Transcontinental Race No. 5 - TCR5 - #TCRN05 - 2017

Did anyone put together a photo set of the bikes used this year?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mkpaa/sets/72157655872912539/

thanks

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mkpaa/sets/72157671644429160 has a fair few from 2016 too

Cheers. I like that internally geared one. others are all much of a muchness (langster excepted).
Wander if their will be any changes this year? 650 tyres etc.
Depends on the terrain I guess.

Whilst 'ride your bike' is good advice, it is also worth doing rides to mimic your experience in the TCR. For example, once spring rolls around I plan on a few trips where I'll go out with the fully loaded bike, ride all day, sleep in my bivvy then get up and ride all day again.

I want to minimise surprises or 'unknown unknowns' during the race. Whilst it is impossible to eliminate them all, I feel like there are probably plenty i can find out before the race starts and, if possible, mitigate them.

There are a few things you'll only learn after x hours/days on the bike, so I think it's valuable to have experienced similar, under as close to race conditions as possible. Digestion, conditioning, fit issues, old hidden injuries, equipment.

Having never ridden big distances or done a multi-day ride I decided to do London-Bilbao and London-Edinburgh, both of which taught me useful lessons.

Those kind of rides are for learning though, not for fitness. They take a lot out of you, so don't go mad on those. From a fitness perspective it's better to be consistent and stick to relatively typical training.

I'll include the usual caveat that riding speed isn't the biggest factor.

Yeah, that's riding your bike. :P

One of the best/easiest options for seeing how you cope going long is to start riding audax.

http://www.aukweb.net/

Obviously I ignored my own advice and did fuck all riding on my actual race bike. But that wasn't by choice.

Yeah, but so is commuting 5k to work every morning, and that is mostly useless.

I think I see 'just ride your bike' too much when people are asking for actual detail and it is kind of bothering me.

You seem to fail to recognise the quote and as far as "how do I train for x" questions go, they are worse than my now generic answer because everyone has different time free, everyone has different aims for the same race, everyone responds differently to different amounts and types of training so the answer is really "do what works for you" and to find that out you need to try a whole lot of stuff.

Curious now though.

I might enter it in 2018 after spending 6 months doing ONLY commuting miles and see how I go.

Aks @bananaskid for training advice. :)

Despite good intentions, I did less than 2 months training for TABR, basically 50 miles every day, or in actual fact every night, round and round Richmond park.
Its not about speed at all, its all about staying on your bike.
Being old, embittered and with issues helps also.

Ask @bananaskid for nearest McD on 2017 course.

I suppose I was looking for where a starting point would be, even if you've done a lot of exercise before and found out what works for you in that scenario, ultra cycle racing is a sort of unique case.

I know fine well where it comes from - it doesn't really matter. It's like posting that Lemond quote everytime someone asks about buying a new set of wheels.

It is meaningless advice to give to somebody without a little more context.

'Eat and sleep well'
'Try intervals'
'Use some sort of monitoring to log/measure efforts/improvements'
'If you're training for 1 hour hill climb then do a lot of 1 hr hill climbs'

Those are all much more useful than 'ride your bike lol'

He was a seasoned vet this year though. :)

Long ride experience > fitness

Though you certainly showed that fitness can make up for illness.

Being old, embittered and with issues helps also.

< Has Issues. Stubbornness is definitely a useful trait for these kind of things.

One of the registration questions was about food. I wonder if he knows all their opening hours too? :P

The point seems to have been missed by Captain Serious here but feel free to continue to dish out this really useful training advice.

Chris White explains some of the training here .

So indeed basically you need to ride enough to know how these things work and not just read about it and train according to a program. Do intervals or something to get the speed, long rides to get used to it and to learn how to do it. Even though I had been riding for years before I started randonneuring, it took about two seasons of that to not feel battered after a long ride. ymmv

If find it impossible to read text there. That changing colour background messes with my eyes.

"Despite not doing any rides solely for the purpose of 'training', I do ride my bike more when preparing for riding the TCR"

A man after my own heart.

you're right - i should just tell people to ride their bike instead - way more useful