The cycling season is long. With this sport being so hard in both the training and racing, it’s not a surprise that as we approach the end of the season our bodies start to feel the fatigue in a more serious way, but the effect that it has on racing is interesting. Add in different contract situations, the timing of different goals, and the world championships for some, and it can feel like quite a strange peloton. For me I’ve had a couple of hard stage races that have had a big effect. The Tour de Pologne and Benelux Tour, both very hard seven-day stage races, have put me in some good form, especially for longer efforts, but they have both pushed down the heart rate I can manage on the bike and made it important for me to get more of a warm-up before I can really feel the legs in the way I want to. I feel I can manage a pretty high power for less effort once I’m going well now but I can also spend the first two hours of a training ride worrying a lot about whether or not I’ll be able to get even halfway through the intervals I have set.