I’m looking for some advice for pacing the Death Ride. I know @Jonathan did it last year so I’m hoping he’ll jump in and share some of what he did. I don’t need a mile by mile break down, but I would love to know what percentage of his sea level FTP he targeted for the climbs. Is it ok to get into Sweet Spot on the climbs knowing you’ll have time to recover on the descents? Or is it important to cap the power at around .65 IF because it will be such a long day? I’m not near as fast as Jonathan, but just looking for advice for how to finish as quickly as my fitness will allow. Thanks!
Thinking about DR 2027, never done it. Did you find advice for this? I’m curious.
Not really. I live at sea level and my local climb only gets up to about 5200’ so i decided I would shoot for an IF of around .6 based on my sea level FTP. Our local climb takes me about 80 minutes to go up and about 25 minutes to come down so I did some experimenting doing the climb at different NP’s and then seeing what the IF ended up being after the descent to get an idea of how hard I needed to go on the climbs to end up with a .6 IF after the descents. I ended up trying to do the climbs at about .7 IF. This seemed to work pretty good, but I wasn’t prepared for the heat (my garmin recorded 115 degrees) and had to take a 4 minute break in the shade on the final climb of the day. I ended the day with an IF of .58 and was 14 minutes slower than my goal of 9 hours. I feel like if it hadn’t gotten so hot I would easily have been a little under 9 hours. It was an awesome day and I would highly recommend it. I would love to do it again, but am hoping to do the Triple Bypass next year. Let me know if I can be of any help!
Yeah, helps. But I think I’ll start a new thread just to open it up. I’m mostly wondering how much to lean on v. Divert from the TR program.
I created, and started, my TR Plan on December 7. I used the Gran Fondo plan and I think I put in 10 hours as my time at a moderate pace. I couldn’t have been happier with how well I was prepared fitness wise. I was just a bit unlucky that I had a very cool May and June so wasn’t prepared for the heat
Did you stay within the hours and TSS per week prescribed by TR or did you do longer rides and do more TSS.