How Two Years of Cross-Training Changed My Cycling Performance
I started running and strength training for variety. Only later did I understand what it had changed.
The hard part of changing training is not always the training itself. Sometimes it is the uncertainty that comes with stepping away from something familiar.
For a long time, winter training was easy to understand, even if it was not always easy to enjoy. Get on the bike. Do the indoor sessions. Build the base. Add some intensity. Repeat until spring. There is nothing wrong with that approach. It works. It is specific, measurable and clean. If you want to improve on the bike, at some point you need to ride the bike.
But clean does not always mean sustainable. Especially not mentally.
After years of doing the same kind of winter training, I started to feel the need for something different. Not because I had some clever masterplan. Not because I had suddenly decided cross-training was the answer to everything. I was just bored. Not completely, not enough to stop training, but enough to know that staring at a turbo screen for another winter was starting to take more out of me than just energy.
So I changed things. I kept the bike work in, but I started adding more running, more commuting, more outdoor base miles and two strength sessions a week. In winter, the strength work leaned more towards heavier lifting and mobility. In summer, it became more about conditioning, movement quality and staying robust rather than trying to push heavy weights all year round.
At first, the reason was simple. I wanted training to feel interesting again.
It might not sound like the strongest reason on paper, but I realised it was becoming more important than I expected. In endurance sport, we can become so focused on optimisation that enjoyment starts to feel like an optional extra. Something nice if it happens, but nowhere near as important as the plan, the numbers, the zones or the session targets. The problem is that enjoyment is often what keeps the whole thing alive.
You can have the most optimised plan in the world, but if you are slowly starting to resent it, consistency becomes harder. Not because you lack discipline, but because nobody wants to feel like they are dragging themselves through the same thing forever.
That was the pull towards cross-training. But it did not come without doubt.
I had no way of knowing whether adding running and strength work would help my cycling, hurt it or simply add more fatigue into an already full training week. Running came with obvious concerns. What if I picked up an injury? What if my legs were never fresh enough for the bike? What if the extra training made me generally fitter, but less sharp for the thing I actually cared about?
For someone who likes routine and structure, that uncertainty was probably the hardest bit. The running was not the problem. The gym work was not the problem. Still riding the bike was not the problem. The difficult part was accepting that I might not know whether the decision had worked until much later.
Most of my year is built around a fairly small racing window. I train for months to be ready for hill climb season, which means a lot of investment goes in before there is any real proof that the investment has paid off. When you are on the turbo for hours, you have a lot of time to think. Sometimes too much time. Is this enough? Is this too much? Is this working? Am I wasting time? Would I be better just doing what I did before?
Cross-training took some of that pressure away. Not immediately in a performance sense. I did not suddenly notice a huge change after a few weeks. There was no clean moment where I thought, yes, this is definitely working. At first, I was doing it because it was enjoyable. Running gave me something different. Strength training gave me structure away from the bike. Commuting added volume without every ride needing to feel like a formal workout. The bike was still the centre of gravity, but it was no longer the entire personality of winter.
The first real sign that the approach had not hurt my cycling came much later. It was not during winter or in the early stages of the training block. It was when I got closer to hill climb season and started doing more specific work again.
That was when I began to notice my form was in a better place. Power numbers I had been trying to improve for years started moving. Race efforts were better. Times improved. It was not just one random good day either. Across the season, if I followed the plan and did not overdo it by trying to squeeze too much into one weekend, the pattern was consistent.
Last season was probably the best hill climb season I have had. That forced me to look back and ask a different question. Not, “Did cross-training make me worse?” but, “Did changing the process help me stay in a better place for longer?”
That is probably the more honest way to frame it. I do not think it is as simple as saying running directly made me a better cyclist, or that lifting weights automatically added watts to my longer power. Training does not work that neatly. There are too many variables. Better consistency, better recovery, improved motivation, more aerobic volume, different stress, less mental fatigue and more enjoyment could all have played a part.
So I do not want to pretend there is a perfect cause-and-effect story here. There probably is not.
What I can say is that cross-training seemed to help me build fitness while keeping the process mentally sustainable. It gave me variety without removing structure. It gave me a different kind of challenge without taking cycling away as the main focus. More than anything, it reminded me what it feels like to be excited by training again.
The clearest example of that was my first half marathon.
In February, I raced the Media City Half Marathon in Manchester. By that point, running had moved from being something I was doing for variety into something I had started to take more seriously. That was fairly predictable. I may have started running for fun, but I am still me.
Once the times started improving, the competitive side came out. Running into work had replaced some of my bike commutes, so I was doing six to ten miles at a time. I had a ten-mile run on a Saturday, a six-mile run midweek and a couple of shorter three-mile runs around that. The more I did, the more I wondered what I could do over a half marathon.
On the day, it was freezing. I stood on the start line excited in a way I had not felt for a while. It was new. I did not really know what I was capable of. I told myself I had no expectations, which was obviously nonsense. I wanted sub-90.
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That number had got into my head because it felt like one of those benchmarks. A line that says you are reasonably fit, or at least fit enough to start pretending you know what you are doing.
I ran 1:34.
At first, I was happy. I had enjoyed the day. I had taken on something new. I had got that buzz from not knowing exactly what was going to happen. Then, because apparently peace was never an option, I started thinking about the four minutes. What could I have done differently? Where did I lose time? Could I have paced it better? Was sub-90 actually there?
That is just how my brain works. But after I talked myself down a bit, I realised the bigger point was not whether I had hit some arbitrary benchmark. It was that running had given me back something I recognised from when I first started cycling: the excitement of the unknown.
That became one of the biggest benefits of cross-training. It was not just physical. It was psychological. It made training feel less narrow.
This year, I wanted to understand the cycling side more clearly. Not guessing from how training felt. Not assuming things were working because I had been consistent. Actually testing it.
So far, the early signs are positive. Last year, my 90-minute power was 203 watts, which was a PB at the time. This year, it has moved up to 216 watts. My 60-minute power has also gone from 219 watts last year to 230 watts this year. For context, I am currently around 57kg, which puts the 90-minute effort at roughly 3.8W/kg and the 60-minute effort just over 4W/kg.
On paper, those are just numbers. Useful numbers, but still numbers. The more interesting part is what sits behind them.
For a long time, I was worried that changing the process might cost me something. That by adding running and strength work, I might become a bit more rounded but lose some of the cycling-specific fitness I had spent years building. The numbers suggest that has not happened. If anything, the longer power has moved forward.
Again, that does not mean cross-training deserves all the credit. It does not mean everyone should copy the same mix. It definitely does not mean specificity stops mattering. If you want to get better at cycling, you still need to ride your bike. If you are aiming for hill climb season, you still need the specific work that prepares you for that effort. You cannot just do a bit of everything and hope it all magically lines up.
But there is room to build the engine in different ways. There is room to make winter less stale. There is room to ask whether the routine you have always followed is still serving you, or whether you are only repeating it because it feels safe.
That is what I think we miss when we talk about training. We talk a lot about what is optimal. We talk less about what is repeatable.
A plan does not only need to work on paper. It needs to work inside your actual life. It needs to be something you can recover from, something you can keep coming back to and something that holds your attention long enough for the work to compound.
Because consistency is not just built from discipline. It is built from making the process sustainable enough that you are willing to come back to it again tomorrow.
That does not mean every session needs to be fun. A lot of training is repetitive by nature. Some days are flat. Some days are boring. Some days you do the work because it is there to be done, not because you are buzzing to get started. But if the whole process becomes stale, that matters.
Enjoyment is not the opposite of seriousness. It is often what allows seriousness to last.
There is a well-known saying that the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It is usually attributed to Einstein, although he probably never said it. Still, the point holds.
At some stage, if you want something different, you have to be willing to change something. That sounds obvious, but it is hard when the old routine has worked before. I knew how to train the old way. I knew what winter looked like. I knew what the sessions were supposed to produce. Even the boring parts were familiar. Changing the process meant giving up some of that certainty.
That is not easy when you care about performance. But looking back now, I think the risk was worth taking.
Cross-training did not just give me a different way to train. It gave me a different way to stay engaged with training. Running gave me a new challenge. Strength work gave me a sense of robustness. Commuting kept volume ticking along without every ride needing to become a session. The bike work stayed there, but it had more space around it.
The result was not some neat, perfect story where every decision suddenly looks clever in hindsight. Training is rarely that tidy. But the direction is clear enough. The mixed approach has not made me less fit on the bike. The 60-minute and 90-minute numbers suggest the training has moved forward. The hill climb results suggest the sharper power was still there when I needed it. Mentally, the process has been easier to stay invested in.
That might be the biggest benefit of all.
Sometimes the best training method is not the one that looks most optimal in isolation. It is the one you can keep doing without losing interest, breaking down or quietly starting to hate the thing you are supposed to enjoy.
Next, I will start working down through the shorter durations. Probably 45 minutes, 30 minutes, 20 minutes and then the sharper efforts that become more relevant as hill climb season gets closer. That will give a fuller picture. For now, the longer tests have told me enough to keep trusting the direction.
Not because I knew it would work from the start. I did not. That is the point.
Sometimes you have to break the old routine before you get proof that the new one was worth trying. And that is where a lot of people get stuck. Not because they are unwilling to work hard, but because they are scared to step away from the version of hard work they already understand.
