There is a particular kind of person who looks at the Tour of Flanders, the cobblestones, the short savage climbs of the Oude Kwaremont and the Paterberg, the biting Belgian spring wind, and thinks: I want to do that.

And then there is a rarer kind of person who actually does it.

Juergen Veith is that kind of person.

Last Sunday, the 58-year-old from Germany rolled across the finish line of the 248km Flanders Classic Challenge, one of cycling's most iconic amateur endurance events, in 7 hours and 50 minutes. He burned more than 6,400 kilojoules in the process, an output so staggering it's hard to put into ordinary language. But let's try.

The average office worker burns around 110 to 120 calories walking to work. Juergen's Sunday ride burned the equivalent of more than 55 of those walks. In a single day. On a bike. Over roads that have been punishing professional cyclists for over a century.

He did this at 58 years old. And he's just getting started.

The Man Behind the Number

Juergen is a CEO who runs a company alongside his life as an athlete. He has commitments that pull hard on his time and energy. And yet, quietly and consistently, he has built himself into one of the most dedicated amateur endurance cyclists you've likely never heard of.

Between 14 and 18 hours per week. That is the volume of structured, purposeful cycling training Juergen commits to. Not casual rides. Not commutes. Dedicated, coached, goal-oriented training.

For context: most recreational cyclists, people who consider themselves "into cycling," ride 5 to 8 hours a week. Juergen nearly doubles that. Every week.

The question worth asking is not how he finds the time, but why he chooses to spend it this way. The answer is clear: he is building towards something. He is proving something, not to anyone else, but to himself.

A Winter in Girona

Preparation for this classics campaign didn't begin in February. It began in the long months before, in Girona, the Catalan cycling mecca where the roads climb into the hills and the riding community is as serious as anywhere in the world.

Juergen spent much of his winter there, working directly with his Reset coach on a programme built around the fundamentals that actually move the needle in endurance performance.

Metabolic flexibility, teaching the body to efficiently use fat as fuel so that over a 7-hour effort, energy reserves don't collapse. Zone 1 training and lactate efficiency, the unglamorous work of riding easy enough, long enough, to build an aerobic engine that can sustain output for nearly eight hours. Appropriate fueling, because at this level of output, nutrition is not a minor consideration — it is a performance variable. And VO2 Max development, building the physiological ceiling that determines just how hard Juergen can push when the road tips up and the pack splinters.

This is not a training plan built for a quick result. It is built for someone who wants to genuinely perform at some of the hardest amateur cycling events in the world. And it worked.

The Classics Campaign

Sunday's Flanders Classic was not a one-off adventure. It was the first of four.

The Classics Campaign:

1. ✅ Tour of Flanders — 248km — Completed

2. Paris-Roubaix Challenge — The Hell of the North. Cobbled farm tracks through northern France that have ended careers and broken bikes.

3. Amstel Gold Race — The rolling hills of Limburg, the Dutch spring, a different kind of brutality.

4. Liège-Bastogne-Liège — La Doyenne. The oldest classic. 258km through the Ardennes. The hardest of them all.

Four races. Four of the most storied events on the cycling calendar. All in Juergen's 60th year on earth.

This is a classics campaign that most professional cyclists have never completed in a single spring. Juergen is attempting all four as someone who chose to spend his 58th year doing something extraordinary instead of simply getting older.

What 7 Hours and 50 Minutes Actually Means

It is worth pausing to appreciate the sheer physical reality of what Juergen completed last Sunday.

He rode for nearly eight hours. He navigated the cobbled climbs of the Wolvenberg, the Koppenbearg, Eikenberg, the Kortekeer, the Kanarieberg, the Paterberg, and the legendary Oude Kwaremont. He rode over cobblestone sectors that rattle your fillings and demand constant full-body tension just to stay upright. He did this among thousands of other riders, in Belgian spring conditions, on a blue Storck that he clearly knows how to handle.

6,400 kilojoules of work output. That number represents hours of real-time fueling decisions, years of aerobic base building, and a fitness level that most people will never come close to, let alone approach at 58.

None of this happened by accident. None of it was luck. It was the product of consistent training over a long time, of showing up week after week and putting the work in. That is what makes Sunday's result meaningful.

Almost 60, Nowhere Near Done

In August, Juergen turns 59.

In the lead-up to that milestone, he will have attempted four of cycling's most iconic classic races. He will have ridden through Flanders, through the cobbled farm tracks of northern France, through the Dutch hills, and through the Ardennes. He will have done it with preparation, intention, and the kind of fitness that most people half his age haven't built.

The cobblestones of Flanders have been ridden. Paris-Roubaix is next.

We'll be with him every kilometre of the way.

When the Reset crew arrived on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, the sun was out, the palm trees were swaying, and the resort was the kind of place you'd normally book for a proper holiday. But nobody was ordering margaritas. The goal was singular: qualify for the UCI Gran Fondo World Championships.

The event on the calendar was the Millars Gran Fondo — a UCI Gran Fondo World Series race. 158 kilometres. 2,200 metres of climbing. 3,300 competitors from around the world. Not exactly a casual Sunday ride.

The Reset crew represented athletes from Canada, Mexico, the UK, and Slovenia — all of them high-performing professionals in their day-to-day lives, all of them treating cycling with the same seriousness they bring to their careers. This was their shot at the world stage, and they arrived ready to earn it.

Wednesday & Thursday: The Recon Days

Arriving on Wednesday gave the team a critical advantage: two full days of course reconnaissance before race day.

By midday on Wednesday, the crew were clipped in and rolling — 100 kilometres covering the start, the first major climb, the descent, and the finish line. The race plan had already been delivered before anyone touched Spanish soil, so this wasn't about figuring things out. It was about feeling the course in their legs and making it real. Back at the hotel: recovery shakes, team dinner, and an early night.

Thursday was the biggest training day of the camp. The objective was simple — stay on the pedals, push the pace on the climbs, and bank one last high-intensity effort before the race. 140 kilometres. High carbs. High output. The crew tackled the main climb — the one that would define Sunday — and recced the final kilometres. By the time they rolled back to the hotel, every rider knew exactly what race day was going to demand of them.

Recovery protocol: Ndruanz shakes, massage, team dinner, bed.

The Reset Performance Environment

This is what Reset is built to do.

Every athlete on this trip is a successful professional — executives, business owners, leaders. They're used to performing under pressure. But cycling at this level requires more than fitness. It requires a structured environment that removes the variables that would otherwise drain performance.

That doesn't mean lavish dinners and showing off. It means carefully managed nutrition protocols, quality recovery, professional massage, personal mechanics, and coached recon rides that put every rider in the best possible position on race day. The hotel was briefed and catered exactly to the team's nutritional needs. Every controllable was controlled, so the athletes could focus on one thing: performing.

Friday: Coffee Ride & The Carb Loading Begins

After two hard days on the bike, Friday was about coming down. The crew cruised the seafront, took in the Spanish sunshine, and enjoyed the kind of easy riding that reminds you why you got into this sport in the first place.

But underneath the relaxed pace, the engine was being loaded. Race day minus two means the carb protocol kicks in — 7 to 10 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight. More food, more recovery, more massage. The calm before the storm.

Saturday: Openers. The Plan is Set.

Pre-race activation — short, sharp, purposeful. The legs were feeling it. The strategy was locked. Every rider knew their role, their targets, and exactly what they were riding for.

Sunday: Race Day

They executed.

All of them.

Every Reset athlete at the start line crossed the finish with the result they came for. In a field of 3,300 riders, across 158 kilometres of Spanish roads, the team delivered. They qualified for the UCI Gran Fondo World Championships.

What It Actually Means

After the race, the team gathered for photos, medals around their necks, smiles that said everything words couldn't.

But the moment that truly captures what this trip meant came later — when one of the athletes got home.

He had the team's signed Reset jersey professionally framed. Race bibs. UCI medal. Millars Gran Fondo lanyard. All of it, mounted in a shadow box to hang on his wall.

That's not just a souvenir. That's a man who wanted to hold onto the moment — who understood that what happened in Castellón wasn't just a good race. It was the realisation of something he'd been working toward for a long time. The qualification. The camaraderie. The proof that every early morning session, every hour on the indoor trainer, every small sacrifice had added up to something real.

That's the thing about moments like these. The result fades. The memory doesn't.

Why Reset Exists

We created Reset to be a platform — a vehicle for people to live out their sporting dreams.

The gap between an athlete's ambition and their ability to perform at world-class events is real. Training, travel, nutrition, logistics, coaching, recovery — it's a lot to manage when you're also running a business or raising a family. Most people never close that gap. Not because they lack the desire, but because they lack the structure.

What this team showed in Spain is that the gap can be closed. Athletes training as little as 7 hours per week on an indoor trainer showed up to a UCI World Series race and qualified for the World Championships. Not because they had more talent than anyone else. Because every controllable was controlled — from the training plan, to the nutrition strategy, to the coached recon rides, to the recovery protocols on the ground in Spain.

That result is repeatable. That's what Reset does.

Next stop: UCI Gran Fondo World Championships, Niseko, Japan.

We couldn't be more proud of this group.

A Massive thanks to our partners for making this experience possible for our athletes

Factor Bikes

Nduranz Nutrition

Ceramic Speed

A recent article is making the rounds in cycling circles. Filippo Ganna, four-time road world time trial champion, six-time track world champion and current hour record holder, ate bacon and scrambled eggs before winning his first world title. He doesn't obsess over calorie counting. He advocates for mental freedom over dietary precision.

Cue the coaches and commentators lining up to say: see? Stop counting your calories. Eat intuitively. Be like Ganna.

Here's the problem. You are not Filippo Ganna. And pretending otherwise isn't inspirational. It's counter productive.

Who Exactly Is Filippo Ganna?

Let's be precise about who we're talking about before we start importing his habits into your Tuesday evening training ride.

People say Ganna turned professional at 20. But that misses the point almost entirely. Before he was a professional, he was a junior rider inside the Italian national cycling federation development system, one of the most sophisticated talent pipelines in world sport. He has been in a structured, coach-led, science-supported athletic environment since his early teenage years.

He has never, in his adult life, been an ordinary person trying to get fit. He has never started from zero. He has never had to lose weight to find performance. His body did not arrive at 28 years old by accident. It was built, methodically, over more than a decade inside one of the most demanding development frameworks in cycling.

By the time he signed for INEOS Grenadiers, his physiology had already been shaped by years of elite-level adaptation. He has had access to team nutritionists, coaches, sports scientists, physiologists, and recovery specialists supporting every training session, every race, and every meal for the entirety of his career.

His achievements tell the story:

• Road ITT World Champion: 2020, 2021

•  Track World Champion (Individual Pursuit): six titles

•  Olympic Gold Medallist: Tokyo 2021 (Team Pursuit)

•  UCI Hour Record holder: 56.792 km set in October 2022

•  Multiple Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España stage wins

GANNA'S DEVELOPMENT PATHWAY

In 2022 alone, Ganna recorded 68 race days. Not 68 rides. 68 race days, meaning he stood at a competitive start line 68 times in a single year. Factor in the training volume that underpins that racing calendar, and you begin to understand the scale of the physiological machine we're discussing.

Professional cyclists ride between 30,000 and 35,000 kilometres per year when training and racing are combined. Male professionals average around 31,500 km annually. That is not a typo.

31,500 km  average annual distance covered by a male professional cyclist

Now, Let's Talk About You

The average committed amateur cyclist, someone who takes their training seriously, rides regularly, and perhaps targets a sportive or local race each year, trains between 6 and 10 hours per week. Recreational cyclists typically manage 3 to 5 hours. That translates to somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 kilometres per year for a dedicated amateur, and considerably less for someone who has taken up cycling at 40 or beyond.

4,000-8,000 km  typical annual distance for a committed amateur cyclist

Think about the person who discovers cycling at 43. They've had a career, a family, a busy life. Their athletic history might be minimal. Their metabolism has been shaped by years of desk work, disrupted sleep, and whatever time they could salvage for movement. They are starting from a completely different physiological baseline.

That person is riding perhaps one-sixth of Ganna's volume. Their body has not undergone years of elite cardiovascular adaptation. Their mitochondrial density, capillary networks, and metabolic enzyme activity are categorically different. And yet we're pointing them at a world champion's breakfast choices as a blueprint for their nutrition strategy.

That is not education. It is negligence dressed up as inspiration.

The Calorie Math Nobody Is Showing You

Here is where the comparison completely falls apart. And this is the part that nobody promoting the Ganna philosophy wants to talk about in concrete numbers.

Filippo Ganna weighs 83 kg and stands 193 cm tall. His basal metabolic rate, the calories his body burns just existing, is approximately 1,900 kcal per day. Now add a typical four-hour training ride at around 280 watts. Using the standard conversion, that is roughly 4,000 kilocalories burned on the bike alone. Total daily expenditure on a training day: somewhere in the range of 5,900 kcal. On a race day of five to six hours, that figure climbs beyond 7,000 kcal.

Even in a caloric deficit, Ganna is eating 4,500 to 5,000 calories a day. The sheer volume of food required to fuel his training means that eating intuitively, even eating pizza and bacon, leaves him somewhere close to energy balance. His caloric runway is enormous. He has enormous margin for error. A bad food choice barely registers against that daily burn.

5,900+ kcal  Ganna's estimated daily expenditure on a training day

Now look at the picture from the other side.

A 45-year-old amateur cyclist, 80 kg, with a sedentary to moderately active background. Basal metabolic rate: roughly 1,680 kcal per day. They train four times a week, riding 90 minutes per session at around 150 watts, a solid effort for a developing amateur. That burns approximately 810 kcal per ride. Total daily expenditure on a training day: around 2,500 kcal. On rest days, closer to 1,800.

To lose half a kilogram per week, which requires a 500 kcal daily deficit, that athlete needs to eat around 2,000 calories. Not 4,500. Not even 3,000. Two thousand calories, with every meal needing to deliver adequate protein for recovery, adequate carbohydrate to replenish glycogen, and enough micronutrient density to support adaptation. There is almost no margin. Every food choice carries weight, literally and figuratively.

THE NUMBERS SIDE BY SIDE

~2,000 kcal  what the amateur must eat daily to achieve a weight-loss deficit

This is not an apples to apples comparison. It is not even close. Ganna burns more calories before lunch than most amateurs burn in an entire day. His 'intuitive' eating happens in a context where the feedback loop is so forgiving that even significant dietary variance barely shifts the needle. For the amateur, that same approach, eating when you feel like it, not tracking, not planning, means chronically overeating relative to output without even realising it.

Telling an amateur cyclist to eat intuitively like Ganna is the nutritional equivalent of telling someone learning to drive to follow the same road rules as a Formula 1 driver. The vehicle is completely different. The environment is completely different. The margins are completely different.

The Physiology Doesn't Lie

The difference between a professional cyclist's body and an amateur's is not simply a matter of fitness level. It is structural. Years of elite training at high volume produce physiological adaptations that fundamentally change how the body processes food, manages energy, and recovers from effort.

Research published in peer-reviewed sports science journals tells us that elite professional cyclists have approximately 30% higher muscle capillary density than trained amateurs, and muscle enzyme activity (the biochemical machinery that converts food into energy) that is 30 to 60% greater. Their VO2 max values typically sit between 70 and 85 ml/kg/min. A competitive amateur club rider will typically measure between 50 and 60 ml/kg/min. A 40-year-old new to cycling might be considerably lower.

PHYSIOLOGICAL COMPARISON: PRO VS AMATEUR

What this means in practice: a professional cyclist's body has been built, over years, to process and utilise fuel with extraordinary efficiency. Their resting metabolic rate is elevated. Their capacity to burn fat as fuel at high intensities is vastly superior. Their bodies have developed an internal intelligence to regulate energy intake and expenditure in ways that most people will never experience.

When Ganna talks about eating intuitively, he is describing a feedback system that has been calibrated over a decade of elite training with a full-time scientific support team. His body knows what it needs because it has been systematically taught over thousands of hours of structured work.

Intuitive eating only works when the intuition has been trained. Ganna's has. Yours, at the start of your cycling journey, almost certainly has not.

The Ex-Pro Coach Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here's where the conversation gets uncomfortable.

A concerning number of coaches promoting the Ganna philosophy to amateur athletes are themselves ex-professionals, or coaches whose entire frame of reference is the pro peloton. And there is a fundamental problem with that.

Ex-professional cyclists have never experienced the journey from unfit to fit. They have never been overweight, metabolically inflexible, or hormonally disrupted by decades of modern sedentary life. They have never had to build a base from scratch at 40, with a recovering metabolism, disrupted sleep, and a full-time job competing for recovery time.

They know, intimately, what it takes to sustain elite performance once you already have it. They simply do not know what it takes to build that foundation for the first time in middle age. They've never lived it. That is a unique and hard-won skillset, and its absence is not a minor gap. It is the entire gap.

When an ex-pro looks at nutrition for a masters athlete starting out, they are drawing on a reference point that doesn't exist in that athlete's world. The advice they give, be like Ganna, don't obsess, eat intuitively, is not wrong in the abstract. It's wrong for the population they're applying it to.

There is a particular arrogance embedded in the idea that amateur athletes simply need to adopt the mindset of professionals. The implicit message is: meet me where I am. Replicate my habits. Copy my behaviours. The problem is that these habits only exist in a context that most amateur athletes will never inhabit. Telling someone at the beginning of their athletic journey to act as if they're already at the end is not coaching. It is gatekeeping.

The best coaches don't ask their athletes to meet them at the top. They walk back down the mountain, meet athletes where they are, and take the journey together from that point.

What Amateur Athletes Actually Need

The answer to poor nutritional guidance isn't to reject nutrition science altogether. It's to apply the right science to the right person at the right stage of their development. Here is what the evidence actually supports for masters athletes and developing amateur cyclists:

1.  Adequate protein intake

Masters athletes have a higher protein requirement than younger athletes to maintain and build muscle mass. Underfuelling protein is one of the most common and damaging errors in this population. No amount of intuitive eating fixes a structural protein deficit.

2.  Fuelling to support training, not to suppress it

Many amateur athletes, particularly those with weight loss goals, chronically undereat around training. This impairs adaptation, delays recovery, and ironically makes body composition goals harder to achieve. The first nutritional priority is always supporting the training stimulus, not creating a caloric hole that undermines it.

3.  Building genuine nutrition literacy

Understanding which macronutrients support which training adaptations is not obsessive. It is foundational. An athlete who understands why they're eating what they're eating makes better decisions consistently. That, ultimately, is what real nutritional intuition looks like when it actually works.

4.  Body composition optimisation is your biggest early win, if you do it right

Let's be direct about something that far too many coaches are afraid to say: for the majority of amateur cyclists, strategic body composition optimisation is the single most powerful performance lever available to them in the short term.

The evidence on this is not subtle. As body fat percentage decreases, VO2 max, the gold standard measure of aerobic capacity, increases relative to body weight. The relationship is well-established in the sports science literature. Every kilogram of non-functional mass that an athlete carries represents oxygen demand without performance return. Strip it away intelligently, and the numbers move fast.

Here's the context that matters: the baseline target body fat for a high-performance athlete is around 13.5%. The average amateur cyclist sits closer to 20% or above. That gap, six or seven percentage points, is not a minor inefficiency. It is a performance ceiling sitting directly on top of them, and it is the lowest-hanging fruit available.

The critical distinction is how you pursue it. This is not about starvation or chronic deficit. It is about strategic caloric cycling: creating a calculated deficit during periods where the training load supports it, while ensuring carbohydrate intake is precisely managed to replenish glycogen stores and support recovery before, during, and after sessions. You protect the adaptation. You protect the engine. You reduce the mass that is holding performance back.

The argument that you lose power when you lose weight is simply not supported by the evidence, and it has not been the lived experience of athletes who have done this properly at a high level. Done correctly, you do not sacrifice power. You carry it on a lighter frame, which means your power-to-weight ratio improves in both directions simultaneously.

To put a real number on it: recently, one athlete in our coaching system lost 5 kg over four weeks of structured nutritional intervention, with a corresponding increase of 5 litres in VO2 max. Approximately one litre per kilogram of mass lost. That is not theory. That is a real athlete, real data, and a real performance shift that no amount of eating intuitively like Ganna would have produced.

You can build power and optimize body composition at the same time. They are not in conflict. The athlete who arrives at 15% body fat with a growing engine is in an entirely different performance category to the one who stayed at 22% waiting for power to come first.

5.  Personalised, progressive structure

Cookie-cutter plans fail because athletes are not cookies. A 44-year-old starting cyclist has different hormonal, metabolic, recovery, and lifestyle constraints than a 28-year-old professional. The plan has to start from the individual, not from an archetype.

The reset Approach: Controlling the Controllables

At reset, we don't deal in mythology. We don't point at what world champions eat and tell you to copy it. We've built our approach on one founding principle: meet athletes where they are, and give them every tool they need to take the next step forward from that exact point.

That means full, personalised meal plans. Not generic advice, but structured nutrition that maps to your training load, your body composition goals, and your real life. It means body composition optimisation strategies grounded in sports science, not cycling culture folklore. And it means proven training systems that have taken athletes from genuinely zero, no athletic background, no competitive history, to world championship qualification in a single year.

Our athletes have won elite national titles. They've transformed their health, their performance, and their relationship with training. Not by pretending to be professionals. By becoming the best version of themselves, on their own terms, with a system built specifically for the journey they're on.

That is what serious coaching looks like. Not filtering down the habits of a 28-year-old world champion who has spent his entire adult life in the most sophisticated athletic development system in the world and telling a 42-year-old who took up cycling last year to take notes.

The Bottom Line

Filippo Ganna is extraordinary. His attitude to food is a natural consequence of an extraordinary body, built over an extraordinary career. The mental freedom he describes is real, and it is admirable. But it is the result of a process, not a starting point.

You don't get Ganna's relationship with food by imitating Ganna's habits. You get there, if you get there at all, by doing the foundational work first: building the training history, developing the metabolic machinery, earning the nutritional intuition through years of consistent, structured effort.

The athletes who follow the eat-like-a-world-champion advice without the supporting context are, at best, leaving performance on the table. At worst, they are undermining the very adaptations that would eventually give them a real foundation.

The pro method isn't accessible. It isn't built for you. And coaches who present it as though it is aren't meeting you where you are. They're asking you to meet them somewhere you've never been.

You deserve better than that.