Newbie zone/pacing question for 110 mile race/ride

0.85 - I had to trim the first minute of the ride to get there! It was pretty hard for the last 20 miles into a headwind. I stopped twice for as long as it took to have a pee behind a hedge - otherwise a continuous effort.

Only had 2x750ml of mix, so was pretty dehydrated when I arrived home - smashed a coke!

This is extremely helpful, I appreciate you sharing this!

.6 sounds SO slow, but that is exactly why I am asking in the first place. I don’t know what kind of hurt I’ll be in 7 hours later. That said, have you ever done anything with negative pacing, meaning slow the first half to 3/4 and faster towards the end when you noted you had more in the tank to give?

That is quite the effort! I have a ways to go before I can smash like that!

When I started doing centuries six years ago, us newbies with average fitness would say “let the rabbits run” and “in it to finish it.”

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This is something that can easily be overlooked - for a given distance, faster riders will be able to do them at a higher IF due to them taking less time to do them. The question we ask is “how hard should I ride for a 100 mile ride”, and we’ll get some answers from 5 hour century riders, and some from 8 hour riders. The question we should really be asking, is ‘how should I pace an 4/5/8 hour effort’, but we really don’t know how long it will take us.
The same, new to training rider could likely do a 4 hour ride at a meaningfully higher IF than an 8 hour ride, but this doesn’t help pick an IF for a given distance (especially considering different elevation gains) if you don’t know how many hours that ride will be.
The slower your are, you will likely need a lower IF for a given distance, likewise the faster you are the higher the IF you will be able to maintain. This is just due to the different durations - there are likely physiological factors that enable faster/fitter riders to maintain higher IFs for a given duration as well.

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Re: Negative pacing - I actually try to do this on all rides! It is very, very, very satisfying to blow past people in the last hour or two of an event. When they look at you funny, just say “I heard they might run out of beer so I want to make sure I get mine!”

Good luck on your ride! Have fun and yep, 0.6 pacing is way too slow for a few hours ride. You’ll feel lazy for 3-4 hours, but by the end you’ll likely be going dammit, 0.6 is getting hard, WTF. :slight_smile:

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One good thing about living somewhere flat! Living on a diet of threshold, SST and Z2 also helps

I have these aims for any long event

  1. No dramas, physical or mechanical
  2. No stomach or food or drink problems
  3. Finish, and feel like I could have ridden more distance or gone harder.

For your first one aim to complete, not to compete. Once you’ve completed a few, you can look at how do you compete. Compete might just mean going faster than last time you did an event. Competing against yourself.

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Really focus on your eating plan and execute that properly. If you’re riding along and suddenly realise that you haven’t eaten anything for an hour or if you’re 2 hours in and have only had 2 gels then any pacing plan is going to slowly run out of road…

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Besides pacing, eat, drink, eat, drink, early and often. It’s really easy to get caught up in the chaos at the start, and find out you’ve done the first hour without really eating or drinking. On a long ride like this, don’t get behind the 8ball on your nutrition, as it’s really hard / nigh impossible to dig yourself out.

Also, don’t do hero pulls early. In fact, if you are in a large-ish group, and you can efficiently sit in without taking pulls, do it.

On rides this long, I’ve done IFs between 0.75 - 0.8, but if you look at my average power, it’s down around 60 - 65% of FTP.