The training was hard. It did not always go to plan. Kristen and her EF Pro Cycling coach Nate Wilson had to make compromises, constantly assess where she was at, and correct their course. Training for a challenge like the Olympics is never just a matter of sticking to a plan. For Nate, TrainingPeaks is an invaluable resource that he uses to optimize his athletes' workouts throughout the year.

Now that the racing season is done and it is almost time for Kristen to start her preparations for 2025, Nate took the time to assess the decisions that he and Kristen made before last summer’s Olympics. A lot went well, as Kristen’s two gold medals prove, but as a coach, Nate always wants to understand what exactly went well and what they could do better for the coming years.

“The key thing is always to figure out the demands of the event,” Nate says. “What are the demands and what are the training components we need to do to meet those demands? For the Olympics, Kristen’s priority was the team pursuit. She was doing all these track camps, which to some degree inhibited the amount of volume she could do. We were also preparing for the goal of the Olympic road race in a context that limited us compared to what we would do if we were preparing only for that. She would have double days three days a week on the track, where you get a lot of intensity, but super low volume with super low amounts of continuous riding. She would do four-minute efforts and instead of riding easy for 20 minutes like you would on the road, she would literally sit down for 20 minutes. So we needed to say, okay, one of the components for both the road race and the track is high-intensity, one- to five-minute power, Kristen is getting lots of that, but what are we missing? She was missing general endurance rides, so she would be missing fatigue resistance.”

Earlier in the season, Kristen and Nate had learned a key lesson. Just a month and a half out from the Paris Games, in her first race in her brand-new American champion´s jersey, Kristen had to drop out of the third stage of the Tour de Suisse. She was exhausted. Kristen and Nate did not panic.

“Kristen had crashed at Flanders and then had 10 days off the bike and then a really short build up to the Vuelta and then the Vuelta, recovery, nationals, track, then Tour de Suisse,” Nate says.

“Training is always a matter of balancing volume and intensity and there were periods of the year where the balance was wrong and you could really see it in her performances. During that whole period, her form was super volatile and her fatigue was super volatile. She would go from feeling great to feeling really tanked and that's because she had a lot of intensity in that six-week period and not a lot of easy volume.”

Nate realized that they had underestimated the amount of basic endurance work that Kristen needed to do to be at her best. They had tried to kick her world-class endurance motor into high gear before making sure it was ticking over smoothly.

Looking at her TrainingPeaks data, Nate could see the red flags. Her heart rate for a given power output had dropped. Kristen felt like she had to push harder and harder to produce the same number of watts and her heart wasn’t responding to her efforts.

“It's easy to take a good athlete and say that they're strong in an area and take that for granted,” Nate says. “People have natural strengths, but also a lot of times, if they're strong, you need to ask one more question, which is why are they strong in that area? Most of the time, there are years of work behind it. You need to make sure you're not neglecting the stuff that might not seem as relevant, but might actually be really relevant. With Kristen, I'm often thinking, she's so good in endurance that she doesn't need a lot of volume, and to some degree that's true, but the period from Flanders until Suisse really underlined that she's also a human and if she doesn’t have a base, she doesn't have a base. She still needs one. My lesson from that would be that Kristen's good at endurance if you train endurance. We can't just take that for granted. Her potential is great, but you still need to give her the stimulus to reach that potential.”

Luckily, Kristen and Nate still had time to rebuild. After a rest, Kristen went to altitude in Colorado to do a block of light track training and long, easy rides to firm up her foundation. Once she was feeling good on the bike again, she came down to sea level and they started to incorporate more intensity into her training, with repeated intervals built into long rides. When her track work with the US team ramped up again in the weeks right before the Olympics, the endurance base that she and Nate had fortified helped her to respond better to the all-out efforts she was doing on the velodrome. It was still crucial for Kristen to maintain her endurance strength. As the Games approached, her workouts became more and more focused on simulating the efforts she would do in Paris.

One of Kristen’s key concerns was whether she would be able to recover well enough from the road race to perform on the track. Her team pursuit qualifying with the US team was due to start just two days after the end of the 158-kilometer road race. She had done a number of long rides followed by a track day during the previous weeks and felt good on the boards, but those long rides were still endurance focused–a far cry from the repeated, flat-out efforts up to Montmartre and around the streets of Paris that the Olympic road race would involve. So, Nate and Kristen started to add endurance work to her track sessions to improve her fatigue resistance.

A key workout that she did days before the Opening Ceremony shows the kind of effort she was putting in to simulate what she would face at the Games.

“One of the last key days for us, maybe 10 days out from the Olympic road race, was a really hard track session with a lot of mental stress,” Nate says. “The US team were using it as a full race prep with the race suits and a lot of pressure from the coach about selection for positions. So, we said, okay, that's going to be physically tiring, but also mentally tiring, which is something you face in racing. We'll take advantage of that to do a quick turnaround and go straight into a three-hour road ride with quite a bit of intensity. You can't do a lot of those because it'll just cook you, but we wanted to create some moments that were closer to road racing stress. We used this most mentally stressful track session as a test, because it was going to come closer to the nerves Kristen would have in a race.”

Kristen passed the test with flying Stars and Stripes.

She completed the workout with strength to spare. That gave her the confidence that she could handle the rigors of the road race. And when she got back to the velodrome, she wasn’t missing a watt. Her preparation had not been perfect. It did not go to plan. But because she and Nate were able to assess her TrainingPeaks data in real time and recognize and correct the mistake they had made before it was too late, she was ready for the Olympic Games. Kristen rolled into Paris in the form of her life and won two Olympic gold medals.

Benefit from the knowledge and experience our team has earned in the WorldTour. Whatever your ambitions, Team EF Coaching is ready to teach you Tour de France-proven training, nutrition, and technique to make you a better cyclist.