From Road Cycling Novice to Finishing Wuling: A One-Year Rider's Growth Record

Introduction

Last January, I bought my first road bike. Last December, I stood at Wuling.

The eleven months in between were eleven months of a complete upgrade in my fitness, willpower, and understanding of life. I’m not going to spout inspirational quotes; this article is simply an honest record of how a complete beginner accomplished, within one year, a goal that previously felt like “that’s not something someone like me would do.”

Monthly Progress Table

The Most Important Turning Point: Saddle Height Adjustment

It sounds minor, but adjusting the saddle height was one of the most important changes of the year.

For the first two months, I had persistent pain on the outside of my knee. Online research suggested it might be IT Band friction, but I bought several kinds of knee braces and tried various stretches without any fundamental improvement.

Later, at the bike shop, the mechanic watched my pedaling style and said, “Your saddle is at least 2cm too low, so your knee has to bend a little more with every pedal stroke. Over time, your knee naturally can’t handle it.”

After raising the saddle and fine-tuning the cleat position, the knee problem almost completely disappeared within two weeks.

This taught me: equipment issues must be ruled out before talking about training. Training with incorrect equipment setup is accumulating injury, not accumulating strength.

The October That Almost Made Me Quit

In October, right knee inflammation from overtraining forced me to stop training for three weeks.

Three weeks off the bike, with only two months until the Wuling challenge. Every morning during those three weeks, I woke up thinking, “There’s not enough time, my knee isn’t healed yet, is this year a write-off?”

That anxiety was multi-layered—not just the fear of missing this year’s goal, but also a self-doubt that whispered, “I really am not the kind of person who can do this.”

But a knee is a knee. It doesn’t heal faster just because you’re anxious.

During those three weeks, I maintained my base fitness with swimming and upper-body training, while also re-reading a lot of material on training periodization. I began to understand that “rest is part of training” rather than “rest is an interruption of training.” This shift in mindset noticeably improved the quality of my subsequent training.

Race Day at Wuling

In early December, I set off from Puli at 5:30 AM, frost in the air.

My riding condition that day wasn’t particularly good—I’d slept lightly the night before, and I had no appetite in the morning. But I told myself, “Even if you’re not in great shape, you still ride. Because by the time you’re truly ready, you’d have already arrived.”

Throughout the ride, I kept replaying scenes from the past year in my head: the embarrassment of my first flat tire when I didn’t know how to fix it, the awkwardness of being overtaken by a gray-haired uncle on Yangmingshan, the anxiety of being forced to stop training in October.

Those images gave me a strange kind of strength in the final 5 kilometers.

Practical Advice

• The goal of year one is “building a foundation,” not “completing the hardest challenge”: The foundation includes proper riding posture, equipment setup, and nutrition/hydration strategy—these matter more than climbing mileage.
• Set an achievable milestone every three months: From 50km to 100km to Cingjing Farm to Wuling, allow enough training time between each milestone to fully absorb it.
• Take injuries seriously; don’t push through the pain: Forced rest periods within a year often actually deepen your understanding of training. Don’t treat rest as failure.
• Find one or two riding partners who are stronger than you: Their level will pull you forward. Riding only with people at your own level makes it hard to break through your ceiling.

Conclusion

After finishing Wuling, I sat by the roadside, bought myself a can of hot cocoa, and thought for a long time before sending a message to the friend who “took me to buy the bike” a year earlier: “Thank you for that ‘just give it a try’ back then.”

Sometimes, a casual word of encouragement can change the entire trajectory of a year.

I’m glad I tried.

Related Reading

• Mastering Wuling on Your First Try: A Complete Preparation Guide for First-Timers Climbing from the West
• My First Wuling Challenge: A Newbie’s Preparation Journey and On-Site Experience
• My First Road Bike Race: A Newbie’s Pre-Race Fears and Post-Finish Joy
• The 100km Challenge Day: A Training Journey from Zero to a Hundred Kilometers