Training for the Mallorca 312 — the hardest kilometre is at km 259.6, and it is not in the mountains

Train for a long day at tempo, not for a mountain. The steepest kilometre anywhere on the Mallorca 312 is 7.8%, and it is at km 259.6 — on an unremarkable back road in the island’s flat middle, 107 kilometres after the last mountain, inside none of the ten climbs the organiser names.

If you have eight weeks, spend them on the thing that actually ends people’s days: 51.4% of this race — 160.9 km of it — comes after the final summit, and it is ridden into the wind on legs that have already climbed 3,093 m.

And if you are choosing between the 312 and the 226 to make it easier: the 226 skips no climb at all. It leaves the long course at km 218.7, 9.5 km from its own finish line.

The course does not ask what everyone trains for

Ten named climbs. They average 4.9%, and the worst continuous kilometre inside any of them is 7.5% — the tunnel-side ramp on Puig Major.

Set that against the island this site has measured. Of 75 published climb-sides, 18 have a steeper kilometre than anything on the 312. The island’s median climb-side has a worst kilometre of 7.1%. Its actual steepest is 15.6%, on Puig de sa Coma Fosca above Gènova — more than double the hardest thing the race will put under your wheels.

The climbs, as the organiser marks them on the file riders download:

Two coaching articles that set the training volume for this event both describe it as a climbing test. Ride Harder: "some of the toughest climbs such as the Coll de Femenia and the Puig Major are included in all 3 distances". Raceline Coaching: "this epic ride tests endurance, climbing ability, and mental fortitude". Neither is wrong about the climbs being there. Both are describing the first half of a race whose second half is longer.

The number every training article inherits, and where it comes from

Every published figure sits above the file. The gap between the round number the plans quote and the rawest reading the organiser’s own track can produce is 308 m — and the raw reading counts GPS noise as climbing. Train for 4,325 m spread over 313.2 km; that is the day.

How we got this Distance is haversine between consecutive track points; elevation is resampled to 25 m and smoothed over an eleven-sample window before positive changes are summed. Three distances, three smoothed gains, three raw gains and three high points, re-derived and compared with what this site already publishes. Any of them moving is caught at once.Computed from the organiser's three official GPX tracks, downloaded from mallorca312.com.Computed 7 August 2026.

The two events inside this one

19.3 metres a kilometre, then 8.0. Those are two different bike rides, and only one of them is the one the plans train.

The second is not empty, either. After the 226 turns for home, the 312 still has 94.5 km and 914 m left — more than a fifth of the day’s climbing, in a part of the island nobody photographs. That is where the 7.8% kilometre lives.

The rule that picks a training ride, stated before the answer

One number decides it: metres of ascent per kilometre. For each half of the race, the ride that rehearses it is whichever of the Consell de Mallorca’s eight signposted routes — all of them measured end to end on this site — comes closest to that half’s climbing density.

Density rather than total, because a training ride is shorter than the thing it rehearses by construction, and density is the property that survives being cut short. Nothing in the rule can see a commercial partner: no route on this island pays anybody anything.

Ride Serra de Tramuntana nord and you have ridden the 312’s morning — 19.4 m/km against the race’s 19.3, a miss of 0.1 metres in every kilometre. It is 108.7 km long, which is 68% of the half it stands in for.

Nothing on this island rehearses the afternoon, and that is the finding rather than a gap in the table. Fars de Migjorn is the closest the signposted network gets to 8.0 m/km, and it misses by 1.1. But the afternoon’s difficulty was never its terrain. It is 153.2 km of open road ridden after 3,093 m of climbing, and no route reproduces that except by being ridden second.

And nothing rehearses the distance. The longest signposted route on Mallorca is Serra de Tramuntana - Central 1 at 181.4 km — 58% of the race, 47% of its climbing. If you want to know what hour nine feels like before the day itself, you have to stitch two of these together, or ride one of them twice.

The climbs you will train on that the race never goes near

If you book a week in the Tramuntana to prepare, you will be sold the island’s famous roads. Most of them are not on the course. Of the 12 biggest climb-sides on Mallorca by ascent, these are the ones the 312 does not use:

Coll dels Reis is Sa Calobra — the climb every preparation article names and every camp itinerary puts on a Wednesday. It is not on the course.

And the one climb that is on the course is on it from the wrong side. The race summits at the Túnel de Monnàber, which is what everyone means by Puig Major; it gets there from Gorg Blau, at 4.1% over 8.3 km for 337 m. The Puig Major people train on comes up from the Sóller valley to the same tunnel mouth: 15.4 km at 5.5% for 848 m — two and a half times the climb, to the identical point on the map.

Ride them anyway; they are the best roads on the island, and the ranking exists because they are worth ranking. Just do not file the week as preparation.

Know before you ride

The feeds thin out exactly where you stop noticing. The organiser’s track carries 9 “10 km to the next feed station” warnings, so a station follows about ten kilometres after each. Through the Tramuntana the widest gap is 34.9 km. The three widest of the day — 50.0 km, 44.3 km, 35.7 km — are all past the mountains, where the road is easiest, the pace is highest and the bottles empty fastest. Carry for the 50.0 km one.

A rider on a 2023 forum thread on the feed that does get crowded: "the first feed station at c. 100k was likened to the hunger games… hundreds of cyclists fighting over a few water taps" (PistonHeads, 8 May 2023).

The wind is the second half’s terrain. Rien Coertjens, who reports finishing the 2018 edition in 8h 54m at 34.9 km/h, on the kilometres after the split: "Straight into a headwind on wide open roads, no cover to be found." Two riders, seven years apart, describe the same stretch the same way, and it is the stretch with no hill on it.

You will ride past your own finish. At km 222.1 the route comes within 5.5 km of the finish line and then turns away. Ride Harder’s coach, on his fifth 312: "Turning right for an extra 90km when you are only a few kilometres from the finish line is tough enough this year it was even tougher." — his ninety is our 94.5 km, and his “a few kilometres” is 5.5 km. A rider’s memory and the organiser’s own track, agreeing to within five kilometres on both numbers.

The controls are earlier than the finish clock. The organiser publishes cut-off times but not the kilometres they sit at; these are the kilometres, read off the track:

The last one is at km 193.9. After it there are 119.3 km with nothing to beat but the finish gate at 20:40. That is the loneliest arithmetic of the day, and the pacing page does it properly, with a calculator built on those four control kilometres.

Gearing is chosen against a gradient, and this course’s worst one is mild. At 7.8%, 11 of the 11 low gears the surveyed hire fleets publish keep our reference rider — 82 kg at 200 W — above 60 rpm. Even the tallest of them, a 36×28, turns 63 rpm on it. Point the same model at the island’s worst kilometre — 15.6% — and 0 of the 11 survive. The cassette you need is for the training week, not for the race. The gearing survey has the whole fleet, and three of the eight operators in it publish no cassette at all.

A camp the week before is a bet, and the German cycling press says so out loud. TOUR Magazin’s format is explicit — "Eine Woche Rennrad-Training auf Mallorca und am Wochenende beim Rennrad-Klassiker Mallorca 312 teilnehmen" (TOUR Magazin, 2 February 2024) — and it is the standard German package. Radsport-Rennrad’s own camp guidance sets the entry bar first: "Wer ins Trainingslager fährt, sollte schon 1000 Kilometer in den Beinen haben." (Volker Buchholz, 12 March 2019), and names arriving unfit and overdoing it on site as the two most common mistakes. A week of Tramuntana climbing seven days before a fourteen-hour day is the second mistake with a start number pinned to it.

Choosing your distance, with the number that actually decides it

The 226 is sold as the sensible option and read as the easy one. It is neither, and the reason is geometric: it shares every metre of the 312 to km 218.7. All ten named climbs. The Puig Major tunnel. The whole Tramuntana. Then it turns for a finish 9.5 km away while the long course goes back out for 94.5 km.

So the choice is not how much mountain to ride. It is whether to add 94.5 km and 914 m of interior road to a day that has already done its climbing. A rider who has ridden it, on a 2023 forum thread: "The 225 is the best route, the 312 doesn't add a great deal apart from the party in Artà." — a verdict we would not have written and will not soften.

The 167 is the one that genuinely changes the day: it leaves at km 97.7, before Coll des Pi, and rides five of the ten. It is still 169.5 km with 2,164 m and the full Puig Major ascent.

What riders say, counted

8 pieces from 7 publishers, each read in full on its own page: 3 first-person ride reports, two coaches’ plan write-ups, 1 forum thread and 3 German-language sources.

Two things they agree on that no training plan we read mentions:

• The suffering is located after the mountains. Coertjens (2018, 8h 54m), Ride Harder’s coach (2025, fifth attempt) and the PistonHeads thread (2023) all put the bad part in the second half, and two of the three name the wind rather than a climb.
• Pace discipline is what riders credit, not climbing legs. Karsten Täschner, who rode it in 13h 03m and wrote it up on speed-ville.de: "Vom Gefühl her habe ich ständig versucht, nie in den „roten Bereich“ zu kommen." (18 April 2019). Fourteen hours is not won on Puig Major; it is lost there.

Booking the week that trains for it

A base. The rehearsal rides above start where they start: Serra de Tramuntana nord and Far de Formentor are Tramuntana routes, and the towns that reach them are measured on the base guide. If you are staying near the start line for the race itself, Platja de Muro itself and Can Picafort are the start line and the next town along; for the training week, Sóller puts you on the climbs the course avoids and you should ride anyway. Prices are quoted nowhere on this site.

A bike, with the right cassette. The gradient that decides it is the training week’s, not the race’s — the roads above the Sóller valley are steeper than anything the 312 will show you. Compare hire bikes and their specifications once the gearing survey has told you what to ask for; three of the eight operators surveyed publish no cassette at all.

Getting to the start. The race starts at Platja de Muro at 06:30, which fixes everything upstream of it. A fixed-price airport transfer for the bike bags, or a hire car if the training week comes first and you want the island. The race-weekend page has the expo days, the transfer distances and the hour-by-hour morning.

Cover. A fourteen-hour mass-participation event on closed public roads is exactly the case most annual travel policies exclude by name. One provider that covers amateur cycling events — we do not rank or compare insurers, and the only useful advice is to read your existing policy’s sports exclusions before you assume.

And the entry. None of the above matters without a start number, and entries for 2027 open on 6 October 2026. How to get one lists the four routes in, with what each costs.

Verified Every figure on this page was re-checked against its source on 7 August 2026. Next review due within 60 days.

How every figure on this page is produced, and what it deliberately does not claim, is on the methodology page. The event’s own records — the entry routes, the pacing arithmetic, the weekend logistics — are on the Mallorca 312 hub.