How to Plan Your Season: A DEEKA Guide to Building Your Best Year Yet

Planning your cycling season can feel overwhelming! So many races, so many training paths, and only so much time in the year. At DEEKA, we believe the best seasons aren’t built on arbitrary schedules or generic training templates. They’re built around excitement. Around fire. Around the thing that makes you say: “That’s the one. That’s the race I want.”

Here’s our step-by-step framework for designing a season that’s purposeful, productive, and deeply motivating.

1. Start With What Excites You Most

The first step is simple:
Choose the event that truly lights you up.

Is it a brutal mountain gran fondo?
A punchy criterium you’ve always wanted to podium?
A gravel epic with climbs that make your legs ache just thinking about them?

Whatever it is, put that event, your A goal, in the diary first. This becomes the centre of gravity for your entire season. Your training phases, supporting events, and development all revolve around this date. When you start with what excites you, motivation takes care of itself.

2. Add Supporting Races With Similar Demands

Next, choose your B-level events. Races or challenges that help sharpen the skills needed for your main goal.

Look for events that reflect key components of your A race:

• Terrain

• Duration

• Intensity demands

• Climbing style

• Environmental factors

These races allow you to: Hone Race Craft, Practice tactics, pacing, fuelling, and handling in a real setting. Then identify the gaps, spot areas you need to improve before your peak event.

3. Protect Your Fitness: Avoid the “Race, Rest, Recover” Trap

Racing is exciting, but too much racing can quietly chip away at your aerobic fitness. That’s because racing often forces you into a cycle of: Race → Recover → Rest → Repeat. This leaves little space for the steady aerobic work that underpins endurance performance. At DEEKA we hold this principle strongly:

“You can never be too aerobically fit, but you absolutely can begin anaerobic training too early.”

Choose your B races strategically, and leave room in the year for high-quality training blocks.

4. Build Your Phase Plan Backward From the A Goal

Once your A and B goals are in place, map out the phases of your season:

1. Aerobic Foundation

2. Build Phases with growing specificity

3. Sharpening and event-specific work

4. (Then later) Taper, see next section

Working backward ensures each phase connects logically and keeps you building toward peak form at exactly the right time.

5. Create a Taper That Brings Out Your Best

Now that the structure is set, you can shape the taper, the final runway into your A event. A proper taper should reduce training fatigue while maintaining sharpness, ensuring you arrive at your target race:

• Fresh

• Physically primed

• Mentally ready to express your fitness

Your taper length and structure depend on your training load, ride duration, and event type, but what matters most is that it’s intentional and not left to chance.

6. Begin With Aerobic Development—Always

With everything in the diary, it’s time to start training. And regardless of your discipline or experience, the first step is nearly always the same: Build the aerobic engine. It drives your:

• Sustainable power

• Repeatability

• Recovery

• Efficiency

• Performance on long climbs and long days

Starting with aerobic work sets the foundation for the entire year. Starting hard anaerobic work too early only burns matches you’ll wish you had later.

Final Thoughts: Design a Season You’re Proud Of

At DEEKA we believe your season shouldn’t just be about fitness—it should be about purpose, excitement, and progress.

1) Lead with the event that inspires you.
2) Support it with meaningful races.
3) Protect your aerobic foundation.
4) Build phases that make sense.
5) Taper intentionally.

And commit to long-term progression rather than short-term chaos.

Follow this structure, and you won’t just plan a season—you’ll build your strongest, most focused year yet on the bike.