Maddy Nutt: How Good Could You Actually Be?
What if the biggest thing limiting your performance isn’t your physiology, but what you believe you’re capable of?In this episode of The Cycling Performance Podcast, Nathan Haas and Colby Pearce sit down with elite gravel and ultra-endurance racer Maddy Nutt to talk about performance, identity, risk, data, and what it really means to find your limits.Maddy’s path into cycling hasn’t been a conventional one. She only started riding seriously at 20, with cycling initially built around coffee rides, adventures, and having fun on the bike. Eventually, she left a career in finance to see how far she could take racing. Five years later, she’s become one of the world’s top ultra-gravel riders, with a second place at Unbound XL among a growing list of results.But recent physiological testing with Team EF Coaching challenged something Maddy had long believed about herself as an athlete.She’d always thought of herself as a classic endurance “diesel”: someone who could ride hard for a very long time, but without much ability to produce short, explosive efforts.The testing showed something different. Alongside her exceptional endurance capacity, Maddy also had a surprisingly powerful glycolytic system.And that raised a bigger question: how much of what we think we’re capable of is shaped by physiology, and how much is shaped by the story we’ve been telling ourselves?That discovery becomes the starting point for a much wider conversation about data, self-belief, risk, and whether finding your limits sometimes starts with questioning what you thought they were.
