Does knowing how far you have left to cycle change how hard the ride feels and how well you perform?

Details

Twelve well-trained competitive cyclists completed five 40 km rides, each aiming for their best time. Across the first four rides, their average ratings of how hard they felt they were working increased, and those ratings rose more steadily during each ride. These changes were linked to better performance.

On the final ride, researchers withheld all feedback until the last kilometre and asked for effort ratings at irregular intervals to make the remaining distance harder to judge. Average reported effort fell, and its rise during the ride became more cautious. The researchers linked this pattern to performance and interpreted greater familiarity and certainty about the finish as supporting a more aggressive effort strategy.

A separate part of the study involved six well-trained recreational cyclists completing 5, 10, 40 and 100 km rides in random order. During the first half of the longer rides, average reported effort was lower than during shorter rides, but ratings matched during the final 20% of ride duration. This supports the importance of interpreting effort in relation to how much exercise remains, rather than treating it as a fixed response.

The samples were small, and the feedback-withholding ride always came last. The abstract gives no performance times or size of the performance differences, and withholding all feedback does not isolate distance information alone.