My 200k ride two weeks ago went well. Near the end of the ride I started asking myself, "What would it be like to add another 100k?" I've ridden two 300k brevets before, one going really well, the other less so. Of course, organized brevets have all been cancelled due to COVID, and there are no sanctioned 300k permanent routes starting from Madison. So I figured I'd do a DIY brevet.
The difference between a DIY brevet and just a long ride? I dug up some of my knowledge about how to ride a good time and made a solid plan. The standard reference to this is an article in Bicycle Quarterly, where Jan Heine describes how he created his plan to ride Paris-Brest-Paris, a 1200 km ride, in under 64 hours. One of the keys is to minimize the time off the bike, and to do that you need to specify how much time you're going to spend at each stop. Following the article's suggestion, I created a spreadsheet to help me with the planning.
Based on recent rides and the wind forecast, I figured I should be able to maintain an average moving speed of close to 25 km/h (15.5 mph). I made some adjustments to account for presumed hilliness of the sections and the fatigue in the later parts of the ride. The break schedule was aggressive. A 15 minute break? Sounds long, but it's all to easy to, as the Brits say, faff about and waste half an hour at a gas station. This costs you time while also not really providing much rest.
With sunrise a little after 6 am, I aimed for a 5:30 am start to maximize riding time with daylight. I was happy enough that I was on the road by 5:34 but that happiness didn't last long. About 2 km into the ride I saw a face mask in the middle of the road. That triggered an immediate, "Oh shit, I didn't pack a mask!" An additional 5 km and already 17 minutes behind schedule. Sigh.
The ride to the first control was uneventful. My legs felt in okay shape and there was hardly any wind. My route incorporated a tiny detour just before the control to collect two Explorer tiles. I skipped the first control in Newville as I still had plenty of water and wanted to make up some of the lost 17 minutes. At this point an unexpected drizzle had started. But I was making good time and at the next stop, in Whitewater, I was ahead of schedule. The lakefront park I had chosen for a 30-minute rest turned out to be so-so: The restrooms were locked and the lake turned out to be more of a swamp or marsh. But at least it had comfortable benches. I cut the 15 minutes break time down to 10 to account for having to make another gas station stop for water.
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| The underwhelming lake view in Whitewater |
The next section of the ride was my favorite. Kettle Moraine was already in view from just outside Whitewater. Oak trees, pine forests on sandy soil, gentle climbs on windy roads, good views. If this were closer to Madison, I'd ride here all the time. And based on the number of roadies I encountered, I'm not alone in this assessment.
Eventually the moraine ended and the country of giant mansions on private lakes and Donald Trump election signs began. The next control was in the Town of Oconomowoc (population 98.74% white; 2018 vote share Scott Walker: 74%). Nobody at the gas station but me wore a mask, including the staff... I had calculated my arrival time based on a segment speed of 23 km/h, assuming that the hills of the Kettle Moraine would slow me down. But they had been gentle enough for me to arrive at the half-way point or the ride with 30 minutes in the bank.
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| Looking for ways to stay healthy? Wear your f'ing mask |
Those 30 minutes would come in handy for the next segments. The wind had picked up and came from the northwest. Which way did my route take me? Well, first north, then west. In addition to the cross/head wind, there were constant rolling hills, which I hadn't expected. And the route was dead straight for the most part. So it was a bit of a grind, mentally and physically.
By the time I got to the next control, in Watertown I was a few minutes behind schedule. Or was I? Losing 30 minutes over 44 km seemed like a lot. Trying to claw back time, I skipped the Watertown stop (only 5 minutes anyway) and pressed on toward Waterloo. Once I got close to town and checked the clock, it looked like I would get there ahead of schedule. Weird: I certainly didn't feel any faster between Watertown and -loo, and I wondered if maybe my schedule sheet was wrong (I checked today, and it wasn't). Who knows.
In Waterloo I was scheduled for another "long" break, at half an hour. I bought supplies at a gas station, but it didn't have any seating. By the time I got to the nearby Firemen's Park, only 20 minutes of break time were left. Let me tell you: This break schedule was brutal. But the schedule is the schedule.
From here on I was in semi-familiar territory again. It was nice to recognize some of the road names from previous rides. But the wind had gotten stronger and the grind continued. What helped me get through this was listening to a podcast interview (in German) with Phil, an ultra-cyclist with a very chill-but-intense and inspiring attitude about riding your bike over long distances.
I probably was dehydrated and undernourished at this point, despite what I thought to be a decent job of chugging water, Clif Shots and Bars, and (a new addition to the arsenal) Tailwind. My body was in underpowered Diesel engine mode: Fine at constant speed, but slowing down drastically on every uphill. My heart rate for the most part refused to go into Zone 3.
The last control before Madison was the general store in Keyeser. I had been there once before and wasn't counting on the store actually being open. But it was closed indeed and the faint hope for a Pepsi was squashed. No luck. I was 19 minutes behind schedule now, with 35 km to go. All south from here on, that is, no longer into the wind. Maybe with skipping the 5-minute stop at Keyeser I could make up the remaining 14 minutes and arrive on schedule?
To increase my chances, I followed advice I had just learned from the podcast with Phil. He describes how during ultra races he often catches a second wind in the evening hours. "I'll put on an awesome set on my speakers, real bangers. And then: Kopf aus, Beine an." Brains off, legs on.
The "brains off" part probably worked; the "legs on" less so. And so it was 7:42pm when I rolled in. Twenty-four minutes behind schedule, with a total elapsed time of 14 hours 12 minutes and 12:40 in the saddle. This was faster than any of my 300k brevets (14:26 and 15:12). Of course on an actual brevet you don't have the option to just ride through controls -- you have to stop at least long enough to get your brevet card signed, which can easily cost you 5 to 10 minutes each time. But on the other hand, I didn't benefit from any drafting, and there were the 17 minutes lost to forgetting my mask.
Conclusion? Well, I'll just copy and paste the one from my ride report from the previous 300 km (where incidentally my moving average was exactly the same):
My moving average was much lower [than on my first 300k], 24.6 vs. 27.4 km/h, but I spent half an hour less at the stops. This pretty impressively shows that a fast brevet is not so much the result of riding fast but of having efficient stops.
