Ride Plan
My last two long rides, each about fifty miles and lasting over five hours, finished with a high level of fatigue. On a scale of one to ten I would put it at seven, still able to drive home and clean up, and not collapse on the sofa, the next couple days were rough. I knew I was holding back on power, and for the Century Ride I wanted to go a bit harder, at what I hoped would be Ironman race pace. My rough draft plan then was to try to do a full one hundred miles at an average speed of 12 mph. Start time around 6am, finish between 2pm and 3pm.
My bout with cancer took a lot out of me, especially endurance. I don’t think we can say only endurance, as force production must have taken a hit, too, but that ability comes back rather quickly. Getting endurance back is taking a lot longer, and compounded by the long gap in training caused by my hernia that hit around the same time as we were chasing down the cancer diagnosis
I wanted to be realistic about the endurance issue without using it as an excuse. After doing a couple of fifty mile rides it is not as simple as just going twice as long. We all have a limit – albeit a soft limit – after which our brain refuses to execute the requested muscle movements. It’s a survival thing. You know it when you feel it.
On the morning of the ride I decided to ride to Kailua, the fifty-mile turn around, take stock and decide then whether or not to continue. By Kailua I felt good, so in spite of several friends my age who decided to go back, I decided to continue on to Kaneohe and the seventy-five mile turn around. And, I gave myself until 11am to reach Swanzy Beach, the one-hundred-mile turn around, in order to make it back before the event closed at 5pm. Besides, I had to meet my wife, so returning late would not go well. It’s not like I had any reason to do the whole thing.
As I approached Waihehe Park, the location for the seventy-five mile turn around, I was very tired, the time was 10:30am so there was no way I could get to Swanzy by 11am. On top of that, my right quad cramped hard as I dismounted. Not good. I took a long break, ate a bunch of their delicious haupia pudding and drank about half a bottle of sports drink, then headed back.
Fuel & Hydration Plan
Pre-ride breakfast was two slices of sandwich bread with peanut butter and jelly. No gut issues.
Primary fuel source was Precision Hydration Flow Gel, one 300g bag in a bottle carried in my second bottle cage, one squeeze every twenty minutes but not before Sandy Beach, the twenty-five mile turn around. I planned to grab solid food at the aid stations, especially the bananas and those yummy peanut butter on graham crackers they usually offer.
I thought I could get by with one fluids bottle (remember, the second cage held the Flow Gel bottle), and I could have, but to be on the safe side I stopped at a few places along the way to top off. I carried ten pouches of PH1000.
I knew I had been under hydrating on my long training rides, so I really pushed the fluid intake. Another reason why I stopped along the way for extra water. Even so, I know I finished dehydrated. This is something that I really need to work on, as my last two marathons went down the same black hole.
Looking back on the day I will say that the Flow Gel bottle should work well on the tri bike, with two cages behind the saddle and one bottle between the arms. One bottle on a day like Sunday is cutting it close. I also wonder if the PH1000 is not salty enough. I will experiment with some PH1500 I have on hand.
Conditions
The weather was as good as it gets. No rain, light winds. A little more cloud cover would have been welcome, but I did not feel as hot as I had on my recent long training rides.
How I Felt Along the Way
The ride along the Kaiwi coast is what made the day. I have done it a couple of times solo, but you must pay such strict attention to ride the narrow shoulder with cars nudging your elbow that you can’t enjoy the view. For us the road was closed, all the way to Sandy Beach. Fantastic.
Around mile 35 I began to feel real fatigue as I made my way along the rolling hills of Kahekili Highway. The good news is that my wrists were not collapsing the way they had before my bike fit, which netted among other things a narrower handlebar.
When I got to Waihehe Park (mile 40) I had a long talk with myself about going on or turning back. The fatigue level and time left me no choice but to turn back. From Kailua on I was deeply fatigued, and my triceps were screaming for relief. I began to feel a twinge of cramping from my right hamstring as I climbed Makapuu, but nothing bad happened. I was feeling overheated and grabbed a minute of rest whenever I found some shade, as did other riders. Total distance was 78.5. Not too shabby.
Conclusion
A really useful metric to track resilience – some all it durability – is the correlation between power and heart rate. During the ride I could clearly see an ever widening gap, such that by the end I was in power zone high one and heart rate low three. Respiration was somewhere in between, closer to heart rate, meaning I felt like I was working a lot harder than what my power meter and progress were saying.
There is still no widely accepted method for improving durability. The only thing experts agree on is that more volume will improve durability. Long rides of five to seven hours. Another possible technique is to finish a four hour ride with a hard push – a ten or fifteen minute section at zone three or four. This is supposed to have a similar effect as riding more hours.
This is not a huge problem for single sport cyclists. Do this on Sunday and take three or four days off to recover. Triathletes cannot afford such a big impact on their condition. One rest day is all there is time for.
I’m going to continue to study this conundrum. Meanwhile, I am shifting focus to run training for the marathon in December. See you there!