River City Gravel Fondo is 71 miles with roughly 4,000 feet of climbing on a mix of maintained gravel and forest service roads, with technical descents and variable surface quality. Rain is possible year-round, though the forest cover offers some protection.
This is a twelve-week plan for riders chasing a result, built around the higher weekly hours that racing takes rather than just covering the distance. The volume is higher and the hard days more specific, because a result here comes from riding the repeated climbing and the technical descents at pace, not just getting through them.
71 MI · ~4,000 FT CLIMBING · MIX OF MAINTAINED GRAVEL ROADS AND FOREST SERVICE ROADS · 12 WEEKS · 9–13 HR/WK · COMPETE
WHAT'S INSIDE
- Structured workouts on your calendar, with real power and heart-rate graphs
- Strength work built in, with video walkthroughs
- Weekly notes from me, plus the Gravel Grit mental program
- A testing week and a mid-plan retest, so the plan runs on your real numbers
- The full River City Gravel Fondo guide — terrain, gearing, fueling
Hey! I'm Matti - also known as the Gravel God himself!
If you're into gravel racing and want to be as fast as possible, you had better choose me!
Why?
Because I'm the fastest, least talented person to ever ride a bike. I've made every mistake in the book so you don't have to and I'm here to save you years of failure and struggle.
When I'm not helping my athletes get faster on a bike I write obvious, overlooked training content that makes cycling training easy to understand.