Listen to the Leadville podcast series. Will tell you everything you want to know about the race. They also have a 3 hr podcast containing a full description of the course, start to finish.
Have any of you started researching the appropriate times for checkpoints for specific finishing times?
The best way is to look at past finishers times and splits. For your given target time, find 5 (more if you want) finishers with that time. Then take the average of their times for each split. You can get a very good read this way.
The hardest part will be estimating what a good (realistic, yet still stretching you) target is for your finish time.
This post has some estimates of how to do this based on your FTP.
Have any of you taken an LT GPX file and turned different parts of the course into TR workouts?
I have not. You could do that, but for the most part you’ll be riding all sections of the LT100 at a lower power than a typical TR workout.
The hard part of Leadville is not any one climb by itself, but the fact that you have to do those climbs back to back in a 103 mile ride (and at altitude).
In a pre ride 4 weeks before the race a few years ago, I think I cleaned powerline. But on race day, I walked all of the steep parts.
So rather than training for a particular climb - where in training you might “smash it” - I think it’s more important to really dial in your pacing for the race. This is hard to do, other than having some experience on similar rides, and/or, being used to riding with power and knowing the IF you can hold for a given duration, adjusted as appropriate for altitude.
Good luck everyone!
My tips:
- Sweet spot all day long! Get good at ridding at sweet spot, you’ll do this on the climbs.
- Optimize your equipment; tires, kits, chain, and helmet. I saw so many slow tires, not tight jerseys (let alone skin suits), squeaky chains and un-aero helmets. People are probably losing 20-40 watts depending on how bad their setup is.
- Train to eat. Think of this as your new discipline. Find the right combo of carbs to get 100g an hour or more. I wish I would have done more of this earlier.
And if you really want bonus points, try carb loading before another long event that’s not super important to see how you handle it.
This is what I did a couple of years also. I took an average of 5 finishers for my target time to get representative times. The harder part though is knowing what time to target!
Wow! I think this will make it easier to go faster. Even if you’re in green it should make it easier to hook with with fast greens (although I agree with you there’s no chance to connect with a red).
Side note @Nate_Pearson, what tires did you use for Leadville?
Very cool spreadsheet. Question: How did you come up with the W/kg at the top?
@Nate_Pearson used a Thunder Burt on the rear and a Racing Ralph up front.
I haven’t heard @Jonathan say yet what he is using, but I suspect Aspens…
Aspens or maybe even a lower profile tire.
I think that’s the hardest part - i.e. knowing what time to aim for. I’m 3.25 W/kg, and did 9:38 in 2017. I guesstimated my target time to be 9:30 based on my ride the month before at Silver Rush, and a pre ride of sections of the Leadville course. I was 8 mins off target, and that included a gradual meltdown over the last few hrs.
See this post for the W/Kg estimates - Leadville 100MTB FTP? - #2 by stevemz
I think those are about .5 w/kg too high, IMO. I was at 3.7 w/kg when I did it in 9:11, DaveWH above was at 3.25 and did 9:38.
Oh thanks!!! I didn’t see that thread. Pretty useful stuff right there.
I’m in Texas but not at sea level, maybe 500- 1,000 feet?
I’m in Reno, around 4-5k and it was still a big difference going to Leadville last year. Due to work, I could only show up the Thursday afternoon before the race.
I should’ve added I live at 7k feet. So definitely not sea level.