Have Any Women Done the Trenching Challenge Yet? Are you in Tucson/Phx? Come say hello!

Incredible achievement, congrats

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Oh no. I’m hijacking this thread. What was your strategy for coupling the battery to the device? Did you stop and plug it in as needed or do you have such mad biking skills that you could do it on the bike?

I like the square battery form factor so I can weldwood a piece of one-wrap on the batter…weldwood another piece of one-wrap on my bike…then just leave the battery cabled up to the device the whole time, but it’s still easy just to rip the battery off the bike and charge it.

Definitely, I don’t have enough skill on the bike to plug in my battery while riding! :pensive:

This isn’t too far off topic:

  • small lipstick battery case in jersey pocket
  • 4 or 6 foot USB cable, can’t remember exact length but it was a charging only cable (no data lines)
  • stop for ~1 minute to connect to Garmin computer, or Varia radar
  • ride on!
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For charging my head unit I use a top tube feed bag - I really like those in general, and then I just use one of the round single 18650 cell powerbanks to charge it. I generally let it get to about 50% charge then charge it. You could also run a cable from that across the top tube to charge a tail light, but I’ve ended up cycling through tail lights, as I for my long rides I have not needed the varia in the middle of the night. Managing the charging of devices for a 24+ hour ride can be a bit of a challenge, especially headlamps during the night, as most take much longer to charge than to discharge. I also have run 2 lights on high during descents, as a sudden failure of a light during a fast descent at night would be bad :slight_smile:

Ordered!

Mostly Walmart brand sugar :slight_smile:
Gatorade for flavor. Plus Sodium Citrate and caffeine powder from purebulk.com.

I think she would have avoided GI issues completely had I not failed to tell her that I put 4000mg sodium in fuel bottle #2!

Please don’t give her any ideas! I’m still half dead from that day and I rode only half of it.

I had no idea this was something people were already doing!

Anyone know where I can find records (unofficial or official) for more obscure challenges like Trenching / Double Everesting?

Great point! Hadn’t even considered that I might not be able to safely pull the brakes in time if this happened.

I’m interested to hear how you keep your lights charged because that was a particular challenge during her event. It only worked because I was stopping about 50m of climbing short of her turnaround point, and because I descend faster than her and could catch her after spending a minute or two managing light swapping at our charging station (RV) on the side of the road. Had I been riding every meter with her, it would work and I would need a new strategy.

Nice to see someone else home-brewing their drinks! I’m mostly through my batch based on sodium bicarbonate/salt, have some sodium citrate to try next. I’ve found that ā€˜true lemon’ and ā€˜true lime’ products are good for flavoring, if you like citrus. I have mostly used commercial products for my long rides just due to convenience as I’ve been mostly solo on those.
After your initial post, I looked for ā€˜trenching info’, and didn’t really see much other than some mentions of the idea. For everesting there is Hall of fame | Everesting I know that there has been a lot of action on records for single everestings, I haven’t seen much talk about double everest records. I don’t see a quick way to just filter double everests, but Andy van Bergen (ie the guy behind Everesting) could likely help identify the records. A quick browse shows at least on person did a double everesting in under 18 hours :exploding_head: If you sort by elevation you will see about a dozen triple everests and then you’ll see the doubles. I think for ā€˜official’ records they now want to pre-clear the route, as there can be real issues with the quality of elevation data with strava segments since the elevation profile that Strava uses for the segment is whatever was recorded by the person who created it.

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My light ran out of juice on a downhill at the Pace Bend Ultra one year. That race takes place in a rural location so no other lights of any kind. My eyes were used to staring at 1200 lumens so everything went PITCH black. One of my scariest moments on the bike. Def rec ultra riders take some action to reduce the odds of that happening!

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I was trying to avoid jumping in on the thread hijack, but another question about this - can you keep recording a ride while plugging/unplugging the power cable on the 520? It power cycles when you plug it in, doesn’t it? Will it just stop the ride, and then restart? Or will it split it into two rides?
(I was going to test this out, but if you’ve already done it…)

To paraphrase Aerosmith - ā€œI kept a rolling all day longā€ and it is one continuous recording despite recharging twice during the double century. Can’t recall if having a charging only cable was required or not. No power cycling, no stopping of the ride, it just simply kept working as if it had a giant battery.

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I love to geek out on this stuff :slight_smile:

Here is an outline of what I did. I’m cheap, so I only had 1 new nice light (Bontraeger), and a couple of older nice ones, including a light-n-motion helmet mounted light. I bought two cheap ā€˜bright lights’ (ie $25 800 lumen 2500mah, ā€˜fillixar’ brand), and I had a few $5ish dollar cheapies (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32957572478.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.27424c4dyzIl8g) These cheap ones I mostly use on blink mode for general day riding.
Since most of the time is spend climbing slowly, I found that the cheap lights were fine for this, as I could see 10-15 feet ahead of me and that was enough. For the downhills, I would have 2 good lights on high, either 2 handlebar mounted ones or a handlebar one and a helmet one. If I had 2 of the brighter lights on the bars I would just use one of them on the lowest setting for climbing. This worked pretty well to minimize the running down of the batteries which was a concern, as if I ran out of lights I would have to take a break in the middle of the night. I think part of my desire for redundancy was the fact that my lights were cheap, and I did not have confidence in their low battery indications. In practice those worked well, and I never had a surprise light failure. Still not something I’m going to bet my life on when it is easy to account for. My wife’s main concern with these activities is my safety, so she appreciates my attention to detail in this area. I think the one generalizable principle from this is that you have two lighting situations - climbing and descending, and I think it can be useful (ie less expensive) to address those two situations with different lights. The Bontraeger was definitely the nicest light, but I wasn’t going to buy 4 or 5 of them for the ride.
For charging the lights not in use, I used a large powerbank like the one you have, as well as a Makita USB power source: https://www.makitatools.com/products/details/ADP05 Most tool manufacturers have something like this now, so if you have a power tool set this is a great way to get some massive power banks. I was never limited by the charging power sources, just the speed of charging. Any future ā€˜nice’ lights for me must have fast USB-C charging or they won’t get my money. I would swap the lights between using and charging before they got fully depleted, but I’m not sure if this was the best strategy - it was more motivated by me now wanting to have a light go dead on me. I avoided charging on the bike for everything except the bike computers as I wanted to keep weight to a minimum.

In practice, I don’t think I ever came close to running out of lights. Part of this was on 2 of my 3 rides I took breaks during the night for other reasons, and that gave me extra charging time. I had real difficulty managing the temperature during the nights, and had to take breaks to warm up and eat. A camp stove is now something I bring, as having a hot cup of noodles when you are freezing is amazing :slight_smile:
For one of the roads I everested (Ebbetts Pass in CA), good lights were essential on the descents as over the day you would see new rocks in the roadway that had fallen. The road condition was not static, which required extra care. I would often clear rocks from the downhill lane when climbing so that I would not have to deal with them on the descent. I never realized how many rocks can fall until I spent 24+ hours on the same stretch of road.

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For older ones like the edge 500, you need a special cable otherwise it resets the unit. Newer ones (not sure how new is required) can be plugged in (at least to a powerbank, actual computer might be different) without disturbing the recording.

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Well, looks like the answer to my question posed in the title is, yes, per Everesting site.

I filtered this link by choosing ā€œRideā€ at the top, then filter options: Female, Elevation: High to Low.

Looks like she’ll be 10th or 11th woman on the list for vertical. Thank you @toyman for that link! She’s already plotting the next one.

Same for us. Was not perfectly efficient but was more confident that we wouldn’t hit end of battery life during descents.

Same for her. I carried the charging lights, or we had a power station for the bigger NiteRider’s which, frustratingly, require non-USB charging cables. USB-C charging lights would be a dream.

Better yet, a light that could be charged/powered while on. Probably pricey.

FWIW before the 2017 Double Century I tested my Garmin 520 by running it all day during work, in order to determine battery life and that my Anker 3350mAh lipstick battery case would charge it for the project 15-18 hour elapsed time day. I’ve since upgraded to the Garmin 530. The Garmin will continue recording and charge with any USB cable.

My Varia radar is the one that requires a power-only USB cable.

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It’s Everesting.cc ā€œofficial.ā€ @michelleihowe is (EDIT) 10th-ranked female, all time, for elevation. Filter by female & by elevation high to low.

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@Dr_Alex_Harrison what are the set of rules you use to dose sodium? I think there’s more to the art than what I can extract from the accupad pic.

Start with 500mg per hour. If cramps likely or need to promote thirst because sweating is likely (and if drinking purely to thirst you’ll end up about a liter behind, pretty quickly), increase to 700-1200mg/L/hr. I prefer 1200-1500mg/hr because it helps me stay on top of water consumption, and thus, better absorb >120g carbs per hour, especially in hot conditions.

Unfortunately, no hard/fast rules for sodium dosing exist because unlike carbs, sodium needs ARE wildly individual, and variable with conditions and even with the seasons as you acclimatize. Although, like carbs, optimal sodium consumption rates and concentrations are higher than most folks probably implement.

I overdosed Michelle’s sodium, because she typically does well with 1000-1500mg/L, but I also forgot she wouldn’t have access to adequate water for a refill, and failed to inform her of such a risk. Hence the 4000mg in that bottle. Grave mistake.

More nuanced discussion in Renaissance Periodization | The RP Diet For Endurance - EBOOK

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What is this inward pointing break lever about? Something about sprinting or personal preference or anything other? Kudos for that impressive ride!

#aeroiseverything. It moves the hands/forearms narrower. Substantial improvement in energy loss due to drag.