Ultra Cycling Tips That Don’t Usually Make It Into the Guides
Jun 24, 2026 ·
Article
There’s a certain kind of knowledge that only gets shared at the right moment.
You’re at the finish line of a 1,000 km race, or at the debrief dinner after a tough edition, and someone mentions something that stops you mid-sentence. A trick for managing saddle sores on day four. What to eat when your stomach has completely shut down. How to stay warm during a 3am bivouac without adding kit weight. You file it away, tell yourself you’ll remember it.
You don’t always remember it.
That’s the problem with ultra cycling tips — the best ones live in conversations, not articles. Riders pass them between each other at checkpoints, whisper them at finisher parties, trade them on long training rides with people who’ve done the hard races. And then they disappear. The rider who told you forgets they told you. You forget the details. The next person starting their first ultra starts from scratch.
The VeloAtlas Field Manual exists to fix that. It’s a growing collection of ultra cycling tips covering everything that actually matters when you’re deep into a race and things start to go wrong — or when you want to make sure they don’t.
What’s in it
The Field Manual covers the categories that come up again and again in those post-race conversations: heat and hydration management, sleep strategy, nutrition when your appetite disappears, mechanical problem-solving on the road, mental tactics for the dark patches, and the small kit and logistics details that only matter at 400 km in — but matter enormously when you get there.
These aren’t ultra cycling tips you’ll find in a beginner’s guide to cycling. Experienced riders learn them the hard way — through DNFs, through bonks, through arriving at a checkpoint at 2am and realising they’ve made a preventable mistake. The Field Manual writes those things down before they get lost again.
Why this exists
Most of what people publish about ultra cycling falls into two categories: race reports or gear reviews. Both are useful. Neither tells you what to do when your knee starts tracking wrong on day three, or how to manage your pace when the heat index spikes and you’re still 200 km from the next major stop.
The ultra cycling tips that actually change outcomes travel by word of mouth. A veteran mentions something to a first-timer before the start. Two riders share a conversation at a petrol station at midnight. Someone drops something useful in a race group chat and the feed buries it within hours.
The Field Manual is trying to be the place those tips end up instead of disappearing. I update it as new things come up — from my own racing, from conversations with other riders, from the hard-won knowledge that the ultra cycling community shares generously when you’re in the right room at the right time.
How to use it
It works best in two moments: before a race, when you’re preparing and want to make sure you haven’t missed anything, and during a race, when something has gone sideways and you need a fast, practical answer.
The tips are short and direct. No padding, no preamble. If you’re 36 hours into a race and your stomach has shut down, you need to know what to do — not read three paragraphs of context first.
If you have ultra cycling tips of your own — things you learned through racing that you wish someone had told you before the start — I’d genuinely like to hear them. The Field Manual is meant to grow.