Am again correcting myself.
My HR was at 87% and not 92% of max HR.
I need to go back to school to relearn math.
As others have said, this isn’t serving you well. Eat early and often. Gravel races are usually crazy at the start, but as soon as you can start eating, eat. You can never keep up with what you are burning, so the race to keep some glycogen in the bank starts as soon as the race starts. I’ll be hitting my carbs 10 minutes into a race if I have a chance. With crazy starts, that might get pushed out to 30 minutes, but I try to hit the carbs at least every 20 minutes. 3x per hour, even if they can’t be evenly spaced. Shooting for 100g+ (or whatever you’ve worked up to in training). The key to hour #3 is what you did to fuel in hour #1 and #2. And consider a big carb load in the days leading up to the race. For a long race, I’ll load for 2-3 days, but at least get 1-2 days in even for a 3 hour race. It’s crazy how much carb loading helps.
Also, I’ve found that volume is king when it comes to durability. If you have the time to do longer training rides, it has so many benefits. Besides the fitness aspect, the ability to fuel and hydrate at “race pace” need to be trained as well.
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Lots of good information on fueling and would reiterate to start fueling from start of race. It is good to set an alarm on the bike computer to remind you to drink/eat. For races I typically will have bottles of around 60-80 carbs and gels of 30 carbs each. Real food is difficult for me on the bike. I try to drink every 12-15 minutes and have a gel every 30 minutes.
Other suggestion is adding in long 3-5 hour zone 2 rides. I used to be similar and fade at the 2 hour mark. I have been doing a ton of long zone 2 rides this year which has increased my durability significantly where I now can go real hard for about 4 hours and then start to fade a bit but it is not a huge drop off like before. The other benefit is the long rides are a great way to practice fueling and finding out what works for you.
And they’re fun adventures!
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In a XC race, I start to fade around 90 min, so I aspire to get where you are. I am intrigued by how much I may need to increase my fuel, but I’m pretty sure my limiter is just fatigue from lacking long enough training rides. I have always been good at getting my shorter hammer rides in, not as consistent with longer base rides. For context, I’m 52, have raced off and on for decades, train with HR, but not power.
The best gains I’ve seen in years have come from focusing on increasing hours instead of intensity (56).
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Lot’s of really great info here.
I believe I need to put a greater concentration on the longer and more intense training that mimics a gravel race intensity, duration and distance.
Cheers
And you need to make sure you’re getting at least 60 g/hr of carbs right from the beginning. Ideally, work your way up to 80-100 g/hr of carbs ensuring that you avoid GI distress. I can do 80g of Skratch or Gatorade quite easily. And it really makes a difference in the later hours of a hard ride.
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I would also recoomend to start taking in carbs from the start and aim for 60g -90g/hr, probably start with 60 and see how you get along with it.
Without proper Power DAta it’s a bit hard to evaluate how hard you went in the beginning, but from the HR it seems it was pretty hard and since you didn’t do much longer rides, it is also not surprising that the intensity is catching up with you in the 3rd hour, No amount of Fueling will save you from Blowing up if you went to hard in the beginning.
Everyone here is focusing on nutrition when he’s already admitted his training rides are not as long as his events. On top of that I doubt the training rides contain as much pedaling as a race (more stopping at lights and such), unless they are indoors.
3 hours is probably not long enough for nutrition to be much of a limiting factor. But sure, don’t under fuel.
I would say that indoor training sessions of longer duration, while brutal, probably condition your legs to keep spinning nonstop for a long time better than the outdoor rides do.
I have also found that coming from a road background, I tend to pace myself poorly for longer gravel events, i.e. start out punching over climbs at z4/5 whereas a steady z3 all day would be ideal.
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I said the same in the 3rd post 
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And, not or. He clearly needs longer training rides and needs to fuel better. No one should (and I don’t think anyone is) arguing that there’s only one factor in play here.
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You have a pacing issue, not a fitness issue. You’re going too hard to maintain threshold numbers that long. Dial the first couple hours back and aim for a negative split. Ride at sweet spot or temp and charge the last hour hard.
This is very helpful.
I was believe that my pacing was “not” the issue because I did the Barry-Roubaix which was a 3:40 duration. Average HR was 160.
No power number however but felt great the entire way.
Thus it’s led me to the conclusion that feeding or lack there of is the issue.
Also the evening before my dinner was not a high calorie or carb meal. It was soup…there’s part of the feeding my problem. Not taking in enough the day before and the large bowl of oatmeal 2hrs before the race was definitely not enough.
Thanks for all this great feed back.
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If I were looking to sabotage someone’s race I’d recommend to them to eat the way you do/did. Carb load the day/s before and 3+ hours before your race. I love and use Cinnamon Toast Crunch the day before and morning of race day. I typically finish an entire Family size giant box of it.
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I fuel like a complete boss with all the ra ra carb breakdown. Sometimes I fade cuz I’m tired or my job or (reason). Maybe don’t anchor on one experience? Anecdata is noisy AF.
If you are burning above 600 kcal / hour, probably less, remember that on the bike fueling is just limiting losses. You can’t be positive. So if you messed up the night/days before you are already done.
- Maybe you can strickly on glyc burn at low enough intensity buy from a body/energetic perspective you are trolling yourself to start conserving in case of tiger.