Ultra Endurance Ride Optimizations Are Fascinating

I’m currently 12 days away from the biggest event and race I have ever done. The Swift Summit 200 features 326.4km of distance and 3,229m of elevation. It’s likely to be hot, and potentially smokey. Last Fall I completed my first 300km ultra-endurance ride to the Coast and back, but that was a bit less distance, 700 meters less elevation, cooler weather, and my fitness level was higher.

This is the last year for the Swift Summit, and it has been a big goal to complete the 200 mile course. Almost all of my training the past month has been focused on preparing for the race, dialing in bike fit, testing different strategies, and more. I realized late last night that I finally know what an A race is.¹ It has been interesting to see and experience how many different avenues I have conciously or even subconciously started to optimize in preparation for this massive event.

Multi-factored Approach to Bridge some Performance Gaps

I unfortunately have not been able to complete any ultra endurance rides this year. I attempted a long ride as part of my heat conditioning last month, but had to bail out due to heat exhaustion getting to concerning levels. Though that was good to discover that I can discern the difference between wanting to push through discomfort and properly acknowledging safety concerns. In my experience, that can be an pretty fine line. Yesterday was another optimistic attempt which fell a bit short, but also tested various aspects of my plan and approach to the race.

This is only my second season racing, and life events including a broken thumb largely tanked my pre-season training. I’m empirically less physically strong than last year which has been a challenge to work through. However, it has also encouraged/forced me to work on my technique and strategy to even attempt some of the things I wanted to do this year. I had to dramatically shift my priorities and stop focusing on the raw numbers. The latter was harming my mental health, and ultimately detracting from something I love to do–ride bikes. I need to ride smarter, because harder isn’t a viable option without risking injury. Some highlights of different approaches and disciplines this season include:

• Improving my descending skills to read race lines better and improve sorting out entry speed.
• Forcing myself to stay in Zone 2 for big endurance rides. It’s fun to surge over hills and that works on shorter rides. For something of this magnitude, and my current training status, I don’t have much wiggle room for starting out too hard.
• Dialing in the bike fit and gear choice for the ride. This has been the big focus recently and covered more below.
• Continuing to capture what food and other nutrition I can consistently find at gas stations and convenience stores wherever. It is a challenge to be vegan and gluten-free in that scenario, but bringing all of my own nutrition on an ultra-endurance ride is often not feasible beyond 200km. Nor is it particularly desirable.
• Intentional heat conditioning to acclimate my body towards a likely unpleasantly hot ride. This includes testing out different ways to delay and mitigate onsets of heat exhaustion including what indicators to watch for in my body.
• Doing physics calculations (thanks to the help of some online tools) to select the right gearing to optimize for the climbs and sacrifice top end speed. This isn’t a sprint race, nor do I need to go fast on the flats. It’s ok if I spin out on the descents, and should stay in zone 2 for those as well.

Dialing in Some Final Tweaks and Test Plans

A vast majority of the elevation was on peaceful and beautiful gravel listening to some music. Since everything revolves around Swift Summit for me right now, I decided to do 62% of the elevation in 48% of the distance of the Swift Summit. The gravel added in a bit more time and technical training bonuses. This week is the last of decent training before the pre-race taper. I wish I had an ultra or two in me before going into the ride, but the first half of the year wasn’t kind to base building. I’m focusing on strong determination to stay mostly in zone 2 regardless of elevation, and the climbs today largely achieved that. Some of the gravel pitches spiked into zone 3 or 4 briefly, but I was constantly monitoring heart rate and slowing down when necessary. There is no go too hard in the beginning and still somehow finishing the race in the cards this year.

My overall bike fit is so much better after some tweaks last week. After the bike fit, I got an appropriate length of aero bars, which got their inaugural ride. The fit on those needs a bit of tweaking. The current stack is great for a racing position, but my goal is to provide a position to alleviate hand tiredness while also getting some speed gains as an extra bonus. Yes I have already started getting the friendly jabs at triathletes. It’s ok, my swimming is absolutely awful. 😆 They got a lot of use on the road sections of the ride, but I had to balance that with some shoulder fatigue if I used them for too long. A better mount for the computer to be on the aerobars is a shortlist. I think the Bar fly TT mount is the main contender. The default Garmin one worked in a pinch for now, but messing with the screen angle when on the bars vs not was annoying.

Up next is some 5 AM training rides. Yay! If I say I’m excited does that make it easier? I’m doing everything I can to make the dream of completing the Swift Summit 200 a decent probability of becoming a reality. The ride departs at 5 AM, and time management plus early mornings are a challenge for my ADHD brain. I’m a bit anxious on the sheer size of the ride and being set back by some life things and a broken thumb that tanked my pre-season training and half of my racing season.

There’s a small glimpse into how I have been focusing on riding smarter to conserve energy across multiple angles to help mitigate the gap. There were some nice benefits of being forced to refine my technique and strategy for my second season. My systems are pretty dialed in, and I have been capitalizing on big training days when I can. I know I’m as prepared as I can be going into it. Well after some 5 AM rides.