How Enric Mas Trains (Leading the Vuelta a Year After Surgery)

In May, Enric Mas finished 32nd at the Giro d'Italia and lost the general classification on the first mountain day. Spanish cycling media were openly asking whether Movistar should keep backing him. Today, 4 September, he is in the red jersey of the Vuelta a España with eight stages left, 1:45 clear of a four-time winner of the race. Nothing about his physiology changed in those four months. What changed was the block of training in between, and the fact that he had spent the previous year learning to be patient.

A year that started with a blood clot

Mas crashed on the Mur-de-Bretagne stage of the 2025 Tour de France. He kept riding, but tests found thrombophlebitis in his left leg: a clot in an inflamed vein. He abandoned in the Alps, and that was his season. He missed the Vuelta, the race where he has finished on the podium four times, for the first time since 2019. During it he told AS he had no idea when he would ride a bike again, let alone race.

He had surgery on the leg in mid-October 2025. His first race back was a team time trial at Challenge Mallorca in February, close to his home in Artà, roughly seven months after his last race. His own framing of it was flat and unromantic: "It has been a long process and I am still in it, little by little." He also said the training was following the recovery, not the calendar, which is the sentence in all of this that most amateurs get wrong.

He then took the July pressure off himself entirely, skipping the Tour de France for the first time in years. "I want to take a break from France for a few years or a few months, let's put it that way."

The Giro was not a failure, it was a block

This is the part worth sitting with. Mas went to the Giro in May insisting a podium was realistic, and finished 32nd. Read as a result, it looks like the end of a career. Read as training, it looks like exactly what it was: three weeks of the hardest aerobic load available anywhere, absorbed by a rider who was eight months post-surgery and simply not ready to race it.

Grand Tours are terrible places to discover your form and superb places to build it. Mas came out of that Giro with three weeks of racing in his legs that no training camp can replicate, and then, crucially, he did not race again for two months.

Here is his own account of what followed: "After a very difficult start to the season, this summer I had a training camp at altitude, went to San Sebastian and then the Vuelta a Burgos and I've started having lots of good moments."

That is a textbook sequence, and it is copyable at any level:

1. A big aerobic load (the Giro), taken as stimulus rather than as a test.
2. A long absorption block at altitude, where the adaptation actually happens.
3. One hard single-day race (17th at Clásica San Sebastián) to reopen the top end.
4. One short stage race (5th at the Vuelta a Burgos) to confirm the form is repeatable day on day.
5. The target.

The mistake most amateurs make is compressing steps 1 and 5 and skipping 2. Load without absorption is just fatigue. Mas went into the Vuelta saying "we've come from altitude and we don't know exactly how we will respond," which is the honest position: altitude blocks are a bet whose payoff lands weeks later, and you find out in the race.

What he actually does well

Mas is 1.77m and 61kg, which is the classic Grand Tour climber's build, and his whole career has been built on one repeatable skill: holding a very high steady power on a 20 to 40 minute climb, day after day, for three weeks. He is not an explosive rider and he does not win by surprise. He wins by still being there.

Stage 9 to the Alto de Aitana is the clean example. 187.4km, 4,952m of climbing, six categorised climbs, 32 degrees. He sat in the group all day, went with 3.2km to go, and outsprinted Oscar Onley for his first win since 2022, with Roglič third at 12 seconds. Three days later on Calar Alto he attacked again and took about another half minute out of Roglič. Both moves came late and both were sized to what he could hold. That is not caution, it is pacing discipline: he rides to a ceiling he knows, rather than to the mood of the group.

For a rider like that, the number that governs everything is the power he can hold at threshold, expressed against his body weight.

Feed in a recent 20-minute or ramp effort and you get an FTP estimate plus the training zones that fall out of it. Then divide by your mass on the watts per kilogram page, because on an 11.9km climb at 7.2%, absolute watts are almost irrelevant and W/kg is nearly everything. If you would rather derive the same anchor from two maximal efforts instead of one, critical power gets you there from a different direction.

The rest of his week looks like every Grand Tour rider's week and like Vingegaard's and Pogačar's: a large majority of low-intensity riding holding up a small amount of very hard work, structured altitude blocks, and years of it stacked without interruption. The principle underneath is the one in how to train zone 2 and polarized training, and it is unglamorous by design.

The limiter he never fixed

Four Vuelta podiums, no wins: second in 2018, 2021 and 2022, third in 2024. The reason is almost always the same, and it is about to be tested again.

Stage 18 on 10 September is a flat 32.1km time trial into Jerez de la Frontera. Mas has never been good against the clock. In the 2021 Vuelta's 33.8km time trial, Roglič won in 44:02 and Mas was ninth, 1:24 down. In 2020 he called his Vuelta time trial "a disaster." His lead over Roglič right now is 1:45, and Roglič is the Olympic time trial champion.

So the arithmetic is uncomfortable: on history, that single stage roughly erases the entire lead. Mas knows it. "We have to be aware that Primož Roglič is an Olympic champion and has an impressive time."

This is the honest training lesson of his career, and it is a more useful one than any session. A limiter you never train stays a limiter, and eventually it decides your season. Mas has been the best climber in this race and has still not made it safe, because there is one discipline he never built. If you have a known weakness, the time to train it is not the week you need it.

Why he can still win it

The case for Mas is not that the lead is safe. It is the shape of what is left:

• Stage 14, tomorrow, finishes up the Sierra de la Pandera, 11.9km at 7.2%. Every second he takes here is a second he does not have to defend at Jerez.
• Stages 19 and 20 come after the time trial. Peñas Blancas, then Collado del Alguacil in the Sierra Nevada: over 5,000m of climbing and a final ascent of 8.3km at 9.8%. If Roglič takes the jersey in the time trial, Mas gets two of the hardest mountain days of the race to take it back.
• Stage 21 is not a parade. 112km around Granada, classified hilly.
• Roglič turns 37 next month and has a long history of losing Grand Tours to bad luck in the third week, something the profile of his career covers in detail.

He is the favourite. He is not yet the winner, and anyone telling you the race is decided has not looked at stage 18. What he needs is a buffer of more than two minutes by 10 September, and Pandera is where he goes to get it.

What you can actually steal from it

• Judge a comeback in blocks, not races. 32nd in May and red in September is the same rider. Form after a long layoff arrives in steps, and the first races back are part of the build.
• Load, then absorb. The Giro was the stimulus; the altitude camp that followed is where it turned into fitness. Skipping the absorption is the most common way to waste a hard block.
• Test the form before you need it. One hard one-day race, then one short stage race, then the target. Cheap information, in the right order.
• Pace to a number you know. Mas attacks at 3.2km, not 13km, because he rides to a measured ceiling. Set yours with FTP and W/kg.
• Train your limiter in the off-season. A weakness you avoid all year will find you on the one day it matters.

More in this series: Primož Roglič, Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogačar, Remco Evenepoel and Demi Vollering.

Sources

Wikipedia, 2026 Vuelta a España, Cyclingnews on the thrombophlebitis, Cyclingnews on his return to racing, Domestique on his 2026 changes, Cyclingnews stage 9 report, CyclingUpToDate GC after stage 13, IDL Procycling on the time trial maths, Vuelta 2026 route.

Cover photo by Yannick Arts, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.