There is a type of athlete who has ticked every box in triathlon. They have done the Iron Man, they know how to suffer, and they are not afraid of a big day out. At some point they discover gravel racing or ultra mountain biking, and they assume their fitness will carry them through. It does not. At least, not in the way they expect.

Dave Schell has been coaching endurance athletes for fifteen years. These days he works predominantly with gravel and mountain bike athletes targeting events like Unbound, Leadville and similar long-course ultra events. What he sees again and again is that fitness is rarely the limiting factor. Something else is letting people down.

The FTP trap

Cyclists hear it constantly: FTP, FTP, FTP. The assumption is that if the number goes up, performance follows. Dave coaches an athlete right now with an FTP of 350 watts, a genuinely strong number. He was riding at the front of groups but losing time in every corner, and picking up crashes. The goal before his last event was not a power target. It was simply to stay on the bike.

They did a skills day. The improvement was immediate. All that fitness had been sitting there, unable to express itself, because the technical foundation was not there to support it. Dave describes it as a teeter-totter: fitness and skill take turns being the limiter, and the job of the coach is to work out which side is currently holding the athlete back.

For most triathletes crossing into gravel or mountain bike, it is skill. Every time.

Listen to the podcast with Dave Schell - Your FTP won't save you at mile 150​

You have to ride the bike you will race

This seems obvious. It is not, apparently. Dave regularly speaks to athletes who have done the bulk of their preparation on a road bike, reasoning that fitness is fitness and the legs do not know the difference. He understands the logic. He disagrees with it entirely.

Six hours on a gravel bike on technical terrain does something to the body that road riding simply cannot replicate. The hands, the wrists, the shoulders absorb constant vibration and micro-corrections. The core is working differently. The neuromuscular demands of loose surfaces, awkward gearing and variable terrain are specific to being off-road, and the only way to prepare for them is to be off-road, regularly, in as many different conditions as possible.

If the first time your tyres move beneath you is during the race, you are in trouble. That sensation of controlled instability needs to be familiar. You have to have made the mistake, corrected it, and learned from it, before the race makes the decision for you.

Building for the distance that actually matters

For an event like Unbound, Dave programmes at least six months of preparation. The structure is familiar to any periodised athlete: a base phase building aerobic capacity, a build phase transferring that fitness into race-specific work, then a peak phase dialling in the demands of the event itself.

What is different from triathlon is where the race is actually won and lost. In a 200-mile gravel race, the decisive hours are not the first two. They are hours eight, ten, twelve. After that point, Dave says, everyone regresses towards the same pace. The aerobic base you have built determines how high that ceiling sits when everything else has been stripped away.

The training implications are straightforward but uncomfortable. Long rides at genuine endurance pace. Big gear work to condition the muscles for sustained torque. Back-to-back days to build the resilience that no single session can create. None of it is exciting. All of it is necessary.

I can speak to this personally. I had the aerobic fitness for long off-road days, but for a long time my body would be genuinely battered after five or six hours on rough terrain. Not just tired. Beaten up. The kind of fatigue that settled into the joints and soft tissue and took days to shift. What changed it was not more riding. It was a diligent, consistent commitment to mobility work, strength training and getting a proper bike fit. Those three things together transformed what had been a structural problem into something far more manageable. Now a long hard day in the saddle produces expected fatigue rather than damage. That distinction matters enormously when you are trying to build week on week and stay consistent across a season.

The mental piece nobody talks about

Dave is direct about this. There will be a voice during a long ultra event telling you to stop. It will be persuasive, it will find evidence, and it will get louder as the hours pass. The athletes who finish are not necessarily the most talented. They are the ones who have already had a conversation with that voice and know they can ignore it.

In reality, preparation for that mental challenge comes from the same place as everything else in training: exposure. You learn to manage the dark patches by having been in dark patches before. This is one of the reasons Dave tells every athlete he works with to sign up for something that genuinely scares them every year. If there is no possibility of failure, the training will not produce what the race demands.

What this looks like in practice

Dave's summary for triathletes considering the switch is precise. Learn to ride in a group. Get used to your specific bike and how it handles off-road. Experiment with tyre pressure in different conditions. Let go of the control mindset that triathlon rewards, because off-road, fighting the terrain always ends badly. And above all else, be consistent.

His tagline at Kaizen Endurance is carry water, chop wood. The work does not change. You just keep doing it.

COACHING INSIGHT

I see this all the time. Athletes come from triathlon with excellent fitness and a genuine capacity for suffering, but they have spent years in a sport that rewards control, precision and predictability. Gravel and mountain bike demand the opposite. The athlete who can let the bike move beneath them, accept that things will go wrong, and keep going anyway, is the athlete who finishes. That is not a fitness quality. It is a durability quality. And it is absolutely trainable.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• FTP is rarely the limiting factor in gravel and MTB ultra events. Skill, body position and technical confidence are usually the low-hanging fruit, and improving them produces free speed without an extra hour of training.
• Race-specific preparation means riding the bike you will race, on the terrain you will race, in conditions that make you uncomfortable. Road miles build fitness. Off-road miles build readiness.
• The decisive factor in events lasting eight to twelve hours is not peak power. It is the aerobic base that determines your floor when fatigue strips everything else away. Build that foundation early, and build it consistently.

If you are making the transition from triathlon into gravel or ultra cycling, the Battle Ready SWAT programme gives you the durability foundation that long-course off-road racing demands. Find out more at by clicking the link below:

Thanks for being part of the tribe. I’m here to help you stay Battle Ready! Simon