Solo 24 Hour World Championships

Wow!

The 24 Solo World Championships - what a hell of an event. I had no idea how big it would be. Thousand of people descended on the Nordic Center in Canmore, home of the 1988 Winter Olympics. It was a superb venue surrounded by beautiful scenery. The team at 24 Hours of Adrenalin did an incredible job!

 

In addition to the 100+ solo racers, the event included a team relay with approx 1600 competitors. The soloists had a separate, more challenging course,  occasionally merging with the team riders for short stretches. The soloists universally agreed it was one of the toughest courses they’d ever ridden. Lucky me! Starting at 4400ft and rising just over 5000 feet, each lap was around 2000 ft of elevation gain over 10 miles. The singletrack was very tight and twisty and covered in roots, so it was pretty hard to get a really good flow going. Climbing up really steep, twisty ascents over roots is a bitch, and the descents were brutal on the upper body. Fun times. NOT.

Fortunately, I was sharing a pit with my new Coach, Shaun. This would be his third World Championship and he was out to win with a vengeance. Man was he keyed up and ready to race. We snagged a really sweet pit location amongst the top seeded pros, and directly opposite the exit from the timing  tent. Here’s Shaun’s video of our pit.

 

The start was Le Man’s style, with the soloists lining up according to seeding and age groups. Surrounded by spectators ringing cow bells and U2’s “The Streets Have No Name” blaring over the PA, the volume was pretty high and just kept getting higher as the countdown got closer to zero. Bang. Off went the gun and we jogged about 1500m around the initial part of the curse and back into the solo pit row. I was pooped just from the run! “I thought this was supposed to be a mountain bike race” I whined to myself.

I think the socks really helped with the run though :-)

 

We jumped on our bikes, headed out of pit row and the race began in earnest. My strategy was to keep pit stops after each lap to an absolute minimum, which I was able to keep to throughout the race. Most of my stops were between 30 seconds and 4 minutes, with just enough time to swap out bottles. I’m racing with all liquid custom endurance blends from Infinit, so don’t eat anything throughout the race. The longest pit stop was 12 minutes when I swapped out batteries during the night.

Pacing is critical in the first 6 hours or so, as it’s easy to go out too fast and blow up early. I did get carried away on lap four and lit it up with Steve Swenson, the guy I eventually beat out for 4th place. We met at the pre-race meeting, so knew we’d be head-t0-head in the same category. We had a blast racing each other on a twisty downhill, but I regretted it later. You only have so many matches to burn in a race, and it wasn't smart to burn one early “having fun”. Live and learn. I was also climbing pretty much everything, and spinning past folks who elected to walk. In hindsight, this wasn’t the smartest approach, riding up some of the really steep twisty climbs, where pushing would have used a different set of muscles and given my quads a little rest. Ahem.

As you’ll see from my Garmin’s elevation profile, the climbing was pretty intense. It doesn’t show all the laps as the Garmin’s batteries don’t last long enough!

Considering how aggressively I was riding, I was pretty happy I had no crashes throughout the entire race. No major mechanicals either. I suffered a serious chain suck around hour 21 which took about twenty minutes to fix. Trying to pull the chain out of the spokes when you can barely stand up is an exercise in frustration! Oh yeah, my bottle cage snapped off on lap one and I had to cable-tie it to the frame. It actually worked out nicely, as I angled the cage slightly to the right so it was easier to get the bottle in and out.

One aspect of racing alongside the relay riders is that the vast majority would say something along the lines of “nice job solo” when passing. Kinda nice. You’d get the occasional “you guys are nuts” to which I’d agree profusely :-)

The first 20 hours were pretty uneventful and just a matter of turning the pedals, staying focused and not letting the fatigue get to your head. 24’s are so much more of a mental game. Every now and again I’d repeat my mantra, “Keep Pushing, Stay Tough” when it was getting particularly hard. One of the things that kept me going was knowing that I had a bunch of ride buddies “pulling for me” back in Austin. I actually printed out and laminated one of the MoJo posts, and hung it outside the pit for inspiration. It may sound cheesy, but that kind of things really helps.

 

Coming in to the pit is always gives you a shot of energy and is something I looked forward to more and more as the race progressed. I didn’t have my own pit crew, but was lucky enough to have Shaun’s wife Doreen and her father, George, adopt me. They are old pros in the pit, having done many events for Shaun, and they made my brief stops a real pleasure. George and I would ritually “bump fists” just as I left. I think he really got a kick out of it – I know it made me grin :-)

 

This particular event didn’t allow iPods, so I was music free which was a mixed blessing. It was easier to stay focused, critical on the gnarly descents, but the fatigue is harder to ignore when there are no musical distractions. I’m so glad U2was playing at the Le Mans start, as I had that song in my head for the entire race. I had a brief patch where “The wheels on the bus go round and round” popped into my mind, but I managed to shake that out. Phew.

One interesting phenomenon I noticed during the race was that my heart rate got gradually lower as the race progressed. I’d be climbing the same gnarly uphill that had my heart rate in the 160s at the start, and later in the race it would be in the 120s. Weird. Here’s the profile from the first17 hours.

After lap 12 I was still feeling OK. I began lap 13 and my fatigue went up precipitously. I’m not sure why exactly, as there are so many factors in play. It’s possible I just ran out of energy reserves. At race pace, I’m only able to ingest around 220 calories an hour before my stomach rebels. When you are burning 600+ calories, there’s an immediate deficit that it’s impossible to catch up on.  Bottom line was that lap 13 hit me hard, and I starting pushing the bike up climbs I’d ridden earlier. Maybe if I'd walked them in earlier laps I’d have been OK. Who knows? By the time I started lap 14, I was pretty toasted.

At the end of that lap, I was still in 4th place and had to decide whether to go out again. If I’d gone back out I had plenty of time to put in another lap. My riding on lap 14 had started to become sloppy and I was close to hitting trees on a number of occasions, so I rationalized that it would be prudent to call it a day (night?). I was too far behind the 3rd place racer to catch up, and about 30 minutes ahead of Steve in 4th place, so I elected to sit down and see where the cards fell. He rode in 30 minutes later looking just as toasted, came over to me and said “so are you ready for another lap” (clearly he wasn’t), to which I replied “absolutely, I was just taking a breather”. He grinned, stuck out his hand and we congratulated each other on a great race. Needless to say, he didn’t go out again and I kept 4th position. If he’d gone back out again, would I have jumped back on my bike? Probably. But I’m sure glad I didn’t have to!

It didn’t really hit me that I was done until Shaun came in a short while later. When he sat down next to me, the fatigue really hit and I pretty much collapsed into a chair. Man was that an awesome feeling!! Shaun had a fantastic race and built up a commanding lead over the other racers in his category. He was so far ahead that he took his time in the pits, including one 45 minute stop before Doreen “coaxed” him out– I think it involved some veiled references to being a slacker ;) He trained hard, raced hard and his 1st place winner’s jersey was well deserved. Great job Coach!

We hung around in the pit for a while decompressing and chatting while Doreen prepared yummy banana and peanut butter tortilla wraps. The first “real” food I’d eaten in 24 hours.  Following that, I focused on getting as many calories into me as I could stomach to optimize recovery, take a shower, leg massage with The Stick and nap before the awards ceremony that evening.

Here’s a shot of Stuart Dorland, the man behind 24 Hours of Adrenalin, toasting the racers that night.

Cheers to you Stuart – that was an experience I’ll never forget.