Transcontinental Race No. 6 - TCR6 - #TCRN06 - 2018

^ Pretty much that.

I watch the dots, I streetview the places, I see the demented grins in the selfies of those who have suffered (are suffering)... and it looks wild (the good kind).

Then I do a solo hundred miles or London to Brighton and back, and frankly I know I prefer the tour to the race, and remember that whilst I like the occasional mountain more than a few in a day is beyond my idea of fun. The thought of that just being one in a sequence of days is pretty vivid... it would be hell.

I know I'd scratch, in this case somewhere between CP2 and CP3 at best.

I reckon we should do it as a forum ride, courier bags and cut off denim shorts. Fixed of course. At least unlike the New Oxford St ride it wouldn’t require training.

I think part of what makes the riders so good is knowing how much effort they can put in without waking up the next day unable to walk, which surely comes only from vast amounts of training and data. Effort goes with the square of velocity (approx) so if you double your speed you're doing 4× the work and you're only going to last ¼ of the time - even though you're twice as fast you're only going to get half way. So if you set that effort level slightly too high you aren't going to make it to the end. Happens every year that someone sprints off and then slows down massively or quits after a couple of days when their body packs in.

It's like Froomey in the TdF riding everywhere at constant power, you need to figure out exactly what that max effort level is that you can do for a series of 16h days.

For a casual day ride it's hard to get into that mentality of conserving your energy, I'm sure everyone here is the same but I sprint nearly everywhere on my short commute (and arrive sweaty) and I also waste effort doing stupid things on day rides like climbing up hills in the big ring. I do the same on the first day every time I go touring and then I pay for it the rest of the week. If I rode like that in a race like this I would blow up in 2 days. If I could slow down on the first day I would be faster overall.

I might try a solo ride from Edinburgh to Birmingham in Oct and see how far I get

Edit: I think skinny was doing like 150W avg. the other day? I never ridden with a power meter but those of you who have maybe you can offer a comparison for how easy/hard that is and how long you can ride at that power

I know next to nothing though, so if any experienced people think I'm way off please let me know

80 mile ride today. I have had a week off with food poisoning.

148 watt average. I am exhausted. But old fat and unfit.

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/2908296640

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Yeah. This or TAW. I can’t help but think the GCN coverage will make it harder to get a spot on next years TCR mind.

For me, 150w is something I’d be able to push all day, as it’s Z1 (recovery). However, avg power tells very little of the story. He won’t have been riding at 150w up any climbs, so it’s his NP that would tell more about how hard a days work really is in this race.

Anyway, by this stage he’ll just be pushing whatever he can with such huge fatigue in his system. What would have felt like no effort on days one and two will now feel like agony if have thought.

As an example, here’s some of my ride (garmin ran out of juice) from this year’s Mallorca 312.

It was ridden quite easily as part of a small group of mates and the avg power was (handily) 150w. The NP however was nearly 190w, do quite a difference.

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I reckon we should do it as a forum ride, courier bags and cut off denim shorts. Fixed of course. At least unlike the New Oxford St ride it wouldn’t require training.

Alternatively, and perhaps more sensibly, we could do the New Oxford Street parcours as a bike packing endurance ride. All frame bags, dynamos, low gears, pizzaand sleeping at bus stops. Sadly there is no petrol station on the route.

Poor Bjorn, just as he was getting back to a rhythm.

Looks like he had to backtrack and is heading over to the road that Skinny took. Disastrous route-planning fail! And there are half a dozen other guys following behind him!

If you want to have a go at this sort of riding, take up audax and build up to the longer rides. 400km takes you beyond what most people can do non-stop. You'll need to sleep for a bit. A 600km needs a few hours sleep, but can be done in a weekend. Then once you're comfortable at those distances, you can go after the 1000km+ rides. I've never really gotten past 600km.

Hard to attribute to route planning fail. The maps show it's there, there are no street view of any of the roads in the area (so you can't just say "this one doesn't have SV so that must be the bad one") and it's one of so many roads that you'd only be on for a short period that I don't imagine Googling every road number is feasible and even Open Street Map shows it in detail and reports consistent quality.

I bet we'll see a lot of people going down that road, I just hope they figure out not to continue.

What has happened to Bijorn?

Most recently?

Went down the R440 which looks good on maps but may actually be nothing but a very rocky goat trail. Has U-turned to get back to the road and is now going around that area which will put him on the same road James took, and this has allowed people behind Bjorn to draw close.

James tweeted this:

Hope bjorn is ok. That path looks rough. Sure someone else went down the 2 years back in #tcrno4. Sure after sleep and sunrise he'll figure it out. Be safe.

Was concerned that is was worse than a routing issue.

On a positive note (although this is necessarily at the expense of others) I am excited to see Stéphane Ouaja in with a shot of a podium place.

Surely you'd just make the start and the finish checkpoints but have no designated route?

Yes and no.
What does strava heatmaps say?
What should one infer from a lack of google images being posted of that road (most images are posted by people in cars)?

It's clearly an error. Without looking in detail I can't say how easy it would have been to avoid it. In 2016 I considered taking a shortcut in Bosnia. I had to spend a bit of time researching it but from the available data I was able to work out that it was mostly unpaved and that few people rode it, so I decided against it.

Bjorn has done three or four things now that suggest to me that he has been a bit careless with his route this year and this fits the pattern.

Bjorn and Stephane now in a race to CP4 with Thomas Dupin taking a different route. This bit went suddenly from innocuous to exciting due to Bjorn's backtrack. Imagine Stephane seeing 2nd place pass him from behind out of nowhere (if it happens). The state poor old Bjorn might be in this time when he reaches the CP. He'll be thoroughly done with this year's race!

You wonder if not for planning and difficulties he'd be pretty close to skinny now. It looked as if he was gaining back some ground recently.

Another top 20 nice but body not playing along

This.

But planning and particularly planning to avoid difficulties is what will always win this race and skinny has shown that he is now, following the experience of his first two attempts, a real master of this. Björn’sdifficulties are awful to watch but skinny’s success is no accident.

Someone has just passed through my hometown, with more people to follow soon :-).

Looks like a real race for second.

Bjorn may have just gambled on the R440 knowing that getting 1st was unlikely with a big reroute like he had to do.

The unknown was how long the unpaved section was (since you can see on google that it's a real road at each end), I can't easily tell from google maps and I don't have the time to go digging around and analysing the speed profiles from anyone who did it on previous TCRs.

At some point he'd have thought "if I carry on here too far then I may lose 2nd place too" and turned around for the reroute. He's slightly behind Stephane now but if he rides as he has so far he should get 2nd place back.