The punching stops here.

Five weeks of spring classics prep and you’ve been training short, explosive efforts. Ninety seconds on the Mur de Huy. Sixty-to-ninety seconds on Amstel’s Limburg hills. Hard. Recover. Go again. Your VO2max repeatability is sharp. Your legs know what 130% FTP feels like for a minute and a half.

Then Liège-Bastogne-Liège asks you to hold 105-110% FTP for three to five minutes. On a climb that doesn’t end. And then do it again twenty minutes later. For 259.5 kilometers.

Different race. Different energy system. And the gap between what you’ve been training and what La Doyenne demands is bigger than most riders realize.

I found out the hard way. Came into LBL after a strong Amstel and a decent Flèche Wallonne. Sharp top-end power, good repeatability on short punches. La Redoute — 2km at 8.9% average — destroyed that confidence in about 150 seconds. The climb didn’t spike and release like the Cauberg. It just kept going. By the top I was 15 watts below where I needed to be, and that was at km 230 of a 260km day. Roche-aux-Faucons twenty minutes later? I was a spectator in the group I’d been sitting in all day.

The problem wasn’t fitness. The problem was specificity. I’d spent five weeks sharpening a knife I didn’t need.

Quick Summary: Liège-Bastogne-Liège 2026

Detail	Info
Date	April 26, 2026
Edition	112th
Distance	259.5km
Total climbing	4,395m
Key climbs	La Redoute (2km, 8.9%), Roche-aux-Faucons (2.1km, 8.3%), Côte de Stockeu (1km, 12%), Côte de Wanne (2.7km, 7.4%)
Effort duration	2-5 minutes per major climb
Top favorites	Evenepoel, Pogačar, Vingegaard
Women’s race	Same day, 156km, 2,830m — Kim Le Court defending

The amateur training lesson: Amstel trains 60-90 second VO2max punches. Flèche Wallonne trains a singular 90-second maximal effort repeated. LBL trains sustained threshold climbing — 3-5 minutes at 105-115% FTP, over and over, across the longest one-day race on the calendar. You need a bigger engine, not a sharper spike.

Why LBL Is a Completely Different Problem

Here’s the simplest comparison I can give you.

Amstel Gold: 33 climbs, most under 90 seconds at race pace. Efforts at 120-135% FTP. The limiter is VO2max repeatability — can you punch hard, recover in 8 minutes, and punch again?

La Flèche Wallonne: One climb, three times. 90 seconds at 130%+ FTP. The limiter is singular maximal repeatability — can you reproduce one specific effort under rising fatigue?

Liège-Bastogne-Liège: 10+ significant climbs, most lasting 2-5 minutes at race pace. Efforts at 105-115% FTP. The limiter is sustained power under cumulative fatigue across the longest day in the spring calendar.

That 105-115% FTP number is the key. It’s not VO2max territory. It’s threshold. The climbs aren’t so steep that you’re gasping for 90 seconds and then recovering. They’re long enough that you settle into a rhythm, a hard one, and hold it. La Redoute at 8.9% average gradient for 2km takes a strong amateur three to four minutes. Roche-aux-Faucons — 2.1km at 8.3% — is similar. The Côte de la Roche-en-Ardenne, earlier in the race, runs over four minutes.

Three minutes at 110% FTP is a fundamentally different physiological demand than 90 seconds at 130% FTP. The 90-second effort is driven by anaerobic capacity and VO2max power. The three-to-five-minute effort sits right on the border between threshold and VO2max, where lactate management, pacing, and aerobic efficiency matter more than raw top-end punch.

If you’ve been training short punchy intervals for the last month, you’ve been building the roof. LBL cares about the walls.

The Mid-Race Trap Nobody Warns You About

Everyone talks about La Redoute and Roche-aux-Faucons. They’re the decisive climbs, the ones where the race breaks apart in the final 30km. But most amateurs never get there in good shape because of what happens a hundred kilometers earlier.

The trio of Wanne, Stockeu, and Haute-Levée between km 130 and km 160 is where La Doyenne starts earning its name.

The Côte de Wanne: 2.7km at 7.4%. Long enough to hurt, not steep enough to walk. The Côte de Stockeu: 1km at 12% average — the steepest sustained pitch in the race, a real wall that hits you less than 10km after you’ve just climbed Wanne. Then the Côte de Haute-Levée: 3.6km at 5.5%, which sounds mild until you remember you just climbed Stockeu at threshold and you’re 150km into a 260km day.

Three climbs in 30km. Each one hard enough to crack someone running low on fuel or pacing too aggressively. And they arrive at the worst possible time — deep enough into the race that the cumulative fatigue is real, but early enough that you still have 100km of racing left.

I’ve seen it in sportives that follow the LBL parcours. Riders come through Wanne looking fine. Stockeu hurts, 12% always hurts, but they survive. Then Haute-Levée, which should be manageable, becomes the climb where their legs stop answering. Not because Haute-Levée is particularly hard. Because the accumulation catches up. Three sustained climbs back-to-back on a body that’s been working for five hours.

If you blow up here, you’re done. There’s no recovery window generous enough to bring you back before La Redoute arrives 70km later. The race is effectively over at km 160, even though the finish line is at km 259.

Train for Wanne-Stockeu-Haute-Levée. The late climbs will sort themselves out.

What Sustained Climbing Actually Requires

How Long Are LBL’s Key Climbs?

The numbers you need for training:

1. La Redoute: 2km at 8.9% average. Race-pace duration for a strong amateur: 3-4 minutes at 105-115% FTP
2. Roche-aux-Faucons: 2.1km at 8.3% average. 3-4.5 minutes at 105-112% FTP
3. Côte de Stockeu: 1km at 12% average. 2-2.5 minutes at 115-125% FTP — the one climb that resembles an Amstel-style punch, but even this is longer than the Cauberg
4. Côte de Wanne: 2.7km at 7.4%. 4-5 minutes at 100-110% FTP
5. Côte de Haute-Levée: 3.6km at 5.5%. 5-7 minutes at 95-105% FTP — right at threshold, not above it, but on tired legs that’s enough

Notice the pattern. Every climb except Stockeu puts you at or just above threshold for multiple minutes. Not VO2max power. Not maximal punch. Sustained, controlled output where pacing and fueling determine who survives and who doesn’t.

This is why riders who train exclusively with short intervals fall apart at LBL. They have the top-end power. What they lack is the ability to sit at 108% FTP for four minutes, crest the climb, recover on the descent, and do it again thirty minutes later. For seven hours.

The Training: Threshold Endurance for Long Days

Workout 1: The Redoute Repeats

Your primary session. If you only do one new workout for LBL prep, make it this one.

Structure:

• Warm up 20 min, progressive to zone 3
• 5 x 4 minutes at 105-112% FTP, cadence 75-85rpm
• 4 minutes easy spinning between efforts
• Cool down 15 min

RPE: Efforts one and two should feel like a strong 7-8/10. You’re working, but it’s controlled. Effort three: 8/10. Efforts four and five: 8.5-9/10. If effort one feels like a nine, you’re going too hard, and effort five will be ugly.

Why four minutes? That’s the median race-pace duration for LBL’s major climbs. La Redoute, Roche-aux-Faucons, and Wanne all land in the 3-5 minute range. Four minutes at 108% FTP is the sweet zone between them.

What to track: Power consistency across all five repeats. At LBL-specific intensity, you shouldn’t see more than a 3-5% power drop from first to fifth. If you’re losing more than that, your threshold fitness needs work — go back to sweet spot training for a couple of weeks before attempting this block.

The difference between this and Amstel prep hit me immediately. Ninety-second intervals at 130% leave me wrecked but recovered within three minutes. Four-minute intervals at 108% don’t feel as violent, but the fatigue accumulates differently. It’s in your legs, not your lungs. A deep muscular tiredness that doesn’t flush as quickly.

Workout 2: The Wanne-Stockeu-Haute-Levée Simulation

This simulates the mid-race trio that ends most amateurs’ LBL ambitions.

Structure:

• 4.5 min at 100-108% FTP (Wanne simulation)
• 6 min easy spinning (descent + valley road)
• 2.5 min at 115-120% FTP (Stockeu simulation — steep, hard, shorter)
• 5 min easy spinning (descent)
• 6 min at 95-105% FTP (Haute-Levée simulation — long, grinding, threshold)
• Full recovery 10 min
• Repeat the entire sequence once more

Total structured work: About 35 minutes across two rounds, in a 90-minute session.

RPE: The first round should feel controlled. Hard but not desperate. The second round is where the training happens. Haute-Levée’s six minutes at threshold, on legs that already climbed Wanne and Stockeu twice, is the moment that simulates km 155 of the actual race. If you can hold power through the second Haute-Levée block, you’re ready for the real thing.

Workout 3: The Full LBL Simulation

Long day. Race-specific. This is your Saturday centrepiece.

Structure:

• 4-5 hours total (yes, you need the duration)
• First 3 hours: zone 2 endurance. Fuel aggressively — 80-90g carbs per hour. LBL is a seven-hour race for pros, probably eight-plus for amateurs. You need to practice fueling at this level or you’ll bonk before the meaningful climbs.
• At 3 hours: Wanne-Stockeu-Haute-Levée simulation (one round)
• 30 min of zone 2
• At ~3:45: La Redoute sim — 4 min at 108-115% FTP
• 15 min tempo (85-90% FTP, simulating the pace between Redoute and Roche-aux-Faucons)
• At ~4:10: Roche-aux-Faucons sim — 4 min at max sustainable effort

The key rule: Your Roche-aux-Faucons effort needs to be meaningful. If you can’t hold 105%+ FTP for the full four minutes after everything that came before it, your pacing was wrong earlier. Back off the Wanne-Stockeu-Haute-Levée block next time and save more for the finish.

I’ve done two of these over the past three weeks, and the second one went markedly better. Not because I was fitter — because I paced the middle hours differently. Ate more between hours two and three (an extra gel every 25 minutes, up to 90g carbs/hour), and held back on the Stockeu sim. The result: my Roche-aux-Faucons effort was 7 watts higher. Seven watts, from a gel and some patience. That’s the LBL lesson in miniature.

A Four-Week LBL Training Block

You’re bridging from Flèche Wallonne (April 22) to LBL (April 26). That’s only four days — so if you’re targeting both, the transition is really about the three weeks before Flèche.

If you’re targeting LBL specifically, here’s a four-week block starting now. Assumes 8-10 hours per week and solid spring fitness from the earlier classics campaign.

Week 1 (March 30 - April 5): Extend the Effort

• Tuesday: Redoute Repeats — 5x 4 min at 105-110% FTP
• Thursday: Wanne-Stockeu-Haute-Levée sim — 2 rounds
• Saturday: 3.5-hour endurance ride. No intensity. Zone 2. Eat a lot. You’re recalibrating from short punchy work.
• Other days: Zone 2 or rest. Your body needs to shift from VO2max sharpness to threshold stamina.

Week 2 (April 6 - April 12): Build Tolerance

• Tuesday: Redoute Repeats — push to 108-115% FTP if power held within 5% across all five repeats last week
• Thursday: Full LBL Simulation — 4-4.5 hours with the mid-race trio and late climb efforts
• Saturday: 2-hour endurance with 3x 4-min efforts at 105% FTP in the second hour. Keeping the duration present.
• Sunday: Watch Amstel Gold (April 19). Study which riders fade on the later climbs and which look fresh. The ones still punching at climb 30 have the engine for LBL a week later.

Week 3 (April 13 - April 19): Sharpen and Sustain

• Tuesday: Redoute Repeats — 5x 4 min at 110-115% FTP. This should feel hard but doable. If it doesn’t, stay at last week’s power.
• Thursday: Wanne-Stockeu-Haute-Levée sim — 2 rounds, trying to negative-split the second round (stronger on the second pass than the first)
• Saturday: 4-hour LBL Simulation. Full version. This is your key session. Practice fueling. Practice pacing. Practice being patient at km 150 when your legs want to go harder than they should.
• Sunday: Easy spin or rest.

Week 4 (April 20 - April 26): Taper

• Tuesday: 3x 4 min at 105-110% FTP. Reduced volume, maintained intensity.
• Wednesday: Wanne-Stockeu-Haute-Levée sim — 1 round only. Crisp, controlled.
• Thursday-Friday: Rest. Both days. LBL is 260km. You need freshness more than one extra session.
• Saturday, April 25: 45-min opener. 2x 60-sec accelerations to threshold, 1x 2 min at sweet spot. Done. Legs open, not tired.
• Sunday, April 26: Race day, sportive, or your own LBL simulation.

Fueling: The Fourth Discipline

LBL’s length changes the nutrition math.

Amstel Gold at 257km is long, but the effort profile allows natural fueling windows between short punchy climbs. Flèche Wallonne is shorter and the decisive efforts are late — you can get away with standard fueling practices.

LBL at 259.5km with 4,395m of climbing burns through glycogen like nothing else on the spring calendar. The sustained threshold efforts on every climb eat carbohydrate stores faster than short VO2max punches. And the mid-race trio at Wanne-Stockeu-Haute-Levée arrives five-plus hours in, when most amateurs’ fueling strategies are already failing.

The minimum: 80g carbs per hour from the start. Not from hour three when you start feeling empty. From the gun. Gels, drink mix, rice cakes, whatever your gut tolerates. If you haven’t trained your gut to handle 80-90g/hour, you have four weeks. Start practicing now.

The riders who crack on Haute-Levée often aren’t undertrained. They’re underfueled. Six hours at race pace on 40g of carbs per hour is a bonk waiting to happen, no matter how good your FTP numbers look.

The Women’s Race: Kim Le Court Defends

Same day, same roads (shortened to 156km with 2,830m of climbing), and a history-making defence. Kim Le Court won last year’s edition — the first African rider, male or female, to win a Monument. She’ll be marked heavily. The Dutch and Belgian teams will build strategies specifically to neutralize her on the final climbs.

Watch how she handles La Redoute. Her winning move last year came on the approach to Roche-aux-Faucons, but La Redoute was where she separated herself from the main chasers. A sustained threshold effort that strung out the field, not an explosive attack. LBL rewards that style.

The women’s race is often more tactically readable than the men’s because the field is smaller and the pivotal moments clearer. If you want to understand what sustainable threshold climbing looks like at the highest level, the women’s LBL is the better broadcast to study.

How to Watch the 112th LBL Like a Training Nerd

Five things to track on April 26:

1. Power profiles on La Redoute vs. earlier climbs. The broadcast won’t show watts, but watch body language. Riders sitting up, rocking the bike, opening their mouths wide — they’re above threshold and suffering. Compare how they looked on Wanne and Stockeu. The delta tells you who paced well and who burned matches early.

2. Pogačar’s tempo on Wanne-Stockeu. If his UAE team sets a high, sustained pace through the mid-race trio, they’re trying to break the race apart before La Redoute. That’s a threshold-based strategy, not a punch-based one. It rewards deep aerobic engines and punishes riders who saved their legs for a late attack.

3. Who eats on camera. Seriously. The riders you see pocketing gels at km 130-140, right before the mid-race climbs, are the ones who understand LBL’s fueling demands. The ones who aren’t eating are gambling. File it away.

4. Vingegaard’s climbing cadence. He spins at 90+ rpm on Grand Tour climbs. LBL’s steeper gradients (La Redoute at 8.9%, Stockeu at 12%) will force him lower. Watch whether he maintains 80+ rpm or drops into the 70s. His ability to stay in his preferred cadence range on gradients this steep is what separates him from pure Ardennes punchers.

5. The gap between Flèche Wallonne fitness and LBL fitness. Four days separate the two races. Some riders will double up. Watch who improves from Wednesday to Sunday and who fades. The ones who thrive at both have the rarest spring classics profile: maximal punch and sustained threshold. Most riders are built for one or the other.

The Longest Day

La Doyenne translates to “the oldest.” The 112th edition. The race has been running since 1892, and the fundamental challenge hasn’t changed: can you climb, sustained and strong, at the end of the longest, hardest one-day race of the spring?

Not punch. Not sprint. Climb. For minutes at a time. When you’re tired in a way that five weeks of Amstel and Flèche prep hasn’t prepared you for.

The shift from VO2max training to threshold climbing training feels counterintuitive after a month of short, sharp intervals. Four-minute efforts at 108% FTP don’t give you that same satisfying, lung-burning intensity. They feel underwhelming in the moment. Then you get to effort four and your quads are filling with concrete. That’s the LBL feeling. Not the sharp pain of a 90-second punch. The slow, building weight of sustained output that doesn’t let up.

Test your threshold. Find a hill that takes four minutes at a hard, sustainable pace. Not a sprint — a pace you could theoretically hold for twenty minutes, but only theoretically. Ride it five times with four minutes between. If the fifth time is within 5% of the first, you’re training the right system.

April 26 is 259.5 kilometers of proving you can do that. Everything else is preparation.

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Based on personal experience transitioning from short-punch Ardennes training to LBL-specific sustained climbing, and the particular demands of La Doyenne’s long climbs. Race details from Liège-Bastogne-Liège official site and climb profiles from ProCyclingStats. The Wanne-Stockeu-Haute-Levée trio will tell you more about your LBL readiness than any lab test. Find three hills. Ride them back-to-back. Then ride for two more hours. That’s the exam.