Adjusting My Headspace and Admiring the Ladies at The Texas Time Trials

 

I was a little light on super-long training rides and races going into this September’s Texas Time Trials 24-hour race at Glen Rose, but my training had been good and consistent for the previous ten months and it’s hard to pass up a nice socially-distanced race less than an hour and a half from home. A 24-hour time trial is a great test of fitness and nutrition and being on the bike solo for so many hours is also a great mental test since it’s a long time to be in your own head. I’ve had a mixed bag of mental experiences in long-distance solo racing and training this year (it's been that kind of year for cyclists and non-cyclists alike hasn't it?). I stayed very positive and upbeat during the unofficial Gran Gravel 500 race back in March but struggled during my 9-day tour/attempted ITT of the Arkansas High Country route in June and my DIY Virtual Gravel World’s 150-mile overnight race in August. Sometimes as things got tough physically, I’d catch myself unable to shake a negative thought for hours on end. A nagging worry, maybe something totally unrelated to the ride or race, would invade my head like a bird that accidentally flies into a house, frantically bangs around on the walls and windows, and seems to take forever to get out.

I’ve done the Glen Rose race, either the 12-hour or 24-hour events just about every year since 2013 and I was always supported or crewed in some way by my friend José Bermúdez, my son JD, my wife Margaret, or my brother-in-law Loyd Spence. To have someone helping you or just being present at the support area at the end of every 26 mile lap is enormously helpful, but you lose that in a long bikepacking race, especially during the night, and I wanted to work on keeping my mood and emotions positive in this race. I wanted to be self-supported through the night and I wanted to stay on the bike all night without getting too sleepy (the last 3 or 4 of these 24-hour races I’ve had to nap between 20 minutes and an hour and a half), at least until Margaret was to come out with breakfast at 8:30 and to help me refill bottles for a few laps.

Nutrition cannot be overemphasized in an event like this since your energy needs will be in the neighborhood of 10,000 total calories over the 24 hours. My plan was to rely heavily on Spiz, a high-protein, high-calorie powder that you mix into your water bottle. Each 26.4 mile lap burns about 750-800 calories for me, so I was able to consume about 400 calories with a single bottle of not-too-thickly-mixed Spiz, drink another big bottle of ice water (trying to down about 60-70 ounces of fluid per lap for the first few laps), and a little solid food. Reducing the amount of solid food while still getting enough calories would hold down the gastrointestinal distress and the sleepy feeling that would come from eating too much. I supplemented the Spiz with peanuts, Chinese dumplings, small Snickers bars, clif bars, SIS water-soluble gels, and chews made by Skratch. I occasionally dropped a nuun electrolyte tablet in a water bottle, but I didn’t sweat too terribly much due to the mild weather.

Speaking of the weather, I doubt any Glen Rose race in history has had more favorable weather than the fantastic temperatures and relatively low humidity we had this year. It was better than anyone could reasonably hope for in Texas in mid-September, with temperatures around 80 at the 5 pm Friday start, dipping down to 55 overnight, and jumping back up to about 90 in the mid-afternoon Saturday.

I accomplished my mission of staying awake and positive through the night with the help of podcasts and music (I put my earbud in my right ear only), caffeine-infused nuun tablets, and a sugar-free Red Bull at about 4:30 am. I kept my mind so full of gratitude and thoughts about pacing, hydration, and nutrition that I crowded out everything negative. In spite of the fact that I tried to strictly control my effort over the first twelve hours[1], I rode them faster than my previous year’s 12-hour race, hitting about 190 miles by 5 am. Margaret brought me a breakfast burrito Saturday morning and refilled my bottles for a few laps. My biggest problem on these long events has been severe pain in the balls of my feet that radiates through my big toes, and this race was the most painful yet. I have moved the cleat as far back on my shoes as I can to move the pressure off the ball of the foot and toward the instep, but I still have debilitating pain when I put in over 100 miles. I have tried bigger shoes, regular shoes, thick socks, thin socks, padded insoles of varying types and gel pads and I brought and tried them all during this race, which cost me a little time off the bike. By the time I was at 265 miles I was in real pain. I bring two coolers to these things, one with ice, food, and drinks and the other just with ice to fill bottles. Margaret had the idea to dunk my feet in the ice-only cooler to numb the pain and that technique got me through the rest of the day, although it cost me a  good deal of time off the bike between laps. A post-race visit to a competent podiatrist revealed that I have arthritis in my feet, so the search for effective foot pain management continues.

Nearly all my gear and my bike setup worked well. I used two bikepacking items/techniques for this race. I zip-tied a headlamp to my helmet to better see my stuff in the support area during the night and I put a Revelate mountain feedbag on my handlebars to carry a third water bottle when I needed it. A few things that didn’t work as well as I would have liked were my rear wheel, my powermeter, and my bike headlight. It turns out that the bearings in my rear wheel were going bad and I had so much wiggle in the wheel I had to open up the brake caliper all the way to keep the wheel from rubbing the brake every time I stood up or cornered hard. I used a very good Lezyne Macro Drive 1300XL headlight that got me almost all the way through the night. When I tried to recharge it with an external battery with about an hour left (a technique that lets me use my Wahoo bike computer way beyond its 14-hour internal battery life), I realized that the light must be turned off to recharge. That mistake cost me the 10-minute charge I estimated I’d need to ride safely for the last two hours of darkness/near-darkness. My powermeter stopped working at the 20-hour point, but I’ve probably exceeded its life expectancy by about 20,000 miles and two years, so I wasn’t too surprised. More things worked well (including me) than didn’t work well and I wound up exceeding my expectations for this race.    

We cyclists are unrealistic optimists.  We seem to always believe that no matter how old we are, next year we’ll be fitter, faster, stronger and better equipped. But this year the optimism that drove my consistent training and planning paid off and this year’s Texas Time Trials was a personal record for me, 344 miles in 23 hours and 32 minutes, for which I’m very thankful.

I’m also thankful to the race organizers for putting this race together and making it as COVID-safe as possible. I think Kelley Ables Vetters burns more watts and endures more sleep-deprivation race-directing than we do racing, and she earns our renewed respect and appreciation at every one of these events.

Speaking of strong ladies, the women swept the top awards at the 500-mile and 24-hour races this year. Christie Tracy piled up an eye-popping 449 miles for 24 hours and Valerie Litznerski and Alison Carey went 1-2 in the 500-mile race. Women beating everyone at an ultracycling event seems to have become so commonplace that it hardly makes the news anymore, but I still feel like it’s something to point out and celebrate, and I hope anyone reading this race report will be as impressed and inspired by them as I am.

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[1] For the first half of any long race like this, I use my powermeter mostly to keep from riding too hard, and I also use it to measure and calculate my calorie requirements.