Yesterday we wrote about pacing Stage 8 into Nice as a “deceptive flat stage” — 171.9km that looked like a transition day and ended with two punchy climbs deciding everything. We got the shape of it right. We didn’t predict that Demi Vollering would use that shape to seize the maillot jaune with a searing late attack, erasing a 15-second deficit in about six kilometers and flipping the entire Tour de France Femmes on its head one day before the finish.

That’s not a pacing story anymore. Ventoux was about holding one honest number for an hour. Nice was about staying sharp through a boring middle for a punchy finale. Col d’Èze, which decides the race today, is about rationing effort across four reps of the same hill. Vollering’s move on Stage 8 is a different skill entirely — producing a race-winning, sustained-hard attack after 165-plus kilometers of accumulated fatigue, on top of an already-selective finale that had just eliminated the sprinters. That’s not FTP. That’s not pacing discipline. That’s anaerobic capacity, and it’s trainable in a way most amateurs never actually train it.

Quick Verdict: Steady Pacing vs. the Late Attack

What It Tests	Example From This Race	Amateur Mistake	What Actually Trains It
Sustained threshold power	Ventoux, one hour, no relief	Surging early, blowing up mid-climb	Long steady-state intervals at goal FTP
Fatigue-managed pacing	Col d’Èze, four reps of one climb	Racing every lap the same	Even splits, deliberately boring early reps
Explosive power on fresh legs	A short crit attack, a sprint from the gun	Going too deep too early	Standard VO2max and sprint intervals
Explosive power on cooked legs	Vollering’s Stage 8 attack, km 165+	Assuming there’s nothing left to attack with	Anaerobic work built deliberately on top of fatigue

The lesson: The legs that win a race after five hours aren’t the same legs — physiologically — as the ones that win it in the first twenty minutes. Training the second kind takes a different session than training the first.

What Actually Happened on Stage 8

Stage 8 ran 171.9km from Sisteron to Nice, and for most of it, the race behaved exactly like the flat, transitional stage its profile suggested. Then the finale arrived — the Côte de Colomars, then the Côte de la Ginestière, both inside the final 17 kilometers, both climbs we’d already flagged as the stage’s real decision point.

Vollering’s team, FDJ United-Suez, drove a hard enough tempo on the Ginestière to shed the sprinters outright. The real move came after that, on the Camin de l’Arieta — a brutal, 450-meter wall averaging more than 13%, cresting less than 8km from the line. Vollering attacked right at the bottom of it. Elisa Longo Borghini closed back up to her with Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney following on her wheel, but Vollering accelerated twice more and shook off both of them just before the top. The gap held and grew through the closing flat kilometers into Nice — Vollering finished alone on the Promenade des Anglais, with Longo Borghini crossing 17 seconds later and Niewiadoma-Phinney on the same time in third. Add the finish-line bonus seconds and the swing was complete: Vollering had turned a 15-second deficit — built when Niewiadoma-Phinney won on Mont Ventoux — into an 8-second lead, heading straight into today’s decisive final stage over four ascents of the Col d’Èze.

What makes that attack worth a training post rather than just a race recap is where it happened. Not on fresh legs at kilometer 20, where anyone with a good sprint can win a bunch gallop. At kilometer 165-plus, after a full day of racing, on a climb that had just spent the field’s remaining matches shedding the sprinters. Winning a bike race from that position requires a specific physical capacity — and it’s one that steady climbing, the thing this race has mostly rewarded so far, doesn’t build on its own.

Why This Is a Different Trainable Skill Than Climb Pacing

Everything we’ve covered in this race so far — Ventoux’s hour-long grind, Nice’s late sting, today’s four laps of the Col d’Èze — comes down to threshold management. Hold the right percentage of FTP, don’t overspend early, have something left for the part that matters. That’s a real skill, and it’s the one most structured training plans are built around.

Vollering’s move tests something adjacent but distinct: the ability to produce a hard, sustained anaerobic effort — not a five-second jump, a multi-minute attack that has to actually hold — after the aerobic system is already deeply fatigued. Sports scientists usually talk about this in terms of anaerobic work capacity, sometimes shorthanded as W′ (W-prime): a finite reserve of above-threshold effort that depletes as you spend it and only slowly refills, especially once you’re several hours and multiple efforts into a race. TrainerRoad’s breakdown of the anaerobic energy system puts it plainly: this is the system that powers efforts in the ten-to-thirty-second-plus range above threshold, and it responds to training the same way any other energy system does — specifically, deliberately, and not by accident.

What is anaerobic capacity, and why does it decide races like this one? Anaerobic capacity is your body’s finite reserve of above-threshold effort — the energy available for hard accelerations, attacks, and surges that exceed what your aerobic system alone can sustain. Unlike FTP, it doesn’t refill quickly mid-ride. Riders who spend it wisely early have something left for the moment that decides the race; riders who don’t, don’t.

The problem is that most amateur training — and, frankly, most of the training advice on this exact race so far — optimizes for the wrong end of that reserve. Steady zone 2, sweet spot blocks, threshold intervals: all genuinely useful, all things we’d tell you to keep doing. None of them teach your body to produce a hard three-to-six-minute effort on legs that already have 165 kilometers in them. That’s a different adaptation, and it needs a different session.

How Do You Train to Attack Late in a Race?

If you’re building toward an event with a selective, late finale — a gran fondo with a punchy final climb, a road race that comes down to a late attack, even a group ride where the sprint always happens after the “hard part” is supposedly over — training this capacity comes down to five things:

1. Practice hard efforts on pre-fatigued legs, not fresh ones. A VO2max interval done in the first twenty minutes of a ride teaches a different adaptation than the same interval done after two or three hours of steady work. If your event finishes hard after a long day, at least some of your intervals need to as well.
2. Build sessions with real accumulated fatigue, not just a warm-up. Ten easy minutes doesn’t replicate 165 kilometers of racing. The workout below uses a genuinely long steady block before the hard efforts, because that’s what actually depletes the reserve you’re trying to train around.
3. Make the finishing effort longer than a sprint. Vollering’s move held for kilometers, not seconds. Training pure five-second power teaches acceleration; training three-to-six-minute efforts on tired legs teaches the capacity that actually won Stage 8.
4. Respect the recovery cost. PezCyclingNews’ explainer on W′ and anaerobic capacity is right that this reserve rebuilds slowly, especially under fatigue — these sessions are genuinely taxing. One a week is plenty for most riders training 6-12 hours; stacking two or three will leave you flat for everything else.
5. Test it honestly. If your power collapses to nothing in the final effort rather than holding something close to your earlier numbers, that’s useful data — it means the session, and the capacity it’s building, still has room to grow.

A Workout to Train This

You don’t need a Grand Tour finale to build this. Any long ride that finishes with real efforts — or a trainer session built the same way — trains the same adaptation Vollering showed off on the Camin de l’Arieta.

Warm-up: 15 minutes progressive, building to endurance pace.

Main set:

1. 90-105 minutes at 65-75% FTP (RPE 3-4/10) — the accumulated-fatigue block. This isn’t filler; it’s the part of the session that makes the finishing efforts mean something. Fuel through it like you would mid-race.
2. 5 minutes at 80-85% FTP (RPE 5/10) — a short lift, simulating the tempo a strong team drives before the real move goes.
3. 4 minutes at 115-125% FTP (RPE 8-9/10) — the attack. This is the effort that matters most in the session — go hard enough that holding it for the full four minutes is genuinely in question.
4. 3 minutes easy spin (RPE 2/10) — partial recovery only, the way a real gap doesn’t come with a full rest.
5. 3 minutes at 105-115% FTP (RPE 8/10) — the second effort, simulating defending a gap once you’ve made it. This is where most riders find out how much the first block actually cost them.

Cool-down: 10-15 minutes easy.

Total time: 130-150 minutes.

The test: Compare your power in block 5 to block 3. A small drop is normal and expected — that’s the reserve doing its job. A collapse to well below threshold, or an inability to hold the target at all, tells you the accumulated-fatigue block genuinely emptied the tank, which is useful information about where your anaerobic capacity actually sits right now, not where you assume it sits on fresh legs. If you haven’t checked your numbers in a while, retest your FTP before setting targets — this session is demanding enough that a stale threshold will send you into block 3 either too soft to learn anything or too deep to finish block 5 at all.

This pairs naturally with the short, punchy climbing work we covered around Tirreno-Adriatico’s muri stages earlier this year — that session trained explosive power on relatively fresh legs. This one trains the same energy system with the fatigue already baked in, which is the harder and, based on yesterday, more race-deciding version of the skill.

The Common Mistake This Exposes

Most time-crunched riders who do intensity work do it early in a ride, because that’s when the legs feel capable of hitting the numbers. It’s a reasonable instinct — nobody wants to grind out a hard interval on legs that already feel cooked. But it also means a lot of amateur training never actually tests or builds the capacity that decides races like Stage 8: producing power when the tank is already low, not just when it’s full.

That doesn’t mean throwing out early-ride intensity work. It means occasionally — once a week is plenty — putting the hard effort at the back end of a long ride instead of the front, on purpose, and being honest about how much smaller the number gets when it’s genuinely earned rather than fresh.

What This Means for Today’s Stage 9

Vollering starts today’s stage — four ascents of the Col d’Èze, the last one via the steeper Vinaigrier road, then a technical descent into Nice — with an 8-second cushion and, based on yesterday, evidence that she can still produce winning power deep into a hard day. Niewiadoma-Phinney starts it needing to find time back on a course that repeats the same climb she was distanced on less than 24 hours ago.

Eight seconds is not a lot of insurance over 99.2 kilometers and four categorized ascents. But the specific skill Vollering just demonstrated — real anaerobic power arriving late, after the legs have every reason to have nothing left — is exactly the skill this race has now shown twice matters more than raw climbing numbers in isolation. Whoever produces it again first this afternoon likely wins the Tour de France Femmes.

The Bottom Line

Steady climb pacing wins you consistency. It’s still the foundation of everything we write about on this site, and it’s still the right thing to spend most of your training time on. But races — and a lot of the group rides and gran fondos that mimic them — are frequently decided by something else: who can still produce hard, sustained power once the aerobic system is already spent.

That’s not a skill you get by accident from doing more zone 2. It’s a skill you build the same deliberate way you’d build an FTP number — with sessions specifically designed to ask your body for power after the fatigue is already real, not before it. Vollering trained for exactly that moment. Chasing a Strava segment at the end of a long Sunday ride, or a result at a local gran fondo, the lesson from Stage 8 holds either way: don’t just train to hold your number. Train to still have one left when everyone else assumes you don’t.

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Stage 8 results and race narrative from Cyclingnews’ coverage of Vollering’s Stage 8 attack and the official Tour de France Femmes rankings. Training targets are estimates based on power-based training principles — adjust for your own tested FTP and conditions.