- The slowest century I've ever done (9.5h)
- The slowest double century I've ever done (19h)
- The only ride I've organized that I've bailed on
The issues all stem from the same basic issue: treating a problem solving challenge like a bike ride.
In the ultra endurance races, being fast is good. Having strong cardio is good. But in the races where sometimes only one person reaches the finish line, just being able to work through all the problems you encounter to get to the end is the most important piece. Pure physical fitness will get you far in the races where nothing goes wrong. In each of my most recent races, there was at least one major thing that went wrong. I would postulate that most ultra endurance races, most athletes run into at least one substantial issue. In races as long as the Race Across America, possibly all or almost all of them do.
We encountered a few big problems, and many small problems on this ride, and didn’t approach them effectively. Before I talk about the specific problems, I want to talk about problem solving in general.
The longer the ride, the more decisions you run into that you have to make. Making more and more decisions can become exhausting, and overthinking problems is a sure way to slow you down and tire you out.
A lot of these decisions are relatively trivial and don’t even occur to me as decisions - should I stop here for 30 or 35 minutes? It’s really hot - should I take advantage of this opportunity to cool off and refill my bottles? I could think about them, but most of the time I just do whatever seems best without even questioning it.
Some decisions are a little more consequential and you want to put a little thought into it - how much food and what kind should I be carrying? Should I put on warmer clothes now, or wait until I can find a safer spot to pull over and it’s really cold? Is it worth pushing on to the next town for a break because it’s bigger and more likely to have more options for food? These kinds of questions can be considered while riding, and don’t have to slow you down as long as the options aren’t too complicated.
Then there are bigger problems. And these I would call problems, not decisions, even though their resolution is generally just decision making. There’s a mechanical issue. Someone’s run out of water and we’re 50 mi out from the next town. Someone’s so cold that they’re concerned about their ability to manipulate their brakes. The route doesn’t work and we have to find a different one. These at the very least require slowing down to consider, and sometimes require getting off the bike to discuss options and research things on phones.
On each of my races over 24h, I have encountered all of these. And I’ve found that how I handle the decisions and problems has a much greater effect on my time than my physical condition or even how hard I’m trying to ride.
It seemed to me like when Jeff and I attempted to ride from San Jose to Los Angeles, we were extremely ineffective at tackling these decisions and problems.
I think a major component of this was that neither of were clearly leading. Arguably I should have been leading because I had more experience with longer rides, but I tend to fall back into a follower position when another person is physically in front of me. This is not to say I should have been at the front always, but this would have been a good thing for me to be aware of if I were intending to lead.
In tandem with this, there were some major communication issues. When you’re racing alone, communication isn’t even a component, and I think this led me to initially miss its importance here.
Now I’m going to go through a handful of the problems we ran into, what happened, and what might have been a better approach.
Big problem - Navigation
This one was huge. I always rely on my GPS for navigation and had loaded and double checked the route on it the day before. The morning of, I turned on my GPS and the route was not there to load. Usually you unexpectedly run into a big issue part way through the race, but here was this ride’s biggest problem before we even began. The route was not excessively complex, but I hadn’t studied it too closely in advance because I knew I would have it on my GPS. This was not immediately a big problem, but led to many problems throughout the ride. Jeff and I glanced over the route before we headed out.
Medium-small decisions - Navigation
Quickly after leaving, we ran into a series of the medium-small decisions. We need to be a couple blocks west of here and missed the intended turn. Almost all of the streets go through, but now each turn turns into a 3-second discussion, and a wrong turn down a dead-end street leads to a quick reassurance about where we’re going an apology for the wrong turn. None of these are a BIG DEAL. None of these even seem consequential. But each time we slow down to agree on a turn adds more time.
I think this would have been approached much better if we just decided one person was leading and the other was blindly following. The direction we needed to go wasn’t complicated (though there were a few confusing turns), and wrong turns didn’t require the discussions we had. Had I been riding alone, I would have made the turns that made sense to me without slowing down, made a couple wrong turns, checked my map, and kept going. I don’t believe it occurred to either of us to try to optimize this, but it adds up.
This kept occurring throughout the ride.
Medium decisions/communication - Gravel roads
The route we were following unexpectedly put us on gravel a little bit. I am not good at riding on gravel. Not "I don’t really like gravel" or "I am slow on gravel" but "If the gravel is too loose and the terrain is too rough and I am on skinny tires, I will crash." Initially I figured I’d just go slowly and carefully through the gravel section, and hoped it wouldn’t last too long. After a short gravel section, we got to a paved road. The route we were going to take continued on the other side on gravel, but we had an option to go on a slightly longer paved route. Riding alone, I absolutely would have just taken the paved route and knew it would be much faster for me (I am that bad at gravel). Jeff and I stopped to discuss options, and he pushed for continuing on the gravel. And we did. I ended up walking my bike.
I realized after this that I should have pushed harder to go on the pavement, and the discussion shouldn’t just have been about preference, but also ability. I do not have the ability to ride a road bike up a hill with loose gravel. I just don’t. I don’t think I communicated that clearly enough to Jeff, and this led to a longer and more frustrating than necessary slow section for me.
Small decisions - More Navigation
Later in the ride, we came to an intersection. I thought we were supposed to go one direction, he thought we were supposed to go the other. So, we stopped, pulled over, looked at maps for a little while, and discussed. We decided which direction to go, then debated what the best way to turn left was, given that we were on the right side of the road and there were cars lined up at the intersection. We got onto one street, then decided it would be hard to get to the right lane from there, and walked in the crosswalk to the left turn lane. This probably took 5-10 minutes.
This is an interesting example, because if I were riding on my own, I wouldn’t have even made a decision at that intersection and would have simply kept riding the wrong way. A few blocks later, I likely would have figured out I was going the wrong way, turned around, and found the correct route for a total time of 1 or 2 minutes. Stopping and discussing prevented us from going the wrong way, but going the wrong way would have been faster and easily recoverable. I think again here having a clear leader would have prevented these hiccoughs, even if it meant we went the wrong way more frequently. Neither of us we even attempting to lead, though, and I think we were both looking at it more collaboratively.
Really, I think trying to do this collaboratively killed this ride.
Medium decision/communication issue - Pacing
When you are racing or riding alone, you are generally aware of your needs and abilities, and adjust things for those. When there are two or more riders, these can be in conflict. For example, Jeff climbs faster than me. We can't compromise at a speed halfway between his and mine, because I can't go that fast. So if he wanted to stick with me on the climbs, he would slow down to my speed.
Something interesting happened, though. On the descents and the flats, he was going much slower than I would have gone if I was alone. I passed him a few times and pulled ahead, but he would always catch and pass me on the climbs. Passing him in those small sections of flats and descents didn't make sense, especially with the car traffic.
This got progressively more frustrating, but I feel like you’re not supposed to yell at people to go faster when they’re riding their own speed, so I didn’t.
Finally we got out of the rolling hills in Big Sur and found somewhere to take a break. I mentioned how awkward the pacing was, and that we’d both be going faster if we weren’t both matching the other’s slower speed. And… Jeff told me that he had intentionally been going slower. To make it easier for me.
At this point, it’s obvious that I should have said something earlier. We were in those hills for hours, which were unnecessarily burning both physical and mental energy for me. We hadn’t really taken time to stop and chat while going through Big Sur, and had both made assumptions. We could have gotten out of there much more quickly and easily if we had been on the same page.
A different option that I think also could have worked here is if we just agreed on a meeting point on the other side of Big Sur and didn’t try to stay together.
Medium decision - Breaks
I think this one didn’t actually end up being a big issue on this ride, but I do wish we had planned it in advance. Along the route, we stopped where convenient, when one of us wanted to stop. Of course, the timing and locations didn’t happen to magically be perfect for both of us, which I’m sure led to unnecessary time spent on some stops. I think also not planning out stops in advance made it unclear where the short term goals were; something I have appreciated about the time stations on the long races I’ve done. If either of us were riding alone, we probably wouldn’t have chosen all the same stops for the same amounts of time. I don’t think our breaks were bad, but I think planning them would have been an improvement.
My last big decision - Leaving
250 mi into the ride, it was late. It was getting chilly. Doing 250 mi at 9 mph is much harder than at 15 mph, or at least the 12 mph that I wanted as a minimum average. All the extra little decisions, mis- or lack of communication, things we could have planned out in advance, and short discussions about directions really added up. Doing 250 mi at 9 mph is demoralizing. We had been going for hours and yet I felt like I still hadn’t exerted any substantial amount of energy. Like in all that time, I had only pushed moderately hard for a few fleeting seconds. Easy pedaling puts all your weight on your butt instead of your feet. And my butt was not happy with all the pressure.
Could I have gone the rest of the way? Maybe. Could I have gone the rest of the way at 9 mph? Probably not. I was pretty sure that if we stuck together we would continue to go much slower than either of us would independently. I was mentally drained and frustrated from our section through Big Sur, and I knew both of those things would only get worse with more time on the bike. And with more time riding at a crawl. I told Jeff I wanted to split, so he rode off ahead.
It was a little before dawn, in Santa Maria. I went to a restaurant and got breakfast. I waited until the sun came up. Then I continued down the PCH alone. This part was peaceful. I had already resigned myself to taking the train back to LA from Santa Barbara, when I got there. I didn’t want to be on my bike for the amount of time it would take to get back to LA, even if I was going faster and didn’t have to talk through so many decisions. Some parts were fast, some I went slow because there was no point in rushing. I had time to kill. There were a couple good climbs into Vandenberg and Lompoc. Descending into Lompoc I ended up on a squiggly little bike path. I could have avoided it and stayed on the main road, but it initially appeared to be paralleling the road.
And then there was a loud BZZZZT. BZZ. BZZT. I quickly stopped and hooked my finger through my helmet straps to pull out the bee that had gotten stuck, but it stung me just as I was getting it out. Right below my ear. Well. There was also a train stop in Lompoc. I might as well just take the train home from here. I’m not allergic to bees, but I had already given up on my goals for this ride, and riding with a bee sting didn’t sound too entertaining. So I went into Lompoc and sat at a Starbucks for a while and chatted with some other cyclists. There were only 2 trains that stopped at Lompoc each day, one in the morning, and one in the evening, so I had many hours to kill. I very slowly made my way out to the train station. It’s a very odd train station, on a beach at the end of a road, in the middle of nowhere. It would have been nice to sit at if I weren’t covered in sunscreen and grime, and didn’t have to worry about keeping an eye on my bike. I sat there for a few hours in the shade. I got on the train. It slowly made its way back to LA. Jeff was already back in LA by the time I got there, late at night. A friend picked me up from the train station and gave me a ride home.
"What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months." (Fred Brooks) I thought about that a lot connected to this ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment