At the beginning of every year, TrainingPeaks Co-Founder Dirk Friel and team head to Spain to meet up with the top cycling teams in the world. It’s when we validate our product roadmap with the world’s top coaches and athletes, ensuring that the features we’re working on will make the biggest impact for both pros and everyday athletes and coaches. Here’s what 2026 looked like.
The Pro Scene: Why Calpe?
Calpe is often described as the “Major League Baseball Spring Training” of cycling. During December and January, a majority of the World Tour teams are concentrated within a 50km radius. Cycling fans can sit at a local cafe, like Café Seamos, and see World Tour pro cycling legends like Mathieu van der Poel to Remco Evenepoel, and Kasia Niewiadoma to Demi Vollering sip on their daily espresso.
Calpe seems like a cycling Disneyland, with a beautiful, flowy coastal road and quiet valley roads just a few miles inland. The terrain attracts such a who’s who of pro riders that you can simply ride the famous Coll de Rates climb and be passed by dozens of pros on any given day of the week.
TrainingPeaks Product Development at the Highest Level
I traveled with our Product Manager, our Director of Data, a Data Scientist, our Partnerships Manager, and our Videographer to capture the experience and, more importantly, gather the “Voice of the Customer.” We met with 13 partner teams to validate our roadmap and ensure our newest features hit the mark.
We focused heavily on our Beta Analyze View, which now displays comprehensive data from .fit files, including CORE body temperature, gear selection, and respiration rate. We also debuted our custom overlap charts, allowing users to overlay multiple channels on a single graph. Our new torque calculations were a particular hit, as torque is a critical target for specific pro-level workouts.
By giving these teams early access to Climb Detection and Interval Detection, we are stress-testing our algorithms with the world’s best athletes to refine the experience for our entire global community. It was also a highlight to see teams using TrainingPeaks Virtual for testing, with avatars sporting their official team kits.
Building the Future of American Cycling
Following Calpe, we headed to Girona to meet with the new American squad, Modern Adventure Pro Cycling. Led by George and Rich Hincapie with Bobby Julich as Head of Performance, the team is dedicated to developing American talent—a focus we haven’t seen at this scale in decades. It was a personal highlight to catch up with old friends I haven’t seen since our junior racing days 40 years ago.
Finally, we met with the head coach of the Spanish National Skimo Team. With Ski Mountaineering making its Olympic debut, Spain is a gold-medal favorite. It has been rewarding to see how they’ve leveraged TrainingPeaks to build a world-class program from the ground up.
By validating our tools with the world’s best, we ensure that every update we roll out provides the same precision and insight to your coaching business.
