1) Super High Carb 2) Cut the fat 3) Hit my protein goal

I'm Jack, I'm Canadian but live in Austria and moved to Europe for pro cycling, raced at the conti level for a bunch of years and after I was hit by a car that ended my career in 2022 I wrote a book to pass on everything I know about cycling to help the next group going after it and that blew up and turned into all I do now. I also have my own Skool group because I love sharing information and get so much motivation from seeing what others are doing. I still love racing, cycling, skimo and XC skiing and would love to learn some more and get some new ideas from all of you 😊 Thanks for having me and stoked to learn more 👊

14) More Then Harder - Bigger Focus on Fatigue Resistance 15) 1 Failed Workout in 7 months - Don't kill yourself so much. This was the best consistency I had 16) Motivation & Fun - I was skiing all winter 17) Bicarb for hard training 18) Gym Strength - I went nuts here 19) Always came home well fuelled, never empty - I learned a lot about nutrition.

Basically all I did was 3 days on, 1 off, never ride on my rest day and almost all of those 3 days of training were 4 hours and something, so always a 4-5 hour ride. That left me with about 21 hours a week of training every week. It was that simple and consistent. I also put the altitude tent away because again, I just didn’t want to live like a lunatic now that I was retired but looking back I’m sure that’s why the heat training worked better for me then. Altitude and Heat are both awesome but for me heat works better and as much as I’ve beat my head against the wall trying to pair them together, every time, I get a bigger boost from either when I just pick one and when I combine both, the boost is smaller or non existent when they literally cancel each other out and you’re just more tired but no better adaptations. Altitude and heat both give you great adaptations to your blood but the problem is one is telling your body to reduce blood plasma and the other is trying to increase it and they both add a lot of stress. You have more stress but the two are fighting each other. Now I’ve just decided, no altitude tent but really focus on the heat training. The numbers don’t lie and that worked better for me and I say that as the guy who always loved altitude and spent every dollar I had to do more altitude camps. I wish it worked to do both but I’ve screwed myself enough times trying to make that work that I’ve just given up on it and stick to the numbers don’t lie and here’s the data and results so give up on your theory here.

I wish I could give you a better answer here but the reality is, none of the stuff that happened after Otztaler 2024 was planned. There wasn’t much planning to it, the original idea was I wanted to do well at Otztalel then I’d go back to preparing for Skimo world cups with team Canada and so Zwift academy was just going to be a funish goal to tie me over between the end of August until the skimo season started in the winter. The idea was I needed to train for more short efforts now for skiing so zwift academy would be a better on bike goal to train for that. That was the plan and I stumbled into those KOM’s because the first one, the Stelvio was just me being pissed I was sucking so bad on the trainer and wanting to prove I’m better than this. We didn’t really have structured workouts to do this, I just did the zwift academy that year and I’m going from memory but maybe there was like 7 workouts that were all around an hour long and it was mostly just sprints and VO2 max efforts. I just did each workout maybe 3 times spread out over a few weeks to try and get the best score on each one. The volume in training dropped a lot because the trainer was killing me and I couldn’t handle an endurance ride after those sessions like Steve had wanted me to do. I never ride the trainer and there is an adaptation period to it. To just jump on the trainer and do a workout, yeah you’re fine, but to jump straight into doing races and max tests on it when you never do it, I was totally crushed after them so the training volume went down fast. This was a big reason training load in xert went down faster than we wanted and I felt I was cooked by late november after that mortirolo KOM. I was just getting use to these trainer workouts at first and then I guess the last VO2 overload block was when I banged out all 7 of the workouts in the final week of zwift academy so I called it my trainer stage race where it was just a week of max intensity and low volume. A VO2 overload block. That probably helped for the KOM’s but both steve and I agree, I could have done even better without the zwift academy and did more efforts specific to the KOM’s, keep the high intensity but don’t let the volume drop as much. Again, hindsight is 20/20 and the trainer stage race worked well but we could have done better with less max intensity and a bit more volume maintained.