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 masters riders, with more recovery built in than a younger rider’s schedule would carry, because after fifty the body recovers slower than it used to. Most of the work builds toward the repeated climbing and the technical descents, at a volume that leaves room to absorb the training, since arriving fit and uninjured is the harder half after fifty.
71 MI · ~4,000 FT CLIMBING · MIX OF MAINTAINED GRAVEL ROADS AND FOREST SERVICE ROADS · 12 WEEKS · 7–11 HR/WK · MASTERS 50+
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.