The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS
Coach Adam Pulford delivers actionable training advice and answers your questions in short weekly episodes for time-crunched cyclists looking to improve their cycling performance. The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast (formerly The TrainRight Podcast) is brought to you by the team at CTS - the leading endurance coaching company since 2000. Coach Adam pulls from over a decade of coaching experience and the collective knowledge of over 50+ CTS Coaches to help you cut throught the noise of training information and implement proven training strategies that’ll take your performance to the next level.
The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS
Carbs, Climbs, and Descents: Coach Adam Pulford Answers Listener Questions (#258)
OVERVIEW
We receive a lot of listener questions, so we're batching a few of them together into one episode. In Episode 258 of "The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast", Coach Adam Pulford and co-author of "The Time-Crunched Cyclist" book, Coach Jim Rutberg, rip through questions about the fear of descending, how to increase carbohydrate intake, preparing for big mountain days, and making the best of events when you're under-prepared.
TOPICS COVERED
- Question 1: How do I get over my fear of going downhill on a bicycle?
- Question 2: I understand I should increase carbohydrate intake on the bike, but how do I do it and how much should I consume?
- Carbohydrate scaling for different types of rides and races
- Question 3: How do I prepare for a big ride (RAMROD: Ride Around Mount Rainier in One Day) of 160 miles with 10,000 feet of climbing, more than half of it in the first 50 miles?
- Training by VAM (average ascent velocity) in elevation gain per hour.
- Long range vs. short range training
- Pacing and nutrition advice
- Question 4: How should I make the best of an event if I'm going in under-prepared?
ASK A QUESTION FOR A FUTURE PODCAST
Guest Host
Jim Rutberg has been an athlete, coach, and content creator in the outdoor sports, endurance coaching, and event industries for more than 20 years. He is the Media Director and a coach for CTS and co-author of several training and sports nutrition books, including Training Essentials for Ultrarunning with Jason Koop, Ride Inside with Joe Friel, and The Time-Crunched Cyclist with Chris Carmichael. He writes for trainright.com and his work has appeared in Bicycling, Outside, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, Velonews, Inside Triathlon, and on numerous websites. A graduate of Wake Forest University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Exercise Physiology, Jim resides in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with his two sons, Oliver and Elliot. He can be reached at jrutberg@trainright.com or @rutty_rides on Instagram.
HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform
GET FREE TRAINING CONTENT
Join our weekly newsletter
CONNECT WITH CTS
Website: trainright.com
Instagram: @cts_trainright
Twitter: @trainright
Facebook: @CTSAthlete
From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Now onto our show. Everyone loves to talk about climbing high carb intake, and you know what Descending fast is fun too. So let's talk about all of that and more on today's podcast. I'm Coach Adam Pulford, and here alongside me once again is special guest host Jim Rutberg, aka Ruddy Jim. Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, and Ruddy will be asking me um the questions once again today, and we have a ton of them trickling in from our audience members, which is you so? I mean so much so that I can't do this on my own, so we're going to rack and stack them as we go. Ruddy, let's get right down to it. Fire away with question number one.
Speaker 2:All right. So how do you get over the fear of descending? I lose momentum, hitting my brakes on the downhill, and have to work so much harder on the climbs to catch back up. I'm afraid of falling and hurting myself due to losing control when encountering sand, gravel, bumps, potholes, other unexpected terrain. I even get nervous, thinking my brakes might not work or the tire might fall off and, to put it in parentheses, starting to sound like I might need counseling. I'm getting better at speeds on known hills, but I struggle with new routes and in races. And that is from Katie.
Speaker 1:Yes, katie, yeah, go see your counselor. I would fully recommend that. And your counselor should be Josh Whitmore, cts coach and skills teacher, down in Asheville, north Carolina. And that is both a joke slash, not joke. We'll talk about that in a minute.
Speaker 1:But but, katie, like I hear you, I actually, when I first came to CTS Ruddy can probably speak to this I was crashing all the time because I didn't really know how to handle my bike all that well. Luckily, I did over time and I got a lot better at it. Luckily, I did over time and I got a lot better at it. And my advice is for you not to do what I did, which was pin it all the time and try to keep up with the fast coaches that I was trying to keep up with and therefore crash.
Speaker 1:So what you want to do is get some in-person, face-to-face, actual coaching, and that will go so much further, because anything that I can really tell you on this podcast it's not as effective as finding someone that you trust locally or going to a destination location like Asheville or Colorado Springs or California where some of our coaches within the CTS network can really help you out, and no podcast out there I don't think could teach you perfect like descending, descending and handling skills. So, with that being said, I have a lot more to say about this, but, ready, I'll kick it over to you If you have any words of wisdom for Katie on this topic if you have any words of wisdom for Katie on this topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, certainly. I think that the biggest thing is there's this misconception or difference in conception around. Nobody has any problem taking ski lessons or golf lessons or some of the other things that are highly technique-oriented. And yet, because we all learn how to ride well, not all, most people learn how to ride a bicycle as a child we think that you should automatically be able to figure out how to go downhill fast on a road, mountain, gravel, whatever. Um, because you just suddenly what naturally have these skills. I mean, it doesn't intellectually, it doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2:We definitely should be able to look at it and say you need lessons, you need skills work to go downhill quickly and everything, because it really is a matter of technique and being able to follow somebody and have somebody look at your body position on the bike, how you're leaning into a turn, how you're leaning the bike, where you're looking, all of those kinds of things.
Speaker 2:And it is remarkable on the improvements that we can make and I'm not necessarily the top skills coach, like Josh is and like you are necessarily but even on our more generalized cycling camps when we're going up and down Mount Lemmon or other places in Asheville and other areas.
Speaker 2:It doesn't take that capabilities of your brakes really are, so that you know when you can take a risk and how far you can push it a little bit and still reel it back in.
Speaker 2:Those things go a long way. The other thing that cyclists don't do and I am completely guilty of this myself because mountain biking skills are not my forte, but because I've been a a point to point or loop cyclist for so long I don't go back and session things, and the folks who are more you know mountain bike specific or they started out as mountain bike they think nothing of stopping and doing the same climb or descent or the same rock feature 17 times before they move on. It doesn't occur to me. I'm thinking I need to get from point A to point B and I'll hit that feature next week. But really sessioning something like a hill in your neighborhood even, or corners in a parking lot or something like that, is really a very helpful thing to do as a road or gravel cyclist as well a very helpful thing to do as a road or gravel cyclist as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yes, it is. And, ruddy, you should session more. Everybody should. And Katie, to your point is like I'll keep on pushing some in-person skill work because it's not just for speed and performance, even though you'll get that too it's really for confidence, fun in safety. So when you're doing these group rides, you know working harder to catch back up after this.
Speaker 1:You know downhill, where the other descenders and corners and people who are better, they spend like, like exponentially less energy than you, uh, in those sections and you spend exponentially more than them in those sections. So like I hear what you're going through and you spend exponentially more than them in those sections. So like I hear what you're going through and a little bit of skill instruction will go a long way here. Josh and I just did a big skill session at my house up here in Frederick, maryland, and we had very diverse crowd. We had anybody from, like, a junior racer racing at the UCI level to a former um, uh, super bike racer, like raced like road motorcycles to uh you know local people who just want to learn how to ride their mountain bikes, more roadies uh, that just started, um, on the mountain bike trail.
Speaker 1:They're very curious. So we had the very diverse group of people. We started super basic in the grass, just learning our controls, so learning what the brakes did, how much, when to deploy them, how to deploy them. And I'll tell you, like everybody picked up something from even the grass skill stuff. And we sessioned the entire weekend to the point where we had somebody say, is there more than just the nose trail? Like cause, cause, we spent like all of our time like on one trail, but we we wanted to to teach the basics, even though we had, like some of the most advanced people in Mapa region there as well as like some of the beginners. And so in that way I agree with Ruddy.
Speaker 1:It's it's crazy to me that like it's very acceptable for people to do ski instruction but not bike instruction and not to go super dark, but it's like there's no cars coming down the hills, you know, during a downhill skiing, okay, but there's cars out there. So learning how to navigate your bike, whether it's trails or gravel or road or whatever, there's a lot of stuff out there that could end your day in a bad way. So putting time, money and effort into how to drive your bike is wildly, wildly huge. So, katie, I'll say this I will reach out to you, I will email you directly and see where you live or where you want to travel to, and I will help find you a good skill instructor there. So I'll just throw that out there into the world and if you want to capitalize on that, let's do it.
Speaker 2:I will also say it's a skill that can be gained and that anyone can gain, whether they're young, whether they're in their 80s. All people can learn to ride within their capacity, within the bike's capacity, in a way that is enjoyable and relatively stress-free to go downhill.
Speaker 1:Yes, yep, and I will attest again. I started riding bikes kind of late in the game, when I was in my twenties.
Speaker 2:And I can attest that you were not good in corners or descents at the time.
Speaker 1:I wasn't good, that's true. But I'll say that I enjoyed climbing more, even though I wasn't that good at that either. But now I'm actually a really good descender and I'm a really good bike handler, and and I am confident in that. And the reason I say that is because over time, like now, I'll have a day where I'll say, oh, I'll go out and hit some climbs, but my focus is going to be the descent, because I just want to have fun today. So I'll just like ride like zone too easy on some climbing route, rip some descents and come back home because I want like a low key day but I want to have some fun. So, katie, super good question. I'll reach out to you and we'll get you some skill instructions because I think it'll go a long way.
Speaker 2:All right, so second question I'll reach out to you and we'll get you some skill instructions, because I think it'll go a long way, All right. So second question uh, coach, I'm an avid listener to your podcast. Already in, you've already answered a previous question that I sent in, so we have a repeat. Um, my question now is if there is a way or technique to increase the amount of carbohydrate consumed on the bike. Is it just something that you gradually increase? And if so, how do I do that? And thanks again, Rodolfo.
Speaker 1:Rodolfo, yes, I remember your name, rodolfo. I don't remember your original question, but thanks for writing back in and this is a good one. Yes, it is trainable and yes, you can increase it. I would say general rules of thumb is number one. Just observe what you're already taking in, right. If it's nothing, well, probably better to take in more. But the reason why I say start recording with what you're already doing to get some general awareness or a benchmark of where you're at.
Speaker 1:Okay, if you have no clue, I would say start around 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour, for you know endurance days that have some sort of intensity to it. I'm not talking about like an easy hour or less We'll talk about that here in a second but I'm talking about some harder rides, maybe some interval days and that kind of stuff. So start with 60 to 75 grams of carbohydrate per hour and do that every hour, and do that for the harder days and if that's sitting good with your belly, if that's seemingly performing just fine, then increase it. Go up to 75 to 80 grams per hour and if that's working fine, go to 80 to 90 grams per hour. But I would say for most people, when we're talking about the grams per hour and all this kind of stuff. Most people are not going to need more than 90 grams per hour listening to this podcast.
Speaker 1:Okay, some people will, though, and my advice on that and my my advice to really anybody is to start with the whole grams per hour game. Okay, but start to switch over to more of a sliding scale. Start to think about a percentage of the intake for your output. I know that sounds weird, but what I mean is you want to aim for a high percentage intake of carbohydrate when you have a high output of kilojoule per hour, and that's coming from your power meter. Let me walk you through a couple examples. First, I would say just having a grams per hour that is, a high carbohydrate for every single ride doesn't make sense to me. Does it to you, ruddy?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Oh, 100 grams an hour for a ride for everybody, that sounds great.
Speaker 2:The reason that you're consuming carbohydrate in the first place is to replenish glucose that you're burning, and if you're not burning very much, there's not as much of a reason to take all of that in. Also, similarly, the duration of your ride. If your ride is two hours or less, you have plenty of stored glycogen to be able to fuel the ride and you don't need as much additional carbohydrate on top of it. Especially again, if it's two hours of endurance, you're going to be at a carbohydrate contribution of 50% to begin with. So there's a bunch of math that goes into it, but I think the general guidelines of starting at 60 make sense, especially because you just want somebody to be consuming food to begin with on rides that are longer than about 75 to 90 minutes.
Speaker 2:But we're seeing right now, in the middle of the Tour de France, where everything is around, how much these guys are consuming. The Tour de France, where everything is around, how much these guys are consuming. They're consuming 150, 170 grams of carbohydrate per hour. It's just massive. Most amateurs do not need to replicate what they're seeing at the level of the Tour de France.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I think to that end is like every day is a performance day at the Tour de France. To that end is like every day is a performance day at the Tour de France. So they need to be consuming in as high of an intake of carbohydrate as possible. But they have easy days too and they're not going to jam 120 grams of carbohydrate into their face on their one hour recovery rides. So I'll suggest everybody start thinking about their training as the hard performance days or the easy endurance days. And now I would start to think about a scalable approach to the carbohydrate intake On the hard performance days.
Speaker 1:This means, like the long ride with climbs, the threshold intervals, maybe three by 20, something that's going to push you. My recommendation I've put this on podcasts before, but it's to aim for 40% to 50% intake of carbohydrate coming from the kilojoules of your power meter. And to give you an example here if Ruddy's out there training and he's hitting a thousand kilojoules per hour as a work measurement coming from his power meter, that means that if we take 40 to 50% of 1000 kilojoule per hour, that's four to 500 calories per hour and we want that come from carbohydrate. Divide by four that works out to a hundred to 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour that Ruddy should be taking in. Okay.
Speaker 2:For the record, I have not hit a thousand kilojoules an hour in probably 25 years, and that's even trying as hard as I can sometimes Like a thousand kilojoules an hour. People really have to take it and do it with a grain of salt. You see it listed in Vela News and all these other places. But talk a little bit about, like, what's realistic. What do you see when your athletes let's say a master's, 40 year old, 50 year old uh, cat three like even a hard training day for them, are they going to hit a thousand kilojoules an hour?
Speaker 1:well, since we already talked about ruddy at 20, let's talk talk about ruddy at 50. Ruddy at 50 in a hard day, maybe 600 kilojoules an hour.
Speaker 2:That's six to seven, I can do that.
Speaker 1:Okay, five hour ride 600 kilojoules Because again it's easy math just the 1000. So if we do 40 to 50% of that 600 kilojoule per hour now, we're talking about 240 calories, up to 300 calories per hour. And if we divide by four Adam's going to check out on math we're talking about 60 to 75 grams of carbohydrate per hour, which brings us right back down into sort of the normal ranges that have been prescribed forever, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:And so these ranges, folks like, where are these ranges coming from? First of all, the gram of carbohydrate per hour. That's coming from a ton of research that kind of started with Oskar Jukenrup that has cascaded into a lot of different circles with, like Scratch Labs, never. Second, a lot of these researchers making sure that the exact blend of sugars going into these products, combined with the grams per sachet or per tube or whatever that you're consuming, is going to be in the ballpark area. Over the past 20 years of just observing what I'm recommending to my athletes which I've always been on the high carb train, by the way and that is because of CTS, because of a lot of the colleagues that I worked with back in the day even helped Power Bar, if we remember when Power Bar came out with their endurance drink we CTS helped to formulate that we were pushing hard carb. From the very beginning it was just like a lower high carb of like 40 to 60 grams per hour and we were excited to get our athletes to do that. Then it was like 60 to 75, and now it's like 60 to 90, right. So the percentage of intake per output is something that I've observed over the years and in my opinion we should have a slidable scale, that Ruddy's high performance days and Matthew Vanderpool's high performance days. We should be able to find a number that kind of fits each of them. Okay, and it does If you Matthew Vanderpool's pumping on a lot of thousand kilojoule per day and he's hitting a hundred to 120 grams per hour. But I took that same 40 to 50% and applied it to Ruddy's hard days of 600 or 700 kilojoule per hour and it came out on a very acceptable, probably what you're doing from an intake standpoint. Okay, so those are the performance days. I've been working with TrainingPeaks and maybe SneakPeak. There might be a podcast coming out in a couple of weeks about some of the stuff that we're doing on TrainingPeaks for a fueling insights tool that's going to be implemented into the Training Peaks suites of stuff. So sit on your edge of your seat for that.
Speaker 1:But then we have our endurance days. That's where you either drink water or you take in less. So my percentage for that well, first of all, I'll generally say, if it's an endurance ride of two hours and less, with not a ton of intensity and you're eating normally, you can just drink water or electrolytes and you probably don't need to take in uh grams of carbohydrate. But if we're doing like some tempo or a 90 minute ride or a two hour ride was like some Hills, that kind of thing let's just say an endurance ride. My general recommendation is 25% to 35% intake of carbohydrate per the output of kilojoule.
Speaker 1:In this example, let's just say Matthew Vanderpoel was having an easy day of 600 kilojoules per hour. That would come out to 150 to 200 calories per hour, or 40 to roughly 55 grams of carbohydrate intake per hour. That's how to use the sliding scales. I know it's a little mathy and a little hard to listen to slash. Boring to listen to slash. My wife is going to hate this podcast. But play around with those numbers. Just remember 40 to 50% for performance days, 25 to 35% and you're going to take that from the kilojoule expenditure from your power meter.
Speaker 2:Okay Now to add a little bit more to the math terrible side. There's also that equation for if you're generally consuming on the lower end of the scales, you know so 40 to 60, 65, 70, kind of in that range, a two to one uh, glucose to fructose uh formulation works really well when these folks are going for the big numbers. When you're going for a hundred grams, 120, 150 grams an hour, then the percentages uh change a little bit in terms of what you want from a um, from a formulation, and so a lot of the really high carb formulations are going more towards a 1 to a 0.8 formulation. And it's just because it's easier on your gut, because the biggest downside to this kind of high carbohydrate, extreme carbohydrate kind of strategy is you to end up with gastric distress, and so there's the gut training component of gradually increasing what you're consuming. But you also have to make some adjustments at the high end to the formulation that you're using if you're starting to have some GI distress from high carbohydrate.
Speaker 1:And I'd even go so far as to say that the two to one versus one to 0.8, I wouldn't like coming back to Rodolfo, I wouldn't stress about that all that much right now. I would, number one, just become aware that that is a thing, if you're not already. Number two, look at your packaging to see if they even put that on there and consume more products that actually promote, like their ratios. So if they do have a two to one or one to one or one 2.8, that is a very transparent and very good, and then you can identify which products suit you better for those high intensities, because I do have some uh folk that the one to 0.8 just works for them, kind of at all intensities, and when I play around with two to one versus one to 0.8, it kind of doesn't matter, um, and so just know that that definitely does exist, become more aware of that, and then maybe some of the products that don't work for you if they don't have this stated, or maybe it's just like a ton of maltodextrin and that gives you GI issue. Okay, now we've identified perhaps why that is.
Speaker 1:Additionally, and this kind of comes first, is all this food talk that we're talking about won't bode well if you're dehydrated. So if all you're doing is guzzling carbohydrate or chewing bars that have carbohydrate but you're not paying attention to total fluid intake ie staying hydrated this fueling plan won't go well. So stay hydrated. First, fuel with carbohydrate, on top of that. We won't talk about sodium in this one, but big fan of sodium, put that in too. And with the bars, yeah, as long as it's a bar that is pretty exclusively carbohydrate, like probably 50 grams of carbohydrate to three to five grams of fat only and almost no protein, that's a good carbohydrate bar. There's bars out there that have 12 grams of fat and say 30 to 40 grams of carbohydrate at the highest level, maybe some protein. That's going to sit differently, meaning it's going to, it's going to digest a lot more slowly. So you want that. On, say, longer rides, where you want a little bit more sustenance, rather than three to four hour hard gravel races, where you want to choose something, you need something that's more carbohydrate based. So, yeah, I mean nutrition. We could talk for so many hours on nutrition.
Speaker 1:Rodolfo, very good question. But the last thing I will say is on those percentages and I know I'm like pushing that hard, but the general, the reason why I've been trying to push this hard into the audience and with my kind of agenda on. It is like people have finally got the word that high carb is better, right? Or is good right do high carb? They think that that high carb is good for everything, but it's not so. Knowing how to scale up your carbohydrate for the intensity, or hard days and knowing how to scale it down for the less hard days is really my messages, and so that 40 to 50% for the hard and 25 to 35% for the easy ish, that's really what I want you to take home. I think we might have time for one more, rudy.
Speaker 2:All right. Third question is Arnie is doing Ramrod. It's a ride around Mount Rainier. It's one day 160 miles, grand total of 10,000 feet of elevation gain. However, in the first 50 miles there are 6,700 feet of elevation gain. So any training advice? The event is July 31st, so we don't have a whole lot of time to make a lot of improvement, but we can at least provide some advice.
Speaker 1:Yes, Arnie, I believe you wrote this into us not this week, probably a couple months ago. Sorry, we are getting to this one a little late. Let me just answer this. If you were to ask me this middle of July, you have maybe a couple of weeks to go, and then what we can do is backtrack into some the training that you've been doing leading up to this. There's not a ton more you can do in a couple of weeks. However, there's probably at least one or two big final training sessions that you can utilize to really give you confidence in an extra kind of like boost for game day.
Speaker 1:So some of that is like a just a huge, massive amount of climbing, whatever you have to work with around your area and you want to try to match the rate of climbing that's known as VAM vertical ascent in meters or climbing per hour that you would expect to do on the day and you want to mimic that in training. For a lot of people that I find a lot of masters, riders and all this kind of stuff good climbers 2000 feet of climbing per hour is usually a pretty good rate of climbing on some of these big epic things, If you can tolerate that, at least for the first part of it, which sounds like you probably will do that. Try to mimic in training. That's the specificity of the training on that. This is also a gut training day. So this leads into Rodolfo's question how many grams to push and all this kind of stuff you want to dial in your exact fueling for the race day on this day. So push the high carbs, see what you can do at kind of a maximum, have a really good hydration plan and incorporate that into this kind of specific climbing day.
Speaker 1:And you want to do this probably 10 days or two weeks out from the main event, because this is going to cost you a lot. This is going to be very fatiguing. So by the time you hear this, Arnie, you probably will only have one day of it. Then you do it, Then you rest, refine your process, see if that's going to work for you, and away we go From there.
Speaker 1:I'll just say two things and I'll turn it over to. Ready is coming in fresh to. This one is really going to serve you well, Cause it's just such a huge day, you know. So, like training up until three days out, that's not enough to freshen up. You need probably a week easy going into this one, the very least, and so arrive fresh. That's really going to help you. And then, finally, if you don't get this big training thing in, or maybe your training hasn't been all that awesome, and if you're still going to do it, fueling really well is your best strategy on the day, regardless of the fitness that you're bringing into it, so ready anything else to throw on top of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think probably mostly a caution really is that if you do go in fresh which you absolutely should the consequence, or one potential consequence that trips people up when they go into events really fresh, is that they rip their own legs off in the first hour because they get excited, they feel fresh, they you're, you know, like you end up going faster and harder than you think you are, and then you should and you just burn way too many matches too early.
Speaker 2:Um, chris Carmichael was my coach when I first, when the company first started and all those years ago, and one of the simple, non-technical bits of advice that he gave me that still sticks with me is don't ride like an idiot. And he would kind of tell me that before races or big rides and things like that, because he knew that I would tend to do exactly that. I would go out feeling great and totally cook myself in the first hour and a half or something like that, and then be toast great and totally cook myself in the first hour and a half or something like that, and then be toast. So if you're going into this event, regardless of the amount of fitness that you have and hopefully well-rested, it's important to just stay disciplined in that first 50 miles, because any matches that you burn you're not going to get back and you kind of want to save yourself, save some energy for the last 50 miles.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really good advice on pacing and I would agree with that for sure. I mentioned on the podcast I did the track this year and one of my goals was just to feel strong all day and 100% of that was in the first hour. Like so many people were riding so crazy, like super crazy hard, I just let them go. I was I'm like okay, cause I've messed it up so many times before. I'm like okay, I'll go. I feel good, I'm going to go with the lead group or whatever that means for the track. Like it was hard, it was a proper event. If anybody, you know, wants a gravel race that checks all the boxes, do it. But because I let people go, whoever they were, and I knew my pacing held to it, I climbed strong all day. I stopped at the aid stations, got water, kept on going and in the end you know it's the last hour or so. You know I would.
Speaker 1:I was passing a lot of people, made some friends and and we're climbing along and and one guy was like out of water. I had an extra bottle cooled them off and I was just like okay, like hop on my wheel, let's bring this thing home. And I was, you know. So I was able to help some people out. I felt strong, rode through and uh, kristen and I, my, my wife, we had a nice dinner that night, as opposed to uh being destroyed, having to stay in the you know the hotel or the APRB and wonder if I'm going to pee in the next six hours because of the extremeness of the event, right, so, again, the pacing on the day is super important, but let's just assume we answered this question long time ago.
Speaker 2:Well, hang on Before you get to that. I do want to go back to the idea of the climbing rate per hour. People who don't have access to super long climbs. Can you do climbing repeats and accomplish that VAM that way? Or is it a necessary thing that they have to have a steady climb for that? Um?
Speaker 1:really good question and I and I think it's the pragmatic answer is you use what you have, right. And from a specificity of training, you know Ramrod has long climbs and if you are going to train properly for it, use long climbs. If all you have is five minute climbs, well then use the five minute climbs and so in that way, then, doing climbing repeats or intervals of going up and coming down and going up and coming down, um, would be a fine way to train, because it's it's hill climb training, okay. And then I want some outdoor training for these athletes so that they know how to climb out of the saddle in the saddle and then descend as well.
Speaker 1:What I would do, not knowing Arnie's full situation or anything, but I would have days where I would climb fairly hard call it threshold, maybe a little bit above up, and I would pin it on the way down to minimize the time in between. So I'm going to do more work in less time by shortening the interval time. So, instead of kind of the typical what we'd normally do with climbing up, turning around and coasting and drinking whatever, I'd get up to the top. You know, spin around safely, spin it, do a U-turn and then start pedaling hard on the downhill, take a minute or two, whatever it's going to take you to get down, turn around safely at the bottom and then hit it again. So that's, that's how it would help train an athlete who had short climbs doing something like this.
Speaker 2:And then, as you said, if we did have more time, if we're talking to somebody who's six months or three months, et cetera, out from an event like this, then how would you prepare someone for a big climbing day?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's. Let's just put climbing aside for a second. It's a big day.
Speaker 1:So what that means is you need a huge aerobic base. That means is you need a huge aerobic base. So I would, um, arnie, I would maximize your CTL, meaning in the base and build time period. I just I would ride you, I would maximize your volume, um, within reason, and try to get that CTL as big as possible, and then at some point I would change the training intensity and really focus on threshold development. That's where hill climbs come in a lot of FTP work and time to extension work, maybe some sweet spot in there or whatever and then I would intensify the training because there's going to be some steep pitches in there and I'm going to do more hill climb work.
Speaker 1:Okay, but I think it's important to recognize on a day like this and what's hot right now is durability right so I wouldn't be doing all the intervals early on in the ride. I would have long rides with um hard hill climbs at the very end and, um, I would work on your ability to produce a similar power, say, six hours late in the day, than you can when you're fresh. That's really working on durability is being able to produce really high power. That's maybe similar to what you can do when you are fresh and ready to go. Finally, I'd be working on the fueling plan throughout and then bring you in fresh, like we talked about.
Speaker 1:That's a pretty general broad strokes of how to answer the question from a long ways out. But I think too, when you're doing something like that epic, you need to be really fit. And, arnie, I'm kind of curious if you are quote time crunched athlete or not. Feel free to write back in and let us know maybe total hours of what you have been doing to train for Ramrod, because that's that's a pretty gnarly one so to that end uh, just not a question that we got from from listeners.
Speaker 2:But something to add on quickly to this would be what is your advice to somebody who has to go, who needs to go into an event somewhat underprepared? Not one of these. I'm not advocating somebody you know go off the couch to do ramrod or ledville 100 or something like that. But everybody, we've all encountered athletes who training didn't quite work out the way we thought it would, et cetera. And they're they know they're under prepared, not unprepared, but just not quite there. How do they approach their big gnarly day when they're not quite ready for?
Speaker 1:it. I get asked that a lot and and kind of have to deal with that a lot. So I think like the first thing to recognize is fueling and pacing on the day are the two biggest things to focus on, regardless of whatever fitness that you're bringing in. So if you've been only training six to eight hours and your CTL is 45, 50, and you're going to do Leadville, my advice is, man, let everybody go. Just ride your pace, a nice aerobic pace. Make it feel like a five or maybe six all day. Five while you're cruising along, six on the hill climbs, and don't overextend yourself. Stop at the aid stations, stick to your fueling plan of what you know is going to work for you. Be efficient in those feed zones meaning you're not going to hang out for 15 minutes, but grab what you can high five, a volunteer and just keep it positive Because you got to recognize that a huge day like that it's all aerobic.
Speaker 1:So as long as you're staying hydrated and you're staying happy and you're staying well fed and you're giving yourself you know delicious snacks, you should be able to go all day.
Speaker 1:Really, the problem is going to be how bad your butt and your hands hurt afterwards. I mean that's the biggest thing so long as you keep on the fueling and all that kind of stuff. So but I do think that the what's unique about timeed Athlete is if you do it for years and years and years, if you've had five years of kind of hovering between 40 and 60 CTL, that's real different than starting two years ago and building up to like a 70 CTL and then trying to do Leadville 70 CTL and then trying to do Leadville. Because if you have all those years in the bank maybe you have some of these long events or something like that. There's stuff that metrics on TrainingPeaks or some of these other platforms can't really monitor for. So that time crunched athlete can get through some of these huge epic days with wise pacing, proper fueling and let's face it like a positive and happy mindset.
Speaker 2:I sure hope so, because that's pretty much my plan for Leadville this year.
Speaker 1:Well, Ruddy, you've got a few behind you. So the people who are underprepared they normally do the opposite of what I just described and it's because they don't have the experience and they get kind of caught up in the moment and they think they should keep up with everybody, Cause that's what everybody's doing and a lot of cascade of problems, you know. Go from there, and so general rule is stay within yourself, stick to your guns, Don't overextend yourself, keep it positive out there and, uh yeah, keep hitting the snacks.
Speaker 2:So, speaking of snacks, it's snack time around here, so, uh, we'll wrap this one up and then, uh, let you get on your the rest of your day.
Speaker 1:Yes, I could go for some snacks and ready. Thank you, we, we. You know we ripped through uh like five audience questions over the past couple of weeks, so that really helped me out. Thank you for your time. I super appreciate it. Let's go back and watch some more Tudor France. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.
