This trip was the longest athletic event of our lives. For 3 months, we worked out for 3.5 hours a day, 5 days a week. In total, we cycled 1,965 miles with 112,777 ft of climbing— the equivalent of cycling the Tour de France Femmes 2022 three times in a row. We took 7 times as long, but we did so totally self supported, with fully loaded bags and without a professional recovery team.
Since we’ve returned, one of the most frequent comments we get is, “wow you must be so strong!”. Or, in the words of my friend Vanessa, “[I] imagine you will need to buy new pants at this point to accommodate your bionic-ly strong legs”.
Now, our trip is complete and the stats are in…after all of that, did we get faster? In the cycling world, there are two ways to measure “faster”- our actual speed in the real world (which may depend on things like wind, terrain, nutrition, etc.) and our fitness as measured by heartrate or the power (watts) we can generate on a bike. During our trip, we only recorded our actual speed each day (our Garmins recorded distance, elevation, and time), so we’ll start with that. The speed show in these graphs is our average moving speed, so it doesn’t include our breaks for snack and lunch. Later, we’ll check for fitness gains by comparing my performance on an indoor bike before versus after the trip.
At first glance, it looks like we did get faster! Our average speed was about 5mph faster by the end of the trip than it was at the beginning. Unfortunately, this statistic is misleading- we did almost all of our climbing in the first half of the trip, so any apparent speed improvements are likely due to reaching flatter terrain.
Even though most mountain days were at the beginning, we did have a mix of flat and steep days throughout the trip. We can take advantage of this variation by looking at whether we got faster on each type of terrain separately. Controlling for elevation, it does look like we got 1-2mph faster over the course of the trip on flat terrain or rolling hills. However, we also reduced the weight of our bikes in the second half of our trip— we shipped our sleeping bags and warm layers home from Hanoi, and needed to carry less food since we could afford to eat out in Vietnam and Cambodia. Lighter bikes could easily account for this 1-2mph speed up.
Since these measures of actual speed on the road have so many caveats, let’s turn to a before and after comparison of my bike fitness on a indoor bike. These numbers can’t be influenced by terrain or bike weight. The standard measure of a cyclist’s fitness is the power they can maintain over the course of an hour, called functional threshold power (FTP). Since March 2025, I’ve tested and tracked my FTP on Trainer Road, a training app for cycling. My FTP was 193 the month before we left. Four months later, after cycling 3.5 hours a day, 5 days a week, my FTP is….175. The lowest it has been since I started training for bike races three years ago, in 2023.
After so much effort, that result was disappointing. But from a physiological perspective, it is not surprising. Getting faster requires hard interval training and adequate recovery time to absorb those gains – teaching our bodies how to perform at max effort. Our “training plan” was many back-to-back days of unstructured endurance workouts with little time for recovery. In those conditions, our bodies got better at what they were being trained to do – endurance rather than power. The best we could hope for was that this trip was like an extended period of intensive off-season training. All this endurance was building our aerobic base, which is the foundation for increasing power later. Our best bet for speed gains would be to take 2-4 weeks to recover, and then start structured training to “convert” our high aerobic base into power gains for race season. I did my FTP test after this period of rest, and TrainerRoad estimated that within a month of structured training, my FTP would jump to 214. So, there’s hope yet.
While there’s no clear evidence of a speed-up curve over the course of our trip, there is clear evidence of a different learning curve: the importance of rest days. We started out with an ambitious schedule that only left room for one rest day a week. There was so much to see and we wanted to see everything while we had the chance. However, we realized we weren’t getting the chance to see everything, much less reflect on what we had gotten to see, because we were so tired at the end of each day. We slowed our pace, took more rest days, and savored lots of croissants and boba tea.