OUR STORY
Born in the Blue Ridge Mountains

1996
Peaks Coaching Group
was Born

Peaks Coaching Group started in 1996, when Hunter Allen retired from the Navigators pro cycling team. The original name for Peaks Coaching Group was CyclingPeaks Coaching, named after the Peaks of Otter in Hunter’s hometown of Bedford, VA.

Hunter had already been coaching several local mountain bike racers for $30 per month in 1995, and then in 1996 decided to see if he could make an honest shot at creating a coaching business. The first training camp was held in April 1997 and had 12 riders the first week and just 2 in the second week. Hunter created his camps as a way for his athletes to come and spend a week of riding with him and gain first-hand knowledge and experience. That year also proved to be a turning point in the business as well, as he met Brian Toone at a local bike race. Brian really wanted a cycling coach as he was an up and coming Category 4 racer, but was also a poor college student at Clemson University.

Brian suggested that, as a computer science major, he could build a “website” in exchange for coaching. “What is a website?” Hunter asked. “Oh, it’s a business card online, it will be cool, but probably won’t do too much more in the future.” replied Brian. Three months after turning on this new-fangled website, Hunter called up Brian and said, “Turn it off! I have too many clients and more inquiries all the time!” In reality, Hunter recognized this might be the start of a larger business and created three different coaching levels at $50, $75 and $100 per month. As a result, the coaching demand continued to rise, Hunter brought on two associate coaches, his good friends from racing days, Skip Spangenburg and Erik Saunders.

1999-2002

The birth of TRAINING STRESS SCORE
INTENSITY FACTOR
NORMALIZED POWER

In 1999, another client began working with Hunter and little did either of them know that this was the beginning of a long-term friendship and partnership. Kevin Williams bought a new toy called a power meter and asked if Hunter could coach with it. Hunter agreed, but very soon thereafter realized that he had no idea if 300 watts was good, bad, or what it meant. Hunter also bought one of the original grey “Tune” hubs called the PowerTap. These first hubs were quite finicky and plagued with issues. It seemed that they were being sent back more often than not for repair, but both Hunter and Kevin continued to build spreadsheets to help interpret the data

In 2000, Sam Callan, the USA Cycling Coaching Coordinator, put on the first ever “Power Training” seminar in Philadelphia, PA. The speakers at the seminar were Dr. Andrew R. Coggan, Dean Golich and Dr. Allen Lim and each of them had some revolutionary things to say about training, but all agreed that the software to analyze this data was poor, and just would not do what they needed it to do. Over lunch, Kevin, being a genius computer programmer, proposed that he and Hunter build the software that the speakers all wanted.

After the seminar, Hunter struck up a conversation with Dr. Coggan and enlisted his help in working on ideas and concepts.

In 2001 and 2002, Kevin wrote code in his spare time, and in late 2002, after an unsuccessful attempt at selling the software to PowerTap, Hunter and Kevin re-doubled their efforts to launch the software. By this time, Hunter had hundreds of athletes sending him power files from around the world and realized that in order to plan a perfect way to “peak” an athlete, a score of some sort would need to be created in order to quantify training load. Since there was power data for each and every second of the ride, the workload was known, but kiloJoules didn’t take into account intensity, so he described what he wanted to Dr. Coggan and two weeks later, Dr. Coggan called up Hunter and exclaimed, “Eureka!” Training Stress Score, Intensity Factor and Normalized Power were born.

2003-2004

Power Profiling, PowerTap and the Creation of TrainingPeaks

In 2003, Hunter needed a way to compare riders to the best in the world to see how their power data compared and again enlisted uber genius Dr. Coggan. Over 300 athletes’ data was captured along with actual “World Champion” data and those were analyzed across four time duration's (5 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 60 minutes). This was the creation of the Power Profiling table.

After thousands of hours of work, and many late nights, CyclingPeaks Software was born on August 4, 2003 with an announcement to the infamous “wattage list” on topica.net. Hunter and Kevin thought they would have sold maybe 100 copies and make some folks really happy. Well, they sold a lot more! During this time, Hunter changed the name of his coaching business to Peaks Coaching Group and also launched a new coaching website separating the software and coaching businesses. Peaks Coaching Group had six coaches at this time and roughly 90 total athletes. Hunter also presented to USA Cycling coaches in September his first presentation on how to train with a power meter and use CyclingPeaks Software. In the end of 2003, the product manager called Hunter and told him that he had officially become the #1 salesman of PowerTaps in the country! Coaching and power meter sales were clearly two trains on parallel tracks each steaming forward.

In 2004, Gear Fisher, one of the founders of TrainingBible.com along with Dirk and Joe Friel, approached Hunter and Kevin to see if there were any ways to create some promotions for each company. These proved to be highly successful and Gear and Hunter became good friends; Gear, along with the CEO of TrainingBible.com, Donovan Guyot, proposed a merging of the two companies. In the fall of 2004, CyclingPeaks and TrainingBible.com became TrainingPeaks.com with Hunter and Kevin as co-owners and co-founders in the new company. This proved to be a beneficial and exciting partnership as TrainingPeaks was able to grow the brand awareness of CyclingPeaks software greatly along with sales. Hunter was asked officially by USA Cycling to teach their newly created Power Certification course with Dr. Coggan.

2005

Training and Racing with a Power Meter

In 2005, after nearly two years of hounding the publishers at VeloPress, they finally agreed to publishing this crazy book about power meters. Dr. Coggan and Hunter hammered out the outline one evening while teaching the Boston power course and got to work writing “Training and Racing with a Power Meter.”

That book was published in January of 2006 and instantly became the guide and reference on training with a power meter.

Back at Peaks Coaching Group, Hunter added more coaches to his team, along with a great coach and Marketing Director, Jeb Stewart. With the success of the book, coaching and software sales continued to grow at a rapid rate.

Later in 2006, Version 2.0 of CyclingPeaks software was launched to continued success as well. From 2007-2009, Hunter travelled to over 10 different countries and taught all over the United States, to coaches and athletes alike, spreading the knowledge of “power” and the “power” of knowledge. In 2009, CyclingPeaks was renamed to WKO+, having been revised by super programmer Jeffrey Hovorka. WKO stands for “workout” and the file extension on the program has always been .wko.

The 2nd edition of “Training and Racing with a Power Meter” was also published the Fall of 2010 and continues to sell thousands of copies to this day in several languages.

The 3rd Edition of "Training and Racing with a Power Meter" will be released in January of 2019.

2005-2016 -- WKO

Peaks Coaching Group continued to grow and Hunter traveled extensively in 2010 continuing to share his knowledge and support the launch of WKO+ and the 2nd edition of the book. In 2011, Tim Cusick approached Hunter to help him with the continued growth and branding of the company. Tim, using his hard-won knowledge of branding and creating businesses, was able to bring organization and processes to the company that had not been used before, making the business even stronger and more cohesive as a team. At this point PCG had over 25 coaches and 200 clients. More camps were added, including a great camp in Brazil, and clients continued to win local bike races, national and world championships, a grand Tour stage win, many international stage races along with many triathlon victories. Hunter even got back to racing in 2011 and with his client Debbie Preller, they won the Tandem National Championship road race in Bend, Oregon. Peaks Coaching Group continued to grow throughout 2012 and Tim became a 50% owner of PCG with Hunter. In 2013, Hunter, Tim Cusick, Kevin Williams and Dr. Coggan got the “band” back together and began working on WKO4.

The goal being to completely re-envision the software and launch it initially on the Mac platform. A tall order, the software had to be written from the ground up and taking over 2 years, WKO4 was launched in July 2015 on the Mac and then, in late January 2016, the PC version was launched. With the launch of Mac version of the software, Tim Cusick decided to focus solely on development of the PC software and continuing to further the software business. So Hunter completely left the software business, having sold his equity of TrainingPeaks in 2014, and then the remaining ownership to Tim Cusick in October 2015.

In 2016 Hunter Allen once again is the sole owner of Peaks Coaching Group with a great team of coaches and staff to continue to make the future even brighter and more “powerful."

2017-2020 -- ZWIFT,CVR , CHINA

In 2017 we celebrated the 20th year of cycling camps and many other great milestones and partnerships. We partnered with LEOMO for development and testing of the TYPE-R real-time motion analysis device. Also creating the motion analysis certification so that coaches and others can accurately use the data to help athletes improve. In 2017 we partnered with CVR World cup to create training plans for riders specifically to use in Zwift and held the first real-world/Zwift fantasy camp and race at the Velodrome in southern California.

The third edition of "Training Racing with a Power Meter" was published in 2019.

It is now translated into 11 languages and has sold over 300,000 copies.

Peaks Coaching Group has affiliate locations in China, Brazil, Japan, Iceland and Germany.

A group of men wearing helmets are riding bicycles

2020-2024 -- Summer Covid Gravel Camp, Tenerife Gravel, Chile Camp, Glucose Monitors and more

We had our first ever cycling camps in the summer due to the postponement of our spring camps during the lock-down. Summer camp was super awesome, and we went swimming in the mountain stream at gravel camp!

Gravel camp becomes a standard within our camp structure as more and more people are riding gravel and enjoying the quiet and fun back roads. Near the headquarters of PCG, we have some of the oldest gravel roads in the country! They go back to the beginning of the road system in Virginia!

We continued to ride and learn as we started digging into Continuous Glucose Monitors and learning everything we could and can about them. This continues today!

PCG Coach Todd Scheske Crushes it with creating more and more World Champions, World Hour record holders, national champions and more. Todd now has coached more champions than any other coach at PCG! Way to go Todd!

In 2024, we traveled to Chile to do some of the most amazing riding in South America. This camp sold out and will continue to be a sell-out. It's just an amazing camp with beautiful roads and sights.

For 2025, we are adding in a May Gravel Adventure camp to Morocco! Join us!

The cycling world continues to evolve and Peaks Coaching Group, with our great partners and sponsors, is still at the forefront of training with power!

Our office is located at 414 Jackson St, Bedford, VA 24523. We host a variety of cycling and training camps throughout the year in addition to our coaching and consulting services. For more information on our services, please email info@peakscoachinggroup.com