How Marianne Vos Trains (and What Overtraining Cost Her)
Marianne Vos turned 39 in May and is still winning bike races, two decades after she started winning them. She has a contract with Team Visma Lease a Bike that simply runs until she decides to stop. That kind of longevity is rarer and harder than any single season of dominance, and the most instructive part of it is not a workout. It's the year she lost.
The year that went wrong
In 2015, at the height of her career, Vos stopped being able to train. The clinical label she was given was non-functional overreaching, which is the precise term for the state between normal training fatigue and full overtraining syndrome: performance has fallen, and unlike ordinary tiredness it does not come back after a few easy days, or a few easy weeks.
It did not arrive out of nowhere and it was not purely a training-load story. A hamstring injury in late 2014 had already disrupted her preparation, a broken rib followed during the comeback in spring 2015, and the systemic exhaustion sat underneath all of it. The recovery took the better part of a year, and the notable thing is how her team handled it: they rebuilt deliberately and refused to rush the build-up, rather than trying to patch her back onto a start line.
Two things are worth taking from this if you are a normal athlete with a job.
First, the language matters. "Overtrained" gets used casually for "I'm tired this week." The real thing is a diagnosable state that costs months, not days, and the boundary between productive overload and the other side of it is not obvious from the inside. Vos has since described learning to tell the difference between the good pain of training and the bad pain that signals something is wrong.
Second, and less comfortable: it usually isn't the training on its own. The load that breaks people is the total of training plus work, travel, obligation and poor sleep, and only one of those appears in your training log. An athlete whose calendar is full of commitments around the riding is carrying a load their power meter never sees.
The cheapest early-warning signal you have
There is no single number that reliably detects this coming. But the cheapest useful trend line is your morning resting heart rate, measured the same way each day, before you get up. It is worth tracking not because a single elevated reading means anything, but because a sustained drift away from your normal, alongside worse sleep and flat legs, is a pattern worth respecting.
Conveniently, resting heart rate is also an input to the most personalised of the heart-rate zone methods, so setting your zones properly makes you measure it:
Heart-rate reserve
135bpm
185 − 50
Max heart rate
185bpm
Resting heart rate
50bpm
| Zone | Range | What it trains |
|---|---|---|
| Z1 | Recovery 118–131 bpm | Active recovery and warm-up; promotes blood flow without adding fatigue. Very easy, RPE 1–2. Full conversation, barely breathing hard. |
| Z2 | Endurance 131–145 bpm | Aerobic base, fat oxidation and capillary density, the bread-and-butter zone. Comfortable, RPE 3–4. Can hold full sentences. |
| Z3 | Tempo 145–158 bpm | Aerobic capacity and muscular endurance; 'moderately hard' steady work. Working, RPE 5–6. Short sentences only. |
| Z4 | Threshold 158–172 bpm | Lactate threshold, your sustainable race-pace ceiling. Hard, RPE 7–8. A few words at a time. |
| Z5 | VO₂max 172–185 bpm | Maximal aerobic power and VO₂max via short, hard intervals. Very hard to maximal, RPE 9–10. No talking. |
Z1 · Recovery. Active recovery and warm-up; promotes blood flow without adding fatigue. Very easy, RPE 1–2. Full conversation, barely breathing hard.
Z2 · Endurance. Aerobic base, fat oxidation and capillary density, the bread-and-butter zone. Comfortable, RPE 3–4. Can hold full sentences.
Z3 · Tempo. Aerobic capacity and muscular endurance; 'moderately hard' steady work. Working, RPE 5–6. Short sentences only.
Z4 · Threshold. Lactate threshold, your sustainable race-pace ceiling. Hard, RPE 7–8. A few words at a time.
Z5 · VO₂max. Maximal aerobic power and VO₂max via short, hard intervals. Very hard to maximal, RPE 9–10. No talking.
- Karvonen anchors zones to your heart-rate reserve (HRmax − resting HR), so it personalizes zones to your fitness better than plain %HRmax, a fit athlete with a low resting HR gets correspondingly lower targets.
- Measure resting heart rate first thing in the morning, lying down, before caffeine. A 5-bpm error in RHR shifts every zone.
A PDF of your personalized results, with a QR code to reopen them anytime.
The Karvonen method uses your heart rate reserve, the gap between resting and maximum, which is why two riders with the same HRmax but different fitness get different zones. Compare it with the plain percentage-of-HRmax zones and you'll see why the reserve version tends to fit better.
One honest caveat: resting heart rate is a trend signal, not a diagnosis. In some overreached athletes it climbs, in others it barely moves or even drops. Use it as one input among sleep, mood, appetite and performance, not as a green light.
Base miles, and not much else
For all her range as a racer, Vos describes her actual training in plain terms:
Most of the training I do is about those base level miles… hours and hours on the bike, especially in the winter but also during the road season.
Her advice to amateurs who love cyclocross is to keep the sharp, cross-specific work to once or twice a week and let the rest be aerobic volume, because the temptation for a time-limited rider is to make every session intense and end up with no base at all. That is the same conclusion Kipchoge and Pogačar reach from opposite ends of endurance sport, and it is still the most ignored advice in amateur training. Our Zone 2 guide is the practical version.
On strength work she is similarly unfashionable. She emphasises core stability rather than heavy lifting, saying core work is the thing she really feels helps, and deliberately keeps the gym load modest because bulk does not suit an all-rounder's profile.
Racing cyclocross as training, on purpose
The structural trick of her career is that winter cyclocross is not a second season bolted onto the first. It is chosen to serve the road year. Her team's cyclocross coach frames the road build as the priority, with good training blocks and volume as the requirement, and Vos picks a cross calendar that fits around it:
The cyclocross races on my calendar combine well with my road training.
She is also explicit that the calendar has to leave proper recovery between races, which sounds obvious and is exactly what an athlete with her history would insist on.
The transferable idea: pick your B-events because they support the A-goal, not because they were on the calendar. Racing is a stimulus you don't control, and it belongs in the plan on purpose or not at all.
2026
This season has been hard for reasons that have nothing to do with training. Her father, Henk Vos, died in late March, and she missed a run of spring races before returning to finish second at Paris-Roubaix Femmes days later. She then crashed out of the Vuelta España Femenina on stage one with a fractured collarbone in May. In June she won the final stage of the Volta a Catalunya Femenina, her first victory of the year and, by her team's count, the 259th of her career.
The Tour de France Femmes starts on 1 August. She has named it as a season goal, though I have not seen a confirmed start list, so treat her participation as expected rather than certain.
None of that is a training lesson and I am not going to dress it up as one. It's just the shape of a long career: the plan meets real life repeatedly, and longevity is partly the willingness to keep restarting.
What you can actually steal from it
- Respect the difference between tired and overreached. Fatigue that doesn't clear after a genuine easy week is a different animal, and the treatment is more rest than you want to take.
- Count the load your log doesn't see. Work, travel, sleep debt and stress spend the same recovery budget as intervals.
- Track resting heart rate as a trend. Cheap, daily, and most useful as a pattern next to sleep and mood. Set your zones with Karvonen so you're measuring it anyway.
- Most of it should be base. One or two genuinely hard sessions a week, and volume around them.
- Schedule recovery between events, rather than hoping it fits in the gaps.
- Play the long game. Two decades of racing beats two brilliant seasons and a burnout, and the athletes who last are the ones who stopped in time.
More in this series: Demi Vollering, Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogačar, Kilian Jornet, Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Eliud Kipchoge.
Sources
Her 2015 overtraining episode and the deliberate, unhurried rebuild are reported by Total Women's Cycling, with the surrounding injuries reported by Cycling Weekly; the good pain versus bad pain framing is from Liv Cycling. The base-miles quote and her winter-training advice are from Total Women's Cycling, and the core-stability comment from Active. The cyclocross-supports-the-road-season quotes are from Team Visma Lease a Bike, as is her Volta a Catalunya stage win. Her open-ended contract is reported by Cyclingnews. "Non-functional overreaching" is the term reported in interviews with her about the 2015 diagnosis; no current weekly training volumes for her are in the public record, so none are quoted here.
Cover photo by MFonzatti, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
