The Transcontinental Race 2015 is over, and unfortunately I failed to finish. My GPS broke during the race at 1000km, and I didn’t have a good enough back-up plan so pulled out with only 2000km done. In spite of this I do feel extremely positive about the whole race experience, as I started out a complete race virgin.
I did a few back to back 350km days, a huge amount of climbing and 2000km within a week. Physically and mentally I felt fine during the race, I had no mechanical problems and my sleep-system worked well. I feel that a lot things I brought from my cycle-touring experience worked pretty well; sleep anywhere and eat everything!
Looking towards the 2016 race, I want to focus on the areas that will give the biggest improvements. I fall into the enthusiastic rookie class of racer, and just about every area could benefit from improvement. But with time and money limited, I need to get the best bang for my buck.
Inevitably I started thinking about a new bike frame, but that’s probably the least value for money option. So I talked myself out of it. To put that into context, I already know that I can sit on my bike (Surly Trucker, downtube shifters, XT groupset, Brooks saddle, 15kg) for 18 hours a day. I can do back to back 350+ km days. And there’s no magically enchanted item that’s suddenly going to propel me up the leader board.
My goal is to gain a couple of kph’s on my average speed and become more efficient overall. I’m thinking of using the North Coast 500 route as my benchmark, a beautiful 500 mile road route around Scotland’s coast. And I have some training rides in mind to Morocco and back, and possibly a ride back from Uzbekistan (visas allowing).
Over the next few months I’ll be exploring, testing and developing in the following areas, in an attempt to become faster, stronger and better. It will be interesting to discover what actually makes significant gains, and where money is best spent.
body conditioning
Without a doubt the best value for money improvement I can make is to lose weight. Me plus the bike are 115kg, and I certainly notice it on the long climbs. My egoistic first thoughts were a nice new £1200 Dave Yates custom frame, saving a whole 500g of weight (0.4% of 115kg). But £1200 spent ‘on the road’ (Morocco trip, etc) would give me a lot of miles and I’d lose far more than 500g in weight.
By carrying a surplus of, say, 15kg I have to produce more power to go the same pace as the racing-snakes. More importantly, running a higher power output means I fatigue more quickly. It gets worse, by doing more work I produce more heat which is compounded by the insulating properties of body fat. So I must drink more, which means I must carry more water or stop more often.
The benefits of carrying more body fat are being able to burn it off while riding, therefore requiring less eating. It’s also possible to sleep in just a bivvy bag in near zero-degree temperatures. But these benefits are far outweighed by the disadvantages, especially in a race across Europe in August.
So weight loss is my biggest priority. I have no kg target, I plan to simply ride my bike a lot. My body will reduce down to its natural weight and body fat percentage. Any guesses what my rider+bike weight will be for the 2016 race?
smoother power delivery
My touring bike has downtube shifters, because I prefer their simplicity and the perfect and silent shifting they allow. I used my touring bike for the Transcontinental race, and never felt I lost time in gear changes. However, with downtube shifters you tend to increase or decrease your power for minor changes in gradient. This is fine for touring, but smoothing out pedal cadence and power would lessen fatigue; important for endurance racing.
To smooth my cadence isn’t straight forward, for my shifters and drivetrain need to change. The knock-on effect is a few hundred pounds of new bike parts. I plan to switch to 11sp Ultegra, and am hoping to try out Di2 electronic shifters. Though I’m not sure Di2 is good value for money, at this stage; an extra £300 just to get auto-trimming? Apparently 11 speed Shimano is more durable than 10 speed, we’ll see…
Switching to an Ultegra group set means hydraulic discs front and rear (currently I have front v-brakes and a rear mechanical disc). It’ll also mean a switch from square taper bottom bracket, to the weaker HollowTech. The downside of progress.
I’ll also kit out the bike with a Bluetooth cadence sensor and power meter, and hook it up to the iPhone app I’ll develop (see below).
bike fit
If I can already sit on the bike for 18 hours then the bike must fit, right? My Surly Trucker is certainly a good fit for comfort, no complaints at all. But there is another aspect to bike fit, efficient use of power. The upper body acts as a counter balance to the power produced by the legs. More powerful riders can better use their power by leaning over further, riders producing less power do so when more upright.
Finding a position on the bike that is comfortable and also enables me to use the most power is what I want to achieve with a bike fitting. I’ll be trying out a bike fitting session using a Retül machine, and also Spin Scan to measure power output. I will be looking for improvements over my long distance NC500 test route, but I’m not quite sure what to expect. Hopefully the main benefit will be reduced fatigue, allowing a little more power to be used which will give me a kph or two extra average speed.
A single bike fit session is in the region of £200. I think that will be good value, particularly as I want to try out aero-bars for the first time. So having a measure of my optimal power output for a given body position will save a lot of time experimenting with different aero-bars.
better fuelling
Taking on fuel on a long distance ride is a hit or miss experience. Sometimes you find the perfect plateful of tastey carbs and protein, other times the only thing open is a 24 hour McDonalds or a roadside vending machine. When you’re tired it all gets a bit difficult to eat well, to make good decisions.
There are many calorie counter smartphone apps around, but I think I need to develop something a little more endurance-race specific. I’d like to have a carb and protein counter (enter quantities as you buy), with an app which helps regulate consumption over time. Because you can only digest a certain amount, excess is (literally) wasted.
I think my fuelling was reasonably good during the 2015 race, but could be made more efficient with a little technology help.
ride metrics
Being an engineer type, the use of metrics to understand and improve a system comes naturally; the system now being the endurance cyclist. During some of the longer audax training rides I’d been thinking about developing a smartphone app to help improve efficiency. And during the 2015 race this became a more interesting idea for a work project.
Taking in many of the above ideas for areas to improve my performance, I’ll build a metrics app to measure how things are going. Polar do many sensors which are Bluetooth enabled, and I’ll begin with heart rate, cadence and speed, and then add in a power meter (expensive!).
While a standard bike computer or GPS already display metrics from these sensors, I want to go a little further. I want to incorporate calories ‘in’ (maybe from the calorie counter app), and match it up with calories ‘out’ (burned cycling). Having a smart app indicating protein intake for example and how long digestion takes, would help in the efficiency of fuelling.
Tracking time spent sleeping would also be pretty useful too, possibly combined with heart rate for ‘good’ sleeping. During this years race I kept to the 24 hour periods starting at midnight (the race started at midnight). For me it would beneficial to see stats (riding, averages, sleeping, eating, carbs, etc) on a 24 hour or race-long time frame.
This is a good R&D project for the next few months. And I hope some of the technology developed may be useful in a commercial app for the long distance community (audax, endurance racing, etc). I’d be looking to build in some smart monitoring which could indicate general performance drops due to lack of fuel or sleep.
Combining some development work into the race training schedule keeps the cycling interesting. There’s lots for me to learn, as well as bringing my ‘systems’ methodologies to the bike computer thing. In addition I have some far flung places to ride to, and am really looking forward to seeing a bit more of the world.
Time to ride, again….
thisdougb 