Unbound gravel race recap

Training
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I’ve been training to eat and can’t imagine trying to eat and hydrate at race pace in the heat with all the dust.

Looking back at my 1 double century on the road, temperatures were between 90 and 104F for 8 hours. Well supported event and water/food stops every ~25 miles. They were dumping ice cubes into our water bottles at 3 rest stops during the heat of the day. I got faint a couple times but no real problems eating, because it was endurance pace. A lot of weird stuff started happening to my body after the odometer rolled 100 miles in the heat.

My point - that is the definition of an easy double century, about as enjoyable as it gets when you finish 100 miles and say “that was so fun I’m going to keep going and do another 100!”

You did 700 TSS and 0.7 IF, I can’t imagine actually staying on top of eating/hydration in the conditions you raced in. Serious props for enduring the unimaginable suffering. Totally. F***ing. Epic. You are a bad ass. :muscle: Congrats on the results!

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Congratulations to everyone that took part in the day.

This was my first Unbound and longest ride of my career (previous was 175), but had a couple of 100 mile training days leading up to this. On race day I lined up at the back of the 10 hour group and approached it more as a Fondo then full on Race. Myself and around 20 other riders were hanging on to the very back of the 100 plus rider lead group, so I/we spent some energy coming off the corners to get back on. The entire group blew up between mile 20-25 when “the real gravel” started.

I stopped at mile 99 to give someone a spare tube and wait while they used my pump (I should have just gave them one of my CO2 as they had an inflator, and/or went down the to water stop a mile later and waited in some shade).

The heat started to affect me after the second neutral water stop around mile 140-145. All of a sudden I couldn’t hold the pace I had been holding and I felt a slight head ache which is a warning sign for me. I had been drinking a lot of water, 48 oz between mile 101 and 125 and I drank all 100 OZ I had between 125 and second CP at 155 (approx 2 hours), but had not been getting enough electrolytes. I just run straight water in my bottles and camel back and had a bunch of salt stick tabs, but wasn’t taking enough obviously.

Spent 15 minutes at CP 2 to make sure I was in the best shape possible. This included shuffling stuff around so I could take a 3rd bottle in my back jersey pocket as I was worried about the rate of water consumption that seemed to be required. Thankfully, we got some cloud cover towards the end of the day and temps started to drop.

I ran IRC Boken Double Cross in 42mm on a Bontrager 3V carbon wheelset. The wheels had a 25mm inner rim width, so the tires measured 44mm when inflated. I ran 30 psi rear and 32 front. Combined bike, rider gear weight was somewhere between 165 and 175 lbs. This setup handled everything the course though at it from smooth gravel and pavement, to some technical descents I would have preferred to have my MTB for (having some MTB experience definatly helped me navigate the descents).

Some stats:

  • 12:44 race time (16.19 mph)
  • 12:13 moving time (16.8 mph)
  • 177 AP, 197 NP, .61 IF
  • 131 Avg HR
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50th overall—Awesome! IF 0.61, was this by design or just a result or what watts you could push? Were you absolutely spent at mile 206 (or earlier?) or composed?

Pacing in these ultra events has to take some real restraint.

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That’s a little disparaging. For this kind of event there’s a penalty for dropping out of a group, but at the expense of needing to choke someone’s dust for a few hours. I don’t think that’s such a major factor in Mtb

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You did awesome.

Great job

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The final IF was just what it ended up being. At around mile 140-145 210 NP no longer felt easy so the next easy wattage range was around 190. Had another bit of a slip with about 15-20 miles to go. I was definatly glad for it to be over, but don’t think I would describe it as being completely spent (which probably means I’m not a vary good bike racer :wink: ). While this was my longest ride, and longest single event on the bike, I had done 2 ironman previously and I think I felt worse at the end of those.

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Your pacing was better then my “hold this beer” approach. You passed me around mile 100-125. Great job

Will you do it again

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Great posts, and great efforts folks.

Man, the start of this race and the desperate attempts to stay attached to an obviously faster group is text book suffer central. There’s just no way you’d intentionally pace such a long effort in any kind of heat, in that manner.

Basically, blow through your glycogen immediately, get behind in your calorie and electrolyte consumption, then ride for 150 miles! This would DEFINTELY lead to gastric distress!

Would there be some way of putting together a paced group of riders?

You could literally just let everyone go, then as a group of say 20, pace it as perfectly as possible. You’d likely end up finishing hours ahead of where you would racing it like a 90min XC race.

Or the size and structure of the event makes it impossible, and I’m dreaming…

Maybe a TR team effort?

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I think the way salvo did it was really smart. Hope to try that next time around as I try to go under 13 hours.

Also the first hour was very easy, it was the 2nd hour where the pace got faster and the roads changed and that took more watts to stay with the leaders. I thought after the first hour this is right where I want to be. Looking at the NP by the hour I can see that I was lulled to sleep by feeling I was safe in the front.

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Yeah, that was my experience as well in 2019. I stayed in the front 100 until about 30 miles / 90 minutes in. Had to give it a little gas on a couple of rollers, but it was pretty easy to sit in and just cruise for the most part.

We hit a pretty technical section around then and that was when I made the decision to let the main group go and set my own pace.

But it definitely easy to get sucked in to going way too hard for too long so you can stay with the group. Once you lose them or make the decision to let them go, you gotta just stick with it and not chase.

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Agree with the two above. Although I have never particpated in such a long gravel event, I did do multiple >120miles MTB races or road fondo’s with >7000m elevation. My take away especially from the last once is that pacing is key. Remember a big fondo in the Alps where I was dropped on the first climb in by all my friends and the big group because I gave myself some strict power targets which I should exceed. The climb was way harder than anticipated, so my speed was just so slow and I was overtaken by so many people and the once I was riding with were just not like the competition I normally face.

However, I justed focussed on not exceeding the power, I was super relaxt physically (mentally you start to doubt if you are not conservative enough, in the end you want to race and are used to attack the climbs). However, just concentrate on fuelling in the first hours did the job. In think within 3 hours in I overtook my first friend, he was toasted. Around 2/3 of the course I overtook the other one, he was still doing ok, but just didn’t have the power anymore. I was at 2/3 of the course still at the same power as the first climb. Only the last 2 hours (of 11 hours), I was really starting to slow down and I think 20% down on power compared to previous parts.

Anyhow, even if the first parts of the race feel so slow, you will crack anyway somewhere. What you should try is to delay that as close as possible to the flinish line.

Regarding the food at race day: Yeah, know the feeling. Also getting sleep in before race day with all nerves, adrenaline, often time pressure since you have to get up early. It’s not easy and I always struggeld with it. Nowadays, I am more of let it go, if I sleep well, I sleep well, if I sleep crap, there is nothing I can do about it. But even crap sleep doesn’t really slow me down the night prior to an event.

Breakfast however, that is always a struggle. I always make sure I prep everything the night before and I make sure I have more than enough time to get my oat in. Eating is always slow on race day and with time pressure, it gets even worse. I really prefer an half hour more eating time than a half hour more sleeping time.

What I sometimes face is that in the transit from home/hotel/sleepadress to the startline, I have to make a good dump, but everybody has it and the organisers often don’t have enough toilets available. This is also something I prefer to check the day before. On more than one occasion I just took my bike, rode two blocks away from S/F and sent it somewhere in the bushes. I am not going to stand in a line risking to miss the start.

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Will you do it again

Probably not. While it was hot and windy, I would take that over the derailleur destroying mud of 2015 (I think that was was the year). I felt like I had to acquire and pack so much extra stuff to deal with a variety of conditions (mud tires, spare derailleur, etc. ) and really don’t want to go thru that again.

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Great thread. I’ve got some teammates that do this race pretty much every year and it’s high on my to-do list.

Some of these posts echo what I’ve found to be one of the most critical strategy points in endurance gravel racing - “when do you let a group go?”. In a road race, it’s really simple - you almost always try to stay with the lead group at all costs. With endurance MTB, there can be some group advantages, but it can be treated much more like a stead state TT without a heavy penalty. With endurance gravel, it’s never going to finish in a big pack, but pack advantages are huge early, so you have to make a strategic choice of when to drop. If you wait until you completely blow up, you will bleed much more time than you gained riding with the group a little longer. But, if you let the group go early and try to ride steady TT mode all day, you will be giving up lots of free speed and end up slower overall. There is no formula that’s going to dictate the exact right time to drop. I will keep an eye on my NP, but it’s really a matter of reading the race and getting some luck being around the right people at the right time. Ideally, it’s nice to drop at the same time as a few others so you still have a small group rather than abruptly going to a solo effort. The hard part is reading whether the others who are dropping are totally cooked or if they have the legs to contribute to the pace.

While I think it’s much more common to hang on too long and blow up, you can definitely screw up the other way also. I am normally pretty smart/lucky with when to drop from a group, but I totally screwed it up at BWR Cedar city last year. I let a big strong group go on the first climb early in the race thinking it was too early to go that hard. The result is that I was really slow early compared to the groups and I didn’t get any help pushing the pace the rest of the day. If you could convince a bunch of other strong folks to do a nice steady state all day, that would make for a fast group, but that’s not how it ever works in a bike race.

I’m really looking forward to doing this event in the next couple years, sounds like quite a challenge.

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Jeremiah Bishop has an extended recap up on Instagram. Towards the end he mentions he was running 700x36s with cushcore inserts and “a cup” of sealant. Still getting flats… :joy:

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https://www.instagram.com/tv/CP2_jFMiPUi/

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Frank Overton interviews Ian Boswell:

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Another good recap:

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In my opinion there is only one tire to run for this event

Pathfinder PRo as wide as you can go

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You’re probably right; I was chuckling at how (uncharacteristically) irritated JB was by people constantly asking “Why don’t you ride tubeless??”

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Looks like Jonathan got to talk to Unbound XL winner Taylor Lideen which goes live tomorrow. Not sure if this was recorded before or after the race, but it’s bound to be interesting regardless.

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I see what you did there

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