Welcome to the Ask a Cycling Coach podcast. You're jumping halfway in. Usually before we record, we have these chats and sometimes these chats go longer than others. Hannah, you and I, and this is Hannah Otto, by the way. So Scott Bikes, competitive cyclists, Pearl Azumi, the whole team that supports Hannah. Hannah, it's good to have you on. We just, we were talking about training plans because here at Train Road, no, it's no secret. We've been working on a lot of new things here. I was just giving Hannah all the behind the scenes updates. So don't go to her Instagram and ask her for what those updates are. She's sworn to secrecy. But we're talking about them. And we're talking about training volume and how complicated it is. What we see is that

athletes when they routinely do long rides, like when I say long rides, like four of is

hour plus rides on the weekends, if you were to run like a glide path, like if any of you

play with like investment software or something and it's like you increase your contribution and then you see that by the time you retire, you get to a higher point. It's kind of like one of those things. And if you were to look at that for athletes that routinely do long rides, not all of them, not Hannah's, not Sophia's and Melisa's and like all these, you know, insanely good athletes. But the average folks,

when you look at it, more often than not, when they do those long rides, they end up at a lower

point by the end on their glide path. And Hannah, you coach athletes, you've dealt with this a lot.

I think that from the outside in, especially because gravel racing is so big and it's all so

long and everything else, everybody has this opinion that they need to be doing an eight-hour ride

prior to Leadville because that's what their time goal is. Do you bump into this? Like, how do you

manage it? And do you, what do you see the outcomes this is like the hardest most

frustrating conversation maybe not most frustrating but very difficult delicate conversation as a coach

because i think you know as a coach i'm balancing two things one i want you to line up the fittest and strongest you can be. And I also

want you to line up with the strongest confidence you can have. And for some reason, these two things

don't always seem to go together. And the long ride conversation is the one that seems to always get in the way.

So when someone's training for Unbound, inevitably always at some point in the plan, somebody comes

with, well, haven't done a ride X amount. Everyone has a different number in their mind, but it's

usually beyond what we need to do. So, you know,

beyond six hours. Like, well, I haven't done an eight hour ride or 10 hour ride or whatever it might be. And I just don't feel confident because I haven't done that and I don't know. And am I going to do it? And this man and the other. And I reassure them, you know, we reassure them. like it's going to be okay.

We save that for race day.

Well, but the confidence and I really need to I reassure them, you know, we reassure them, like, it's going to be okay. We save that for race day.

Well, but the confidence and I really need to know. And so eventually it's like, okay, as a coach,

I'm balancing the confidence factor. If this athlete really feels like they need to do it,

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