Hi! My 2027 goal is to do longer mountain bike rides- endurance races. How many endurance races should I put on the calendar next year? How many races should I do?
Also, I’m training for a 40-mile bike race in November. I’m using the cross-country marathon as the race type. Is this the best choice?
@Becksta you’ve got two primary options…depending on what your goals are. When I was doing 12+ hour races, 5 or 6 races through the spring/summer/fall season was usually my target. Even though that produced a lot of podium finishes & several victories, it’s probably not the best way to maximize performance. I just did it because for me racing was the fun part…so that’s an approach to maximize the fun.
One year I limited the schedule to just two races, a ‘b’ race in the spring and an ‘a’ race in the late summer. Those were probably my biggest victories, course records, jersey, RAAM qualified, etc. But slogging through a lot of training between races & sometimes asking, ‘Why am I doing this?’
So, if you just have fun racing & want to get after it: 5 or 6 races. If you want to maximize performance: one shakedown race & one ‘A’ race. That’s my experience.
How many races did you do this year?
This past year (2026), I did 8 XC races and then a weekly Wednesday night race series. All of these were faster and about 10 miles and under. This year I was thinking of maybe doing 3-4 endurance races but I wasn’t sure if that was too much.
Endurance races are a large spectrum - what length races are you planning on doing?
These are great points!! I think I want more experience in endurance races, so maybe it’s ok if I do more than 1-2.
40-65 mile races
Those aren’t probably crazy exhaustive. You could do a good number of these throughout the year. I think most important is to try and make sure you are recovering from each. I wouldn’t schedule back to back weekends with races. But I would have no problem scheduling one of these per month for your main racing months. I think 5 - 6 is easily doable.
I don’t think 3-4 would be too much, but I would follow @Brennus approach in that some of these should B or prep races for a bigger goal. You’ll learn how to pace the longer events, nutrition, how you recover etc…
Race pace can be pretty draining, and also factor in travel, ride preparation. Even a “B” event most people still get caught up in the excitement and end up going all out. They are fun though!
Before every season I usually have on A race that lands in the first half of the year and I build towards that. I like to include as many practice races as is practicll leading up to that event and will assign them a B or C level of importance. My A races have always been in either middle of March or April which allows me to get started with my base in November or December. I like this approach because I may not be as motivated to race later in the year and if something happens before my A race, I’ve had other opportunities to compete and hopefully have a good result.
Once my A race is over, I can decide on what to do next based on what I’m interested in. I think if you take this approach you can get a good number of races in, maybe one a month or so and that will allow you train enough while also competing. I’ve decided not to do some races that have been planned because of cost, distance, logistics, etc. I hope that makes sense.
How much of the year do you want to race? How well do you want to do? What is your recovery from your races like, have you tested it?
This spring I did 12 race days in 5 weeks. I’ve also done 30+ races over a single season. If you had 50 race days in a season then I would say you are probably doing too much, but most of us probably can’t find enough races to get to that point. Go have fun and don’t worry about trying to hit a perfect peak for 1 or 2 races.
Similar approach here. The last 3 years, my A race was Unbound 200 in late may/early june. I’ll race quite a bit from march through may with events that vary from 3-8+ hours with Unbound being an 11-12 hour race. So, none of those B/C races are really putting me in a fatigue hole as much as training my nutrition, race dynamics, etc. The only exception is that I’ll do a big week about a month out from Unbound with the week ending with a 2 day stage race (at the end of a big block with a month to absorb and shed fatigue). Final prep race is 2 weeks prior to unbound and 8+ hours and 400+ TSS, but I don’t go too deep at that race and it’s more about tuning up for Unbound than it is about results. And that’s pretty much the story of my early season. Race quite a bit because it’s fun, but prioritize the training aspect to support my A event rather than worrying about results.
I know people who stack multiple long races on their calendar throughout the season and perform well, but it takes everything I have to put 100% into one of these long races each year. It’s really the mental strain that I’d struggle to sustain as much as the physical side. I’ve done Leadville ~2 months after Unbound the last few years and I train for it, but it’s not 100% “all in” like I am for Unbound. It’s really just riding out the base fitness I built for Unbound. If I wanted to optimize for Leadville, I don’t think I could peak for Unbound prior to that.
I tend to use the local endurance series (xcm and marathon gravel) as long training days with friends. I struggle in a pack so a lot of those gravel rides are soloish efforts wth me keeping an eye on my power/HR. Same as my XCM races for that matter. like grwoolf above I agree that peaking for both unbound and leadville is unrealistic for me. I peaked for unbound, and then did some speacialized rides heading into leadville. This has worked for me.