that form of concentration
that makes Fausto Coppi's training ride so demanding.
For example, speak to any pro
after a really tough, aggressive race,
and they'll tell you it wasn't just physically fatiguing
but also mentally fatiguing.
Fausto Coppi replicated that perfectly
with this epic training session.
(upbeat rock music)
So was training really harder in the past?
Well, even if you can't tell,
after a couple of cups of coffee,
I'm still completely exhausted.
I had to go super deep, especially
in the second half of that ride.
But was the ride actually any harder
than a modern training session?
Well, looking at my power numbers, the answer is simply no.
At no point did I exceed any of the numbers I'd see
on a normal training session.
But that's not really a surprise,
considering I did have to ride
for nearly twice the duration.
But then again, riding 250 kilometres
on its own is a big effort
and takes some serious consideration.
And that's before you factor in all those attacks
that are to follow in the second half.
In the end, it's horses for courses.
If as a modern cyclist, I train for races back in the '50s,
there's no way I would have been competitive.
I simply wouldn't have had the endurance to keep up.
And likewise, if a 1950s rider was
to train for modern races, they'd barely be warmed up
by the time the race had finished
and wouldn't have the intensity
in their legs to be competitive.
If you enjoyed this video, give it a big thumbs up.
Before you go though,
check out Ollie's Iceland epic just down there.