An Alpine col is a sustained effort that can last well over an hour. No rest, no freewheeling, no flat to recover on. Pacing it is the whole game. Get it right and you reach the summit tired but in control, with enough left to enjoy the descent. Get it wrong and you spend the last half hour in survival mode, paying for a mistake you made in the first ten.

This is the method we coach on every trip. It works with a power meter, a heart rate monitor, or nothing but your own breathing.

The one rule. Hold your effort, let your speed change

Most riders pace by speed without realising it. They settle on a pace that feels right, or sit on a wheel, and try to hold it when the road steepens. The effort goes through the roof. The legs fill with lead. Then the road eases, the speed creeps back up, and the recovery never comes.

Do the opposite. Pick a sustainable effort and hold that, letting your speed do whatever the gradient says. At the same effort you might ride 12 km/h on a 6% stretch and 7 km/h on a 10% ramp. That’s not slowing down. That’s pacing.

It sounds obvious written down. On the road, with riders around you and your ego on the handlebars, it’s one of the hardest disciplines in cycling. It’s also the one that gets you up a mountain.

Find your sustainable effort

On a long col you’re after the effort you could hold for an hour or more. Call it 7 out of 10. Working, but not straining.

If you ride with power, you’ll have a number for that. If you ride with heart rate, you’ll have a zone, though heart rate lags behind your effort and drifts upward in the heat, so treat it as a guide rather than a law. The most reliable anchor needs no electronics at all. Your breathing.

• Full sentences, comfortably. All-day pace. Fine for the valley, too easy for the climb.
• A sentence at a time, between breaths. Your climbing effort. Live here.
• Single words. Too hard for a long col. Ease off before the climb does it for you.
• Can’t speak. You’re racing. On a col, you’re about to pay.

We give riders these anchors because gadgets fail and batteries die. Your breathing is always switched on.

The first ten minutes decide the last twenty

Every col punishes the same mistake. You arrive fresh. The adrenaline is up, the legs feel superb, and the opening kilometres feel insultingly easy at a sensible effort. So you push.

Fresh legs are liars. The effort that feels easy at minute five is the one that buries you at minute fifty. And the debt never shows up where you borrowed it. It shows up near the top, where the views are best and the gradient often isn’t.

So ride the first ten minutes like you’re slightly embarrassed by how easy you’re going. If you reach the top and you honestly had more to give, you’ve lost a minute or two. Start too hard and blow up, and you’ll lose ten, and enjoy none of them.

The first climb of the Marmotte Granfondo is the Col du Glandon. It’s over 26km long and gains more than 1300 vertical metres. With thousands of riders around you and the adrenaline running high, it’s very easy to get carried away.

The first time I rode it, that’s exactly what I did. I went far too hard at the start and paid for it later. It was a painful lesson, but one I’ve never forgotten.

These days I do almost the opposite. I deliberately rein myself in at the start of a long climb. For the first 7–8km, far more riders pass me than I pass myself. That’s often just the excitement and adrenaline talking.

At the time, it can feel like you’re going backwards. Experience has taught me that the riders disappearing up the road in the first few kilometres are often the same riders you start catching again near the top.

As the climb goes on, things start to change. By the final kilometres I’m usually passing riders again rather than being passed. More importantly, I still have something left for the climbs that come later.

The hardest part of pacing isn’t fitness. It’s having the discipline to let people ride away from you when you know you’ll see many of them again later.

Good pacing rarely feels impressive in the first few kilometres. You will benefit much later on.

Read the road, because averages lie

A climb that averages 7% is almost never 7% for long. It’s 5% through the village, 10% past the waterfall, a false flat by the meadow, 9% through the hairpins. Two things follow.

First, ease over the steep ramps rather than attacking them. Hold your effort and let the ramp slow you down. Charge it and you’ll spend the next five minutes paying it back.

Second, use the road signs. On many French cols a marker every kilometre tells you the distance to the summit and the average gradient of the kilometre ahead. That’s your plan, posted at the roadside. Steep kilometre coming, settle in and eat first. Gentle one, recover, or press a little.

One more, for the hairpins. The inside of a hairpin is much steeper than the outside. When the road is clear and it’s safe to, swing to the outside through the bend and keep your rhythm, rather than stalling on the steep inside line.

When to push

If you’ve paced the climb well, the last fifteen to twenty minutes is where you spend what you’ve saved. You can see the summit, you know nothing is left to surprise you, and a strong finish costs you nothing tomorrow. Lift the effort a notch, no gear-grinding lunges, and roll over the top in control.

That feeling, finishing a col strong instead of saved by it, is what good pacing buys. It’s also what makes you want to do the next one.

How we coach it

Pacing is a skill you learn by doing it with feedback, not by reading about it. On our trips it works like this. In the morning, we plan the day’s climbs and agree on your effort bands, in power, heart rate or breathing, whatever you ride with. On the road, a coach climbs alongside you, catching the surges you don’t notice you’re making. In the evening, we review how the climb actually went and what to change tomorrow. Plan, ride, review. By the end of the week, you’re doing it without us. That’s the point.

Keep reading

Your first Alpine col: what to expect

Plan your trip

Pacing is easier to learn on the road than off it, and our coached Alpine weeks are built around exactly this. Get in touch, and we’ll talk about where your riding is and which trip fits.