How To Prepare For An Ultra Endurance Ride - What I Did And Why #gcntech #gcn #cycling #roadcycling #roadbike #bike #bikes

I'm going to explain the bike, the equipment, the nutrition that I've chosen, and also the training that I've done to take on an ultra-endurance record. My intention with this is that it will be useful to anyone taking on an ultra-endurance ride because by understanding the choices that I've made, you'll be able to apply things to your own endurance rides and make them better. I've been pretty nerdy about this. Whatever ultra-endurance event you're taking on, I would suggest first starting at the end, at the end point, and reverse-engineering it and working back from there. This is a strategy that's been championed by Dan Bigham. Now, it's the same for any cycling event but super-critical in ultra-endurance. In my case, I was trying to break the record for the most US states visited by bicycle in 24 hours. Now, knowing that's what I'm trying to do, I can analyze the parkour, I can analyze the route, and I can see which kind of bike is going to be the best for that. On paper, the fastest bike was an out-and-out time trial bike. I didn't use a time trial bike, I used a road bike. Why didn't I use a time trial bike? Well, for many good reasons. The first one is that I don't train a lot on time trial bikes. Now, arguably, I could have done for this event but where I live, it's difficult to do that. The roads aren't suited towards it. Also, I have to do a lot of other riding on road bikes as part of things I'm doing for my job here at GCN. Also, the actual parkour itself, although on paper, a time trial bike will be faster if you just look at purely aerodynamics, the route's actually very complicated. It's going to pass through a lot of busy urban areas with a lot of junctions or intersections, if you're from America. There's also bike paths and roads that aren't that suited to TT bikes. If you've ridden a time trial bike, you'll know what I mean when I say a road that's not suited to a TT bike. I felt I'd be much more comfortable on an aero road bike. I went for the Canyon Aeroad CFR because the beauty of that bike is it's a halfway house. You can actually modular fit on some tri-bars onto it. You're not actually giving up that much in terms of aero once that tri-bar cockpit is fitted onto it. It gives you the versatility to use the drops and the aero bars as well. For me, that was the perfect solution. Having measured the aerodynamics of it, it was rapid. Now, for a lot of ultra-endurance rides, if the roads are suitable for it, then the time trial bike is going to be the best option in a lot of instances. If you're not comfortable riding it, I would say just put the time in and make sure that you're used to riding a time trial bike for very long distances. It is possible to ride a time trial bike for 24 hours. You might want to relax your position a bit. That's the other thing. In terms of the bike setup itself, my position was a little bit more relaxed than what I would normally do. That makes a lot of difference, especially in terms of relieving pressure on your hands. Now, the other thing that helped make the bike absolutely rapid was the wheel choice. I don't find that super deep wheels affects the handling of a bike detrimentally as much as a lot of people make out, especially at my weight, which is about 70 kilos. I don't really encounter many issues. I went for a full disc in the rear because it's so much faster and then a nice deep front. Our friends at Princeton provided with some amazing wheels in the blur disc and the Mach 7580 in the front. That's a changeable profile, 75 to 80-millimeter dip. The wavy profile also helps with the stability of that wheel. They did some amazing custom graphics on them as well, which look absolutely sick, which was amazing, but that's getting off topic. Those wheels, amazing, very fast, very nice hubs. As a rule of thumb with this, generally aero is faster. Even though there are some climbs on this route, I was able to calculate by plotting the route and analyzing it in software like my windsock that it still comes out trumps even with the slight weight penalty of a disc wheel and a deeper front wheel. Aero is just king on a long ride like this. With that in mind, I've gone for 28-millimeter tires for a little bit more cushioning, a little bit more comfort. There's also a few off-road sections in my route as well, which I was able to identify. Very compact, light gravel, but that would have been better for that as well. They were set up tubeless because minimizes puncture risk. Also, if you do get a puncture, you can plug them. I had my Topeak Element saddlebag ready to go, plugs on the outside so I can grab those quickly and just plug something if I have an issue. That was all ready. Naturally, the tire pressure was optimized because tire pressure just makes a huge amount of difference. People underestimate this. I still think that people might go on things like the Silca tire pressure calculator and do their tire pressure, but they're cutting corners. Measure your tire measured width with the Silca calculator on the wheels that you have with verniers. Measure your system weight. On the morning of the ride, get your bike, get your kit, all the stuff that you're going to sit out with, and stand on some scales and weigh yourself so you know the total system weight. Mine was 85 kilograms. I based my pressure on that for the surface that I was going to be riding on. It was 80 PSI front and rear. Of course, waxed chain, wasn't going to forget about that. A modification to that, I used an endurance chip in the wax chain. My target event was not going to be longer than 24 hours. What's perfect for that is Silca's endurance chip because it extends the life of your wax to around 24 hours. I actually find it goes over that, which is great and so ideal for this, but wet conditions can shorten the life of the wax. I would say, look at the weather for your area where you're going to be riding. I think even if I was taking on a multi-day event, something like the Transcontinental, I'd start with a wax chain with multiple endurance chips in the wax just to really have that long life wax and use that as long as I could, but then I would also carry some separate lube in my saddle pack or something that was a drip-on lube. Not the drip-on wax because that needs to dry out and cure, but I would take something like a Silca Synergetic to top that up. I did have a small Silca Synergetic with me. I decanted some little sushi soy sauce bottle that I'd repurposed. That was just in the event that it did rain and the chain got really wet and the wax washed off. I could reapply some lube to it on the fly, which would be good. Onto the cockpit of the bike. Probably the most key bit of equipment, really, aside from the bike itself, was my computer. This is a Wahoo Element Ace. Now, there's lots of different head units out there, but I opted for the Ace because it's blooming massive and it's got a massive screen, which its navigation capabilities are just mint. When you've got a long, complicated route that you're following, it's just so much easier when you've got a massive screen because you can then also have all your data fields that you need to see on there as well. Whereas sometimes with a smaller screen, you're flipping between screens constantly because you want to see all your data fields, but when you have the map screen, it's quite small and you can't clog it up with data fields. Whereas this, you can do both. I'm going to show you the data fields I had on the map screen because I think this is quite useful. Now, I've got things like my speed, the time, the total time, because my event was timed and I wanted to be aware of that. I've got my average power, I've got my power. Then the most crucial thing for me was my average speed. Now, with this, I'd actually turned off the auto-pause because I wanted to know the true actual average speed because if you're doing a timed event and you know that you've got to average a certain speed to do a particular time, then removing the auto-pause is the way to do it because you might have to stop for junctions, you might have to stop for traffic lights, and it just means you're not guessing. You know exactly what your true average speed is. Now, in terms of the route planning, that's something that I spent a huge amount of time on. You'll hear similar things said by people taking on ultra-endurance races that are point-to-point like Transcontinental and things like that. The route planning is just everything and it's always a trade-off. You're trying to balance up things like, is this a fast road? What's the elevation? You're trying to minimize elevation, you're trying to minimize stopping time, you're trading off against how direct is the route, but then there's other things that you need to think about like, are these roads fast roads for cycling? Because the most direct route might not always be the fastest if there's lots of traffic lights or you might encounter a movable bridge or something that's going to open. If you get stopped by a bridge that's opening for a ship to pass, it can really slow you down by 30 minutes. You need to think about things like this. I use a combination of different apps. I was looking at things like Komoot and also Strava and then cross-referencing things and looking at them. Very useful tools that I find complement each other. They're really useful because they can help you find really good routes that are used by local cyclists. They can help you identify good bike paths, good roads, but there's other things that you should be aware of as well. I would suggest thinking about the time of the day that you're going to be riding in a particular area. At certain times of the day, places are going to be quieter. If you're going to be riding through a very busy place, like I was going to be riding through New York City, I was deliberately going to be riding through there in the small hours because I knew that would be the quietest time and therefore the safest and the fastest. Now, if you've seen the main GCN video, you'll see that in my ride, I came off on a bridge, unfortunately, that was a metal grid bridge, but Komoot had flagged this as a thing to watch out for. It just so happened that in the heat of the moment, in the crazy storm I was riding in, I forgot and missed it to my detriment. Anyhow, the Ace, absolutely mega for ultra rides. The other key bit of kit that syncs to this was, I was using the radar light. Now, that then provides you with nice notifications on the side of your bike computer as to when cars are coming behind you. Now, some of the roads that I was riding on in the US weren't particularly cycling friendly and they were pretty busy areas with quite a lot of cars. Having a light that flashes to those drivers that are coming behind me because it detects them and then also notifies me of cars that are approaching and their speed that they're coming up behind me was really useful and actually a pretty blooming good safety feature to let me know and give me greater situational awareness, especially so when I was riding in a horrific storm. This was also connected to my other sensors, so I got my heart rate strap and also my core temperature sensor, more on that in a minute. Another key bit of equipment that we had was to do with communications. I think people would overlook this but communication can be really, really key. This is a Becom 20 from Senna. Now, Senna are a big company in motorcycling and marine but they've also got some really cool cycling products. This is the device fitted here onto my bike helmet. You can see it fits onto the strap. This little head unit allows you to communicate with other people wearing Senna headsets or these ones. The intended use for this is, well, one of the intended uses is for a group of cyclists. It's actually pretty cool. If you were riding in a race or an event, you could communicate with your teammates in the pack quite easily without having the need for a team car that would relay a central radio like the guys in the Tour de France have. This is something that's a lot more accessible and usable in that regard. You also have this range booster mesh net which extends the range up to half a mile. I had one of these in my pocket. Oh, hang on a sec. The Department for Work and Pensions have just messaged me but that's come up as a notification on my Wahoo which is also pretty useful because I could get messages on my Wahoo while I was riding from the guys if they needed to send me a message that they couldn't get me because they weren't in range with the Senna. That's actually not a message from the Department of Work and Pensions because it's a plus 63 number. The Department of Work and Pensions are not based in the Philippines which I think is plus 63. That's almost certainly a text that I've just received from some con people. Brilliant. Anyhow, this little gadget is really useful. It's just 20 grams and being able to communicate with the team car in this particular case was really good because it meant that I could communicate with M from Precision Fuel and Hydration about what I needed and she could remind me when to eat and drink and stay hydrated and fueled. Also, if I had a puncture or anything like that, I can tell the guys. Having that communication, it's just really, really, really, really useful. You can actually connect this to your DI2 and run it from there but I was running SRAM. Now, that leads nicely onto nutrition. Ultra endurance events, nutrition's key. People always say that they're eating competitions and I agree with that but I would also add that they're drinking competitions too. That is something where in the past I've eaten plenty but I've not drunk enough and that has derailed me. I've seen these instances where I've ridden 11, 12 hours without issue and I've done well and then my performance has just dropped off a cliff and I have just been crawling which I can now identify is largely down to being dehydrated and not drinking enough and massively underestimating the amount of fluid that you need to take on board. There are several things you can do to combat this and I did all of them. The first thing is doing some sweat tests. Now, these give you two crucial bits of information. They tell you how much fluid you're losing but they also tell you how much salt you're losing in that sweat and they're different. Some people are very salty sweaters. I'm not that salty a sweater. It's my really, really, really rubbish superpower. That said, my sweat rate is pretty high. I know from doing sweat tests that I can be losing 1.7 liters an hour when riding in 30 plus degrees temperatures in zone two which is loads. Even though I'm not losing much salt per liter, I'm sweating so much that I still need to take loads on. We can counter that by then putting electrolyte in the bottles that I'm taking on constantly and also pre-loading with electrolytes. The day before the ultra event, I'm having a 1,500 precision tab in a bottle and then the day of, I'm also just drinking a 1,500 precision tab in a bottle as well before I've even started the event and then my things have got in there. I'm fully loaded up on electrolyte to help get me through. Sweat tests that measure the salt concentration of your sweat are not super expensive and to just do a sweat rate test that measures the amount of fluids you can do, you can do that for free yourself at home just using a set of bathroom scales. All you would do, and I was doing this on the day before the event just to double-check the conditions out there, is you just weigh yourself, ideally naked, and then you go out riding for an hour in the conditions that you expect to be riding in and you can drink in that hour if you want to. You just have to measure how much you've drunk and then you just come back after an hour, weigh yourself, and then you can work out per hour how much fluid you're losing in sweat. Pretty simple but very, very effective and very useful. As for carb intake, well, that begins the day before but there's things here that you're probably not going to expect to hear because of stuff that seems to be all over the internet at the moment but I'm going to disagree with some of that. The first thing is you can do it on grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight. Based on my weight, I was looking at about 600 grams of carbs the day before and about 600 grams of carbs on the day because I was starting later in the day, about three o'clock. I had plenty of time earlier in the morning to get eating and slam the carbs in. I was doing this mainly in the form of rice because rice is just quite easy to get in and digest and you can sweeten it. I think that's auto-off on the Wahoo. There we go, saving the battery. Then on the actual ride itself, you hear a lot of chat about 120 plus grams an hour. That's quite difficult to do on the body, especially when you're planning on going at ultra distances. For six-hour rides, I think it's quite feasible to most people to train their bodies to do 120 grams an hour or so. The other thing you've got to factor in is the intensity that people are riding at. The guys that are doing 120 plus grams an hour are world tour pros or Ironman pros and they're riding at an intensity that's far higher than what most of us can ride at or most amateurs. In the case of ultra riding, you're not typically riding at super high power outputs. In my case, I'm riding upper zone one, lower zone two. I know from having done gas exchange tests where I've been measured in a lab that that kind of power intensity, I'm burning mostly fat. As a result, the level of carbohydrate that I'm burning is much, much less and so I can be much more efficient. That also means I'm not having to put as much stress on my gut. We went in with a strategy for this of trying to have 90 grams of carbohydrate an hour, every hour. That would take different forms. Start off with some real food and then also be complementing that with a bit of carbohydrate in the drink that I was taking on or also the precision chews and also precision gels as well, which is just really easy to just get in. Now, if I didn't have support, I would have definitely been opting for larger bottles on the bike than the 550 Camelbaks I'd got. Also, I probably would have had a Camelbak hydration bladder as well because look at the temperatures that you're going to be riding in. I knew that hydration was absolutely key because the typical temperatures where I was riding at that time of year, and you should look this up, were for me over 30 degrees and it was. It was blooming boiling, which leads us on to the next key thing, which is heat training. Now, I absolutely swear by this. I've been doing it for a couple of years and the difference it makes is absolutely massive. There's a lot of stuff out there that you hear about that will make you faster or buy this, it will make you faster and all this. I think it's quite difficult for people to cut through the noise of all that. Two things that really stand out for me are creatine, which absolutely works, and heat training. Heat training is much harder to do than creatine. I've performed that with doing a lot of sessions indoor on the bike with a suit on using the core sensor which fits onto your heart rate strap and also doing passive heat trainings in a sauna as well, which you can then log in the app. Through doing that, I was able to become a heat champion. The difference it makes in terms of when I'm then riding at a given intensity in the heat, I just find that my heart rate does not then disconnect and go really high. I don't start to overheat. My body starts sweating earlier, I sweat a lot more, and my body's far more effective at cooling itself. It's a great feeling to be able to do that training and then see the improvement it makes in you. Absolutely swear by it. With regards to clothing, other things matter too, such as the kit that you choose. That is why I went for a white road suit. We're very kindly supported by Rule 28. This is their Neo road suit. You may remember they supported Alex in Unbound when he did that. The white here does help with cooling. Other nice things about this, it's got a dual-layer fabric on it, which means it eliminates the need for the aero bra, which I'm sure people will appreciate. You've got these really nice ribbed aero sleeves. I look at the equipment and the kit that people use when they're doing ultra rides, especially ones that are timed or races. I think people massively underestimate the importance of clothing because aerodynamically, it makes a huge, huge difference. It's the biggest difference. It makes more difference than an aero frame or aero wheels. You are the biggest thing. You make the most difference. In terms of reducing your CDA, it's absolutely huge. Although in terms of bang for buck, the best thing is undoubtedly aero socks. These are the one aero sock from Rule 28, who are like the pioneers in aero socks, but these things also just absolutely rapid. Now, I worked out my CDA with all the kit that I had. I was able to get it so low that the brilliant thing is you don't have to average anywhere near as much power as you think that you might have to in order to break a record like I was trying. It's just another way to look at it. When you're looking at really long distances, if you can become more aerodynamic than having to average 20 less watts over the course of 20 hours, the savings just add up. It's just massive. I look at people doing a lot of ultra things. There is a trade-off because you do need to be able to carry equipment on your bike, and you do need certain things which are maybe an aerodynamic penalty, but pick your wins. Where you can do things like wear aero socks, absolutely do it. Other thing, the gloves. I was wearing the aero mitts, which also have an aero fabric on them. Now, in terms of doing ultra rides, I think mitts are absolutely essential because your hands take a battering. When you're on a bike for a really long time, there's a lot of pressure going through your hands. This is quite a common thing, but some people end up getting carpal tunnel syndrome and real numbness in their hands because the pressure of your hands on the bars for a really long time. That is something that's made worse if your bike setup is aggressive because there's more weight on your hands. What I have found though is if you go too far the opposite way and go really relaxed, you end up with more pressure on your bum and you're just shifting the problem. There's a certain amount of when you're doing an ultra thing, something's going to hurt. It's going to hurt somewhere, so it's just about trying to balance it and try and optimize your setup and your bike fit in order to get that into the optimum position for you. That's something that you can only really do with a bit of trial and error and experience and putting things into practice. Also, helmet choice while we're on the subject of clothing. I had two with me. I had the luxury of being able to have two helmets because we had a support car. Lucky in that instance, not everyone's going to have that. I got the Met Trenta aero helmet, road helmet. Now, this is just a cooler option. Cooler as in temperature cooler because we're riding in such extreme heat. In the footage, you'll see me riding this because we were riding during the day and it was over 30 degrees. However, my plan was if it was cooler, I would have probably exclusively used the TT helmet, which is the new Met Drone Widebody that Tadej Pogacar uses. It's ridiculously quick, but it's also pretty hot to wear. My plan was to switch to that in the night when it was cooler so I can get an aero boost from wearing it, which is significant, but then not overheat. If you overheat, the aero advantage is just blown out of the water by you overheating. Once you go into the red and you overheat too much, your performance will drop off a cliff. Even with the heat training that I've done, it still is possible to overheat. You may be wondering why I didn't opt for aero shoes. It's a good valid question, but again, there's a heat element. Your feet do get hotter when you wear aero shoes and I was riding in a lot of heat. It's that trade-off of comfort. Aero shoes don't give anywhere near the return that you get from an aero sock. You go for the aero sock. Also, when you're doing ultra rides, if your feet get really hot, they can swell up a bit and then they can become really uncomfortable in your shoes. You often see people struggling on ultra rides with feet problems. Their feet start to hurt. They start to swell inside the shoe. Also, you might want to adjust your shoes. Maybe you just want to loosen them off for a period during the ride and that's harder to do. It's harder to adjust the retention system on your shoe if you're wearing an overshoe. That was the reason for that. Now, the next thing I'm going to talk about is the training that I did. With any event that you take on, whether it's long, short, whatever, for me, it's always about specificity. I've got a coach. His name is Jody Warrington. Hi, Jody. Thanks. He helped me prepare for things like this. The first thing we did was starting out in November of last year, I was doing strength training, two or three gym sessions a week. That then tapered off into one maintenance session a week up until about April because then I just didn't have the time with all the traveling I was doing and all the other riding that I was doing and other commitments to maintain that. It did put me in really good stead and I felt that really is something that has helped me this year be really strong. I've been able to do really good power for me on the bike. That's something I'll definitely continue again. I just feel it makes you more resilient, especially when you're doing really long things and you're having to hold your body in a certain position for a long time. The other big physiological thing you're going to have to be able to do in an ultra-endurance ride is just chug along at that diesel pace for hours and hours on end. The best way to prepare for that is to do long, steady base rides. A lot of people are time-limited, myself included. I've got other commitments, but I was consistently able to try and get in once a week at a five- or six-hour ride at that intensity and really target that with also real-life style riding, not just sitting in zone two all the time, deliberately being able to push that little bit more on hills because you gain more time back and then ease off on faster sections. That was something that really helped me and gave me a really good base. Then I was still doing high-intensity stuff as well to complement that and just drag my engine up. Then I was also able to do some longer rides, which you will have seen in some GCN videos, for example, the Everest thing we did on Estelvio. That to me was ultra-endurance training for the longer things I knew I had coming. There is no replacement, I think, for that sort of ride because when you start doing something really long like that, you learn so much from it. You learn about how to fuel, you learn about how your body responds, you learn about those bits of the bike that might start to cause your body to hurt, for example, your hands. Then you can do things about that. You can put more padding down or you can adjust your bike fit. Those sorts of things can really make or break your ultra-endurance event when you come to do it. I'd really recommend that. One big caveat though, while it is good to be able to do really big dress rehearsal rides that teach you about your body and what it's like to feel and understand the sensations, you should only do them if you've built up to them and are able to recover from them because sometimes it's possible to do something like that and put yourself in an absolute hole where you just don't recover from it. If you're not able to do that, it can put your actual event that you want in jeopardy. Bear that in mind. You have to build up to something like that, but the closer that you can get to a dress rehearsal, the better. There you go. I was unsuccessful in my latest ultra-endurance challenge, but that hopefully doesn't mean that you will be in yours. I'd like to think that people can learn from all of the nerdy geeking out that I've done in order to try and make myself faster and better at these sorts of rides and can learn from some things. Anyhow, let us know your comments and if you've got any tips and suggestions as well because I'd love to read them. I'm always learning. This is by no means a definitive list, but I've tried to think of as much things as I can. Let us know in the comments and hopefully see you in the next one. Love you. Bye.