December is planning season. The races aren’t until February, but the work that determines how February goes is happening right now — the long base miles, the structure, the conversations about what the 2026 season is actually for.
I wanted to write about the coaching change, because it’s significant and because I think how an athlete approaches coaching says something about how they think about performance.
Why a Coaching Change
I owe a lot to Sean Yates. He’s the one who told me to buy a gravel bike, and without that conversation the national championship, the Everesting record, none of 2025 or 2026 looks the way it does. That’s not an exaggeration — a single recommendation changed the course of my career.
But as the season grew more ambitious, I needed a coaching setup built specifically for what gravel ultra-distance racing demands. Long multi-day events. Events across wildly different terrains — Belgian flatlands, Catalan mountains, Icelandic lava fields, Andalusian desert. A season that spans four continents. That requires a specific kind of planning and a coach who understands the physiology of sustained ultra-endurance effort.
Jacob Tipper at JT Performance Coaching was the right fit.
What Jacob Brings
Jacob works with athletes across endurance disciplines, and his approach to long-distance gravel and ultra-cycling is based on something I found immediately compelling: the idea that the limiting factor in most long races isn’t fitness — it’s pacing, nutrition, and decision-making under fatigue.
I can train hard. I’ve trained hard for years. What Jacob has helped me do is train smart — understanding what adaptations I actually need for events like Unbound Gravel and Badlands, and building toward those specifically rather than just accumulating volume and hoping for the best.
The first thing we did together was map out the full 2026 calendar and work backwards from each target event. Not just “what fitness do I need by May?” but “what does the specific physiological demand of 200 miles of Flint Hills gravel require, and how do we build that in the time available?” That kind of reverse-engineered planning was new for me and immediately made sense.
The 2026 Structure
We’ve built the season in blocks. The early UCI Gravel World Series races — Santa Vall, Turnhout, The Hills, Sea Otter — serve as race-sharpening ahead of the Traka in late April. They’re targets in their own right, but they’re also preparation: the body adapts to race intensity in ways that training alone can’t replicate.
After the Traka comes a specific build toward Unbound Gravel in May, which is the biggest single event of the year. Then the Gralloch, Gravel Suisse, The Rift, and finally Badlands in August — the ultra that requires the most specific preparation of anything on the calendar.
Jacob manages the load across all of that so I’m arriving at each event in the right condition rather than either under-cooked or broken. That sounds obvious. It’s actually quite hard to do across a nine-month season with this many variables.
What I’ve Noticed
Three months into working together, the biggest change is how I understand my own data. I’ve been using Gravaa throughout, and Jacob reads those numbers in a way that changes how I interpret sessions. What I thought was a strong training week was sometimes a week that left me slightly under-recovered going into the next block. What felt like an easy week was sometimes exactly what was needed.
Learning to trust that — to ride to the numbers rather than to how motivated I feel on a given morning — has been the main adjustment. I’m not naturally inclined toward restraint. When I feel good I want to push. Jacob is quite calm about telling me not to.
December
The Christmas miles are being banked. Long, steady, unflashy riding in whatever the Lancashire weather decides to offer, which this year has mostly been cold and sideways. Fine by me.
The season starts properly in February. I’m ready.
JT Performance Coaching — find out more about Jacob’s coaching programmes. Supported by Merlin Cycles, Ventum Racing, OGT, Gravaa, and Questa Financial Planning.