Ötztaler 2026. Jet Fuel - Episode 1/11

Probably most of you know parts of the story so far, but if you don't, here's the key points to bring you up to speed.

A few weeks ago, I won the 2026 Utztaler for a third time and broke the course record, then proposed to my then-girlfriend Melanie as my finish line celebration.

If you don't know what the Utztaler is, it's the biggest amateur road race in the world and the Unofficial amateur road racing world championships.

It's an amateur race, but honestly, it's as close to feeling like you're in the Tour as you can get.

There's multiple helicopters, TV cars, motorbikes, a gazillion fans going nuts all over the course.

It's in all the newspapers and just madness, but it's so much fun.

For context, the Vuelta was on Eurosport at the time, but they cut away from the Vuelta to show the Utztaller.

On Eurosport.

And Melli's parents, they're almost 70, so they don't have social media, so the first time they saw all the photos from the race was when it was on the evening news at their hotel.

It's a really huge event, and a lot of people go nuts for it, so I hope if you're a cyclist you can one day be a part of it.

It's really cool.

The race is a loop around the valley I've lived in for the last four years, so these are literally all my home training roads, and the race is 225 kilometers, 5,500 meters of climbing, and this year I set the course record of six hours, 29 minutes, and 21 seconds.

For us amateurs, Ötzi is the only one I know of that can really change your life if you win it, and it's really fun to feel like you're in the Tour de France for one day.

It really does feel like that, and I hope that's motivating for some of you that want to go for it.

This will sound nuts, and I didn't understand this till after as well, but if I'd won a stage in the Tour de France this year, it would have got less coverage than winning Ötzi, at least around Austria.

So if you think you might want to do it someday, I promise it's worth it, and you really should go full throttle for that.

The 10 weeks before the race, that is the hardest and best 10 weeks of training I've ever put together.

And in this episode, it's half training advice on what we did to give you some crazy new ideas and numbers to chase, and the other half is the stories you don't know.

Here's the quick bullet points of the story many of you know so far.

I came up with this plan back in February of this year and told my coach, Steve Neal, then slowly told 10 of my friends over the next months.

In May, I published book three, four months to Utz Tyler, which was the training plan I'd follow over the next four months and how I was going to do it.

I wrote the book on how I was going to do it, and then I did it.

And that's awesome when life finally works out like that.

Honestly, that book was originally just supposed to be for me to map out all the training as clear as possible because I knew this would be the most important race to win in my life and I just wanted to be able to see the whole roadmap to getting there months out so then I could just focus on executing.

Then in June I was hit by a car while training.