Training with your partner—or even simply having a partner who loves to ride as much as you do—can be an amazing thing. It can also be incredibly frustrating at times. It’s tempting to try to do the same training, it’s hard when your partner has a long ride on your easy day, and it can even feel frustrating when you’re feeling plateaued but your partner is out there crushing it.

Giant mountain biker and gravel racer Cole Paton and mountain biker Savilia Blunk have been traveling together, training together and racing together for years—but it’s not rainbows and sunshine. Here, Paton is sharing a few tips for training withy your partner. (Tip number one: Don’t even try to schedule joint interviews while your girlfriend is away at a training camp!)

You don’t have to do every ride together

Just because you both ride bikes doesn’t mean your training should look exactly the same—there’s virtually no chance that you’re both at the exact same fitness or skill level, and that means what’s easy for you may not be fun for your partner, and vice versa. “When we first started dating, we would try to ride together every day. But we’d both be compromising our training: I’d be going maybe a little bit too easy, she’d be going a little bit too hard,” says Paton. “We learned that not every ride had to be together. It was OK for us to do separate training.”

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Warm up and cool down together

Out for a set of intervals? Consider starting and finishing together rather than trying to stay synced up. “If we have like an intense workout, we’ll start together, and we’ll plan our route so that we can do our separate intervals on certain climbs or sections of road, and then we’ll meet back up for the rest periods in-between, and finish the ride together.”

Make your own challenges

You can artificially ‘match’ your efforts by changing up your equipment. If you’re the stronger rider, consider swapping to a mountain bike with slicks while your partner rides a road bike. That’s how Blunk and Paton do some of their endurance-paced rides together. “I love doing those rides because I end up drafting Savilia and really working hard to hang on on descents,” Paton says. (If one partner is really new to cycling, an e-bike might even be a good option!)

Communication is key

If you’re not enjoying your rides with your partner because you feel like you’re always working a little too hard (or not hard enough), it’s important to speak up, says Paton. Otherwise, you end up unhappy on your rides, bickering about which turn to take when really, the issue is that you’re feeling exhausted. It’s OK to ask your partner to chill the pace, or say you’ll take a shortcut home and see them later.

...So are snacks

Seriously, the fastest way to ruin a perfectly good training ride together is if one of you bonks, says Paton. They both try to remember to bring at least one extra snack, just in case.

If you both race, focus on the celebration

Unfortunately for Paton and Blunk, they rarely both have great days on the bike at races. “I swear, we have this curse where we never have a good race together,” Paton laughs. “It can be really hard, because one of us is way up and the other is way down after. It’s been a really big struggle for us. But we’ve learned to focus on the good result: we really try to just celebrate every victory together. We want to really enjoy those moments together. So we usually try to dump the bad result and just focus on on whoever had a really good race and share that good day together.”

…Or consider shifting your calendar

You may assume that doing the same race is a positive, but if you’re both racing, it can be more fun and relaxing if you’re not sharing a racing calendar. It’s great if you can take turns supporting each other, rather than both trying to get sorted out on the start line and being exhausted at the finish. “Racing the exact same calendar is really hard because we both have so much pressure, we’re both like trying to focus and stay in the zone, and it’s really easy to get irritable at each other,” says Paton. “But when we have a separate calendar, it’s so nice because we each know exactly what the other person needs for support at an event, before, during and after the race.”

It takes time to find your rhythm

This is the long game—you want to be riding together in a decade, not just for the weekend, so take time to experiment with what works best for you. “It’s taken some years, honestly,” admits Paton. “For the longest time, we were both frustrated after rides, and that made it feel not as fun to train together. Over the years, we’ve figured out how to best balance and strategically plan our training.”

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Molly Hurford

Molly writes about cycling, nutrition and training, with an emphasis on women in sport. Her new middle-grade series, Shred Girls, debuts with Rodale Kids/Random House in 2019 with "Lindsay's Joyride." Her other books include "Mud, Snow and Cyclocross," "Saddle, Sore" and "Fuel Your Ride." Her work has been published in magazines like Bicycling, Outside and Nylon. She co-hosts The Consummate Athlete Podcast.