Tag: hoodoo 500

10,000 Ways That Won’t Work

The last few weeks have included a few misadventures that led me to think of Thomas Edison’s quote: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

I (hopefully) have two actual, real events coming up in the next month or so and am looking forward to my first chance to attend a non-virtual event in about six months. I participated in both events (HooDoo 500 and the 24+6 hour time trial at the 6-12-24 Hour World Time Trial Championships) last year with less than awesome experiences. As my coach Rachel reminded me a few times, hopefully the bad stuff has already happened in training and now I’m set up for some great race experiences.

With a bunch of events going virtual this year, I’ve enjoyed taking the opportunity to use them for training and working out race and nutrition strategies in a low consequence environment. Last weekend, I planned to tackle the Southern Inyo by Moonlight Double Double Century (double centuries on back to back days). Weeks earlier, I had what seemed like a great idea in theory. I booked a couple of nights in Borrego Springs and planned a massive training weekend that would work for both HooDoo 500 and the 24 hour time trial. I would do both rides at night to stay out of the heat and also allow me to get more experience riding at night. I mapped out a modified version of the challenging Borrego Double Century for one of the rides, then planned to do loops on the 18-mile time trial circuit in Borrego Springs for the second double. Perfect, right?

As anyone who lives in Southern California knows, we’ve been hit with a massive heat wave the last couple of weeks along with horrible air quality from all the wildfires. The desert is probably the last place I should have been riding, even at night. But I stuck to the plan. I drove out to Borrego Springs after a half day at work on Friday, dropping off a couple of water caches on my way. After unpacking and getting my bike ready, I rested for a bit and waited for the sun to go down, which brought the daytime temperature of about 120 degrees all the way down to 111 degrees. Figuring I’ve always done pretty well in the heat, I just need to get myself up Montezuma Valley Road (the Glass Elevator in RAAM-speak) at an easy pace, then it should be cooler for most of the ride.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. The heat, horrible air quality, windy conditions on the climb, and a body that just didn’t want to cooperate quickly led to a DNF. I’d started to get a headache earlier in the day and had to take my migraine medication, which is never a good way to start a big training weekend. As I made my way up the climb, my head started to feel heavy, my knees started hurting, then my back started hurting, then I just could not shake the feeling that all I wanted to do was get back to the bed in my hotel room and go to sleep. There really was no easy spinning on the climb with the conditions and the way my body was feeling, so I was working a lot harder than I wanted to be. I started texting Rachel, who agreed with my assessment and “gave me permission” to call it and head back to Borrego Springs. I’d been on the bike about 90 minutes and was fairly close to the top of the Glass Elevator.

I figured I’d get a good night’s sleep and stay inside during the heat of the day on Saturday and try again the next night. I had taken Monday off from work, so I figured I could still get in the double double if I extended my stay an extra night. Around mid-day Saturday, Rachel encouraged me to change plans and just do the loops on the Borrego time trial circuit Saturday night to build some confidence. Unfortunately, spending all day laying around and “over-resting”, with too much time to think and allow second thoughts to creep in led to me not feeling spectacular about heading back out into the heat by the time I was planning to get started again. I ended up compromising with a very early start to an easy century ride on the time trial course and managed to finish just before the temps hit the triple digits on Sunday morning. I headed home discouraged, but fairly certain I’d made the right call.

Derailed by the desert heat in Borrego Springs. Hoping for better conditions in early October…

I spent the week very much looking forward to my plans for this weekend. Rachel has been working on building her running mileage up over the summer with a goal to run 100 miles solo from Temecula to Long Beach. I offered to be a bike escort during the night hours. After getting home from work, I quickly got ready to ride and raced over to Rachel’s house just in time to start with her at 8:00 pm. Her husband Nate ran with her for a few miles before turning around to head home and then get in the car to SAG for her through the night. After a couple of hours, we were joined by our friend Sarah in Murrieta and she ran with Rachel for 15 miles through Wildomar and Lake Elsinore. Then we had about 25 miles to cover before meeting up with her second crew at the Santa Ana River Trail (SART) entrance at Green River Road at about mile 55.

Rachel had similar luck in picking the date for her run as I did with my double-double. The weather and air quality was not optimal for an ultra-distance run. Even at night, the temperature hovered around 75 degrees with humidity, so that she was sweating a lot more than she should have been and was struggling to stay cool by the time we hit about 30 miles. She tried icing herself down, showering herself with the water from her Camelbak, and eating popsicles and icees. We were looking forward to the sun coming up so that she would feel more awake, but knew that the sun would bring more heat. We were hoping that getting closer to the coast would mean cooler weather.

I dropped Rachel off with her second crew around 8:00 am and rode back home. The rest of the crew was surprised that I didn’t take Nate up on his offer to drive me home, but I knew that I needed to do some actual riding (as opposed to rolling alongside Rachel at 5-6 mph). I also knew that pushing myself in my fatigued state would be some of the best training for ultra races I could get. I actually felt pretty decent for the first couple of hours and got a PR on the big climb up Foothill through Corona (after convincing myself not to detour around it and take a flatter route). I was running on fumes by the time I got home. I managed to shower and inhale a quick snack before falling asleep.

Unfortunately, the heat and humidity never let up for Rachel and she made the difficult choice to finish her run at 81 miles. Much like my choice in Borrego Springs, it was the right call and I’m happy that I got to participate in the effort.

Also on the topic of finding ways that won’t work, I’ve been struggling to find a nutrition strategy that works for me for ultra distances. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m trying to keep my sugar intake low, which eliminates a lot of sports nutrition products on the market. I thought I had something worked out during VRAW, but have found in the last couple of weeks that my stomach just won’t tolerate the current regimen. With my two events coming up quickly, it’s a little discouraging to go back to the drawing board, but I’m confident that I’ll figure it out.

As for the upcoming races, I’m excited to go back to both events. I’ll be heading to St. George, Utah with my friends Dee, Rob, and Phil to take on the HooDoo 500 route as a four-person relay team, along with our crew members Curtis and Megan. It should be a fun weekend, and the relay format should be better training for the 24 hour time trial (as opposed to racing solo). My workouts since VRAW have been targeting higher power intervals, which has been fun but exhausting. Hopefully all that work will pay off in the next few weeks.

Dual Event Training

I’m finding myself in a bit of a unique position where I (hopefully) have two very different events coming up that are only six weeks apart. I’ll be participating in HooDoo 500 in Southern Utah on a mixed 4x team with my friends Rob, Dee, and Phil at the end of August, followed up by the 24 hour solo time trial at the 6-12-24 Hour World Time Trial Championships (WTTC) in Borrego Springs, CA in early October. Both events involve riding at night and are likely to be hot during the day, but the similarities stop there. The HooDoo 500 course will have a lot of climbing and I will be riding short, more intense pulls with breaks in between, and I’ll be riding my Cannondale Synapse, an endurance road bike. The WTTC will be 24 hours of constant pedaling on a relatively flat course with as little stopped time as possible. There is the potential for the weather to be very hot and/or very windy, and I will be riding my time trial bike in a much more aggressive position.

The strategy over the next few weeks will be to divide my weekends into long hilly rides on the Synapse and long flat rides/loops on the TT bike, while taking advantage of any opportunities to get acclimated to the heat and ride in windy conditions. I felt really great this week after last weekend’s double double and was able to put in some good efforts after a couple of days’ recovery, so I hoped I would be able to nail my training rides this weekend as they were relatively short compared to last weekend’s epic adventures.

My workout for Saturday was six hours consisting of repeats of 45 minute higher intensity efforts with 15 minutes of easy riding to recover. Despite the forecast of temps above 110 degrees in Borrego Springs, I decided to head there to ride loops of the race circuit for the first time since last year’s event and get started on my TT training. Last year I used a combination of laps on the Santa Ana River Trail (SART) and loops on the Borrego circuit for the bulk of my long training rides, which I felt was perfect for getting used to the constant pedaling and monotony of riding in circles for 24 hours straight. The SART has been so crowded that I didn’t feel comfortable trying to do my more intense efforts out there, so I opted to go where there would be a lot less traffic in Borrego. While I figured some heat training would probably be a good thing, I didn’t want to put too much stress on my system, so I drove out there in the middle of the night on a few hours’ sleep and got started while it was still cool at 4:30 am. This actually worked out well, as it also allowed me to put in some time riding the course in the dark and in a somewhat sleep-deprived state.

I headed out for my first lap and found that although I’ve done this loop dozens of times, I still needed a lap or two to get comfortable with the roads and the corners again. I swear the roads on the north half of that course have gotten worse since last year, which is probably why they’re planning to do road work in a couple of weeks. I’m hoping that won’t interfere too much with my plans to train out there, or with the race itself.

I definitely don’t want to worry about 15 minute delays happening during my training rides, or the race itself which is scheduled for October 9-10. Hopefully this means the roads on the north end of the course will be a little smoother by October.

It was apparent even from the first attempt at higher intensity that my legs weren’t completely recovered from last weekend, but I managed to stay on pace for the first few intervals. Knowing it would be getting hot, I tried to stay on top of my hydration and nutrition, remembering the trouble I had on last Saturday’s double century. The temperature stayed pretty comfortable for about four laps, but I really started to feel the heat for the last couple of hours. As I made my way through my fifth 45 minute interval, I found that I just could not will my legs to push hard enough to hold the effort, but my heart rate was climbing. It may have been my body’s self-regulatory mechanism for protection against the heat. It may have been fatigue from last weekend. It may have been my low-carb nutrition regimen catching up to me. Maybe it was a combination of all those things. I don’t believe I was terribly dehydrated as I was drinking plenty and stopping at my car every lap to refill bottles. Weighing myself before and after the ride, I lost about 4% of my body weight, which is perfectly reasonable for a six hour ride in that heat.

I can also mention that this was my first time putting in a long effort on my TT bike in several months. I mostly stopped riding it once RAAM was cancelled and didn’t even have access to it for a month or so while some issues were being worked out with the power meter. After a few hours, this occurred to me as I started to feel very uncomfortable in the aero position and had to start sitting up frequently. This was extremely unusual during my training for the time trial the last two years. But then again, this is probably the longest I’ve gone not riding that bike in 2-3 years. So I’m sure this was a factor in the fatigue as well, and getting tossed around by the rough roads probably didn’t help matters.

So it wasn’t the perfect training ride, but I was able to put in a pretty solid six hours with some intensity, while putting in some time acclimating to the heat and riding in the dark. The wind was pretty minimal, and when it did start to pick up it was mostly a favorable wind (meaning it pushed me up the only “hill” on the circuit). Hopefully there will be some opportunity for wind training during some future rides.

For Sunday’s ride, I had a four hour hilly ride at a steady, easier pace. Because I didn’t hit my pace targets on Saturday, I had it in my head that I might even be able to ride at a slightly higher effort than what my training plan called for. As much as I figured I could use some more training in the heat, I opted for another early start in the dark so I could finish up meeting my Cycle Relic friends for coffee at about 8:30 am. I got rolling at about 4:15 am and headed south for the hills in Lilac, Bonsall, and Fallbrook.

I gave myself 15-20 minutes of easy pedaling before I felt ready to start pushing the effort. I found that I was struggling just to hold my prescribed intensity so I didn’t even bother trying to increase it at all. Part of the reason I struggled a bit is because most of the climbing was on the back end of the route, so trying to hold my effort on flats and downhills was challenging. Still, I was able to spend a solid hour or so riding in the dark and even got a nice windy descent on Rice Road done in the dark, which was great training for the HooDoo 500 route.

Once I had to start doing some climbing, and after my legs had a couple of hours to warm up, I found that I was able to increase my power output a bit and bring my average up to where it was supposed to be. I pulled into Ryan Bros for coffee just as the Relics were finishing up their orders and got to spend an hour or so BS’ing with them before putting in some easy miles to ride back home. It was definitely worth getting out for the early start and having a chance to do something social after the long solo rides last weekend, with plenty more slated for the weeks to come.

So overall, not the perfect weekend of training, but I got in a good mix of everything and had some fun. Oh, and incidentally, my mileage total for 2020 hit 10,000 miles after Saturday’s ride, which is a nice milestone. It’s only been the last two years that I’ve hit 10,000 miles for the year and both times reached that number by June or July.

For what it’s worth, I fully realize that there is a chance that the WTTC won’t happen this year. Even if it does, the field may be very limited due to travel restrictions, especially for international athletes. Just as I did with my training for RAAM this year, I will continue training as if the race is happening until when and if it isn’t. Even then, I might just go ahead and do my own 24 hour time trial “for fun”. With so many races being cancelled this year, I’m finding it helpful to have virtual events and personal challenges to stay motivated. And everything is working into my training for RAAM 2021.