What it's like to ride 900 km in a day
cyclingtips.com
cyclingtips.com
900 km in a day sounds like an incredible feat to me and I'm super impressed with it, but I would really wonder about the kind of impact that has on your body.
I slept for more than a day after that trip and I swore I would never do it again (and I didn't).
First try I made 140km. It was a hot day and the main issue I had was that I sweat more than I could drink. Also it was getting night and I was afraid of not being able to get a train anymore so I abandoned.
For the second try I started at night (2am) to make sure I had a chance to make it in time. Around 4pm after over 180km I had to abandon because the cycle path ended and it was too dangerous to drive on the road with all that traffic.
Anyway it was a very pleasant experience as you pass many nice towns and other sightseeing. I stopped countless times to take pictures. Riding 100km, or even 200km is less harder than many expect it to be.
The biggest issue, aside from general tiredness at the end was neck/shoulder pain. It just isn't healthy position to be in, and that's for mountain bike, for road bike it must be much worse. Impotence / fertility issues are also frequent for devotees from what I heard, even with appropriate saddles.
My boss had serious neck pain issues that doctors were baffled with and unable to cure. Told him to stop road biking, refused to do so. But eventually he stopped and problems disappeared for good.
Once in a lifetime experience, glad I did it but sure as hell not going to repeat it. Plus I've found more interesting sports for me.
The problems start uphill - I only had a 5 gear bike and went for a simple 60km roundtrip stopping at some relatives. All went well, until I had to move up 100ms. With cramps (the bike was too small), I walked the last km.
But that hill (6% for 2km if you take it in one go) still is hard with a suitable gravel bike now (at 105kg).
With a well adjusted, well maintained bike on a flat lane without wind most would simple push and glide softly.
What kind of GPS navigation system did you used? It can't imagine a single place in France where the highway is the only available road, since there is a lot a really small roads everywhere. (I did an almost 3000km tour of France a few years ago, and for instance Google maps is an absolutely terrible tool for this kind of use).
But this was a long time ago. I think somewhere around Metz. The road was something like a primary road which turned into a highway. A paper map indeed confirmed the road changed into a highway.
Retrospectively, I was woefully unprepared for that trip, not physically, but gearwise (food, drink, spares). I had planned to stay over in Friesland somewhere and then figured I would rather sleep in my own bed. That was probably a miscalculation, but that first half went pretty smoothly so I totally underestimated how bad the second half would be. Going onto Afsluitdijk that was pretty clear but by then the way back was long enough that I decided to go on.
The lack of spares in the end was probably and advantage because the bike held up perfectly (an old Peugeot 10 speed) and it would have just added more weight. But the lack of food & drink was really bad. I Ended up in an all-night gas station at some point to get some water, they were quite surprised to get a customer on a bicylce.
The funniest memory I have of the whole experience was how delicious the dinner was that I had at a little greasy spoon in Westport, about 2/3rds of the way there. Similar to camping or being on a canoe trip, it's just nuts how good food tastes when you're physically exhausted and starving. I went back to that diner later with my then-fiancee, and the food was considerably less appealing without the benefit of having cycled 100km to get to it.
It was the best meal of his life.
After returning home from the war, he determined to raise horses for meat. The first taste-testing, as the story goes, was underwhelming.
(Dutch): https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/twintig-maanden-cel-voor-paarde...
In wartime in NL anything that had protein was fair game, including dogs and other pets, I don't expect that it would be different anywhere else and I'm pretty sure that after a diet of flower bulbs and such those would have tasted just fine. There are some pretty harsh jokes around that theme.
So they got added value with their Gammelfleisch! What's not to like? :-)
No matter if chicken, beef, or pigs.
Fraud is fraud.
The onward ride of 50KM or so was very pleasant. I later realized it was because of a gentle down gradient. As a consequence, the return leg was a terrible misery. So much so that I hauled myself and my bike in a tuk-tuk for the last 10KM or so.
For me the sweet spot was 80KM. To be able to fully enjoy the ride and not feel miserable for next few days.
Time on earth kind of quote right there, my friend.
Reminds me of my own "contemplation" on the way back out of the Grand Canyon. Getting down there is hard. Getting back up is way harder. And the only "food" I took with me was a six pack of beer, so somewhere halfway back up my body ran out of glycogen and I couldn't even maintain my body temperature. Thought I was gonna die, and realistically I could have died, actually. I was there alone, and had I sat down to "rest" that could have been it. Moral of the story: if you're going to attempt something physically demanding like this, at a minimum have plenty of energy dense food, water, and a thermal blanket with you. That's how I pack for longer hikes nowadays.
Unfortunately, as you suggest, your story is commonplace and doesn’t always end well :/.
The takeaways I remember: (1) never hike the Grand Canyon, or any place with high exposure, in the summer, unless you’re extremely prepared for extreme weather (2) always pack the ten essentials [2] (3) when attempting a long or arduous hike, always inform an accountable third party of when and where you’re going.
Hopefully this helps somebody avoid a similar situation in the future!
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-Death-Grand-Canyon/dp/09700...
[2]: https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/ten-essentials.html
Time management: think about how long you want to be out. Divide by 3. Once you hit that first third, turn around. I follow this rule on my bike as well when riding downriver if the train situation is uncertain. I do not appear to be nearly as well-trained as the rest of you commenting on this.
The moment we finished, we all fell asleep in the grass. So weird how the body can go on and on, but the moment it knows it's done (/safe), it shuts off.
Him holding the same speed for three times as long and solo is mental.
I’m an amateur, not serious cyclist, did 15k km in past 5 years. I’m not particularly fit (10km run in ~1 hour). Longest I did was 230 km at 25 km/h and it wasn’t really that memorable. I could have easily continued. But when I started cycling, and wasn’t really less fit, I could have barely cycled for 50 km.
Once you start doing that trip at 30 or 35 km/h you'll find it a lot more memorable. Target for a distance like that on flat country should be in the 5.5 to 6.5 hour range when you're in mostly flat country on a proper bicycle.
What's constant regardless of FTP is the ability to ride for multiple hours without getting saddle sores, joint pain, or running out of energy, which is what endurance is about in my opinion.
Long term high volume endurance training can also cause calcification effects in some older athletes.
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/en...
So yeah, if he's at all representative, I don't think it's health that they're chasing. The most I've done is a couple of sprint tris and a few 50-mile-per-day bike trips. But even that for me wasn't about health; it was about challenge.
I'd done many 600km brevets before that comfortably in 35-37 hours with a ~4hr sleep in the middle, but at PBP there were thousands of other strong riders and it was fun to work together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randonneuring is a lot more "normal" of a way to ride your bike all day than the Ultracycling approach in the article. Instead of grinding out laps of a racecourse solo, ride from town to town on pleasant backroads socially.
Congrats on the ride! I still don't quite understand what it takes to be able to push through beyond what most people would consider immense fatigue.
Did you find it harder physically or mentally?
I had fun the whole time!
Mentally I don't really suffer anything, though I did cry like a baby while riding through misty valleys at dawn the third day. I had realized I'd crossed into Normandy, and got emotional from working out from first principles why I new that detail of french geography. In the first town I passed through in daylight the locals were hanging up large banners for their 75th Anniversary of Liberation by the US Army.
I had a few serious physical setbacks from my ankle, losing a cleat bolt, a wrong turn — but it was easy to run into old friends out on the course to regroup and make new friends along the way helping each other out of predicaments.
I lost a lot of my endurance abilities from Covid, so when I do it again I will definitely be shooting for a different goal: https://adrianhandssociety.com/
I hadn't done much riding that summer because of a broken ankle and actually re-fractured it mid-ride from vibration/stress while descending into Brest. The biggest trouble was that it was impossible to get any ice for it, but I found nice self-adhesive bandages to immobilize it the next day and was fine completing the ride.
I've ridden the full RAGBRAI three times and know from personal experience that your body turns into an insatiable caloric furnace after the second day. Pancakes, pasta, ice cream, steak and pork chop sandwiches, gallons of water and of course, nightly carbo loading. All grist for the mill.
But this, this is at a whole other level.
800-900 calories per hour == 19,200 to 21,600 calories in 24 hours. Which, btw, does not turn off just because you stop. It probably took 2 days just to taper down his body's panic alarm. Not to mention sleep and muscle recovery.
Not to dismiss RAGBRAI, though. It is a different kind of challenge - biking 50 miles in a day, especially with frequent stops, is no big deal. Sleeping in a tent, waking up, and doing it every day for a week especially with all of the nighttime activities is a different kind of challenge.
[0] https://www.cxmagazine.com/trans-iowa-2018-gravel-race-14-fi...
It's universally understood that a century is one of the easiest "feats of endurance", which is why you see people far into their 50s and 60s still able to do them.
I think this depends on your fitness, especially your aerobic and anaerobic thresholds and the shape of your lactate curve. Less fit people burn a lot of glycogen even at lower wattages which results in crazy hunger when your glycogen stores are depleted. Trained people are able to burn mostly fat at relatively high wattages and even skinny people have a lot of energy stored in fat.
Personal anecdote: I decided to use the pandemic to get back into shape. When I started accumulating endurance kilometers, I had to eat a carbo-gel every 30 km and I still felt really hungry after the ride and I had to devour enormous portion of pasta immediately. Now I can easily go 100 km on empty stomach and I do feel kind of hungry after that, but nothing exceptional.
Not particularly eventful and challenging task because I was a veteran already. For example I bicycled from Finland to Yugoslavia in 1971, which was a shit-show extreme.
Do you have pictures from that trip? I'd be very interested to see what you encountered back then (assuming you were allowed to make pictures).
edit: corrected by the author :-)
Roads were bad, of course. But there was not much traffic, except lorries and army vehicles. Civilians used oxcarts and bicycles.
Funny thing is that my Communist Party Youth Club Card made things easier. But later in USA Visa application I had to lie about six times to the question "Were you or your relatives ever connected to a Communist or Nazi organization".
I remember the ox carts (and more frequently, horse drawn carts) from only a bit over a decade ago in the poorer parts of Romania (anything outside the major cities). The 'Communist Party Youth Club Card' is probably a collectible now :)
Thank you for the unique story, pity the thief made of with your camera, stealing from a hospital has to be a moral low.
It was a flat 400k randonnée. Two starters, we stayed together for the first 100k and then he took of[2]. I was pretty fine for the first 300k[3]. I had had a hamburger at 150k and a pizza and 250k, in addition to some bananas and snacks, so I was in good shape enerywise. But then it got dark, and started to rain, and I was getting tired.
Tired to the point where I actually fell asleep while biking. Probably just for a second or two, but I had drifted into the opposing lane. It was after 11pm on a lightly trafficked road, but still. And I could just as easily gone into the ditch. I became wide awake at that point, and then pretty much limped home for the last few hours, getting home at just before 3am after having started 5am the previous morning.
I did do a few more 250-300k rides the following couple of years, but I realized I also had found my limit when it came to long-distance one-day rides[4]. This summer I did a very nice 650k, 9 day tour on my Brompton. That's more my style these days.
[1] Generally averaging 90k per day (with rare days up to 150k) at a leisurely pace.
[2] In the end, he finished like 5-6 hours before me, IIRC.
[3] I had done both a 200 and 300 during the previous six weeks so was in pretty good shape.
[4] It's probably been 15 years since I did more than 200k in a day.
The TransAm / Tour divide are pretty incredible races and fun to watch everyone's GPS trackers virtually on trackleaders.
Those trips were exhausting enough, I can't imagine doing half of that distance on a two-wheeler that I had to pedal!
My longest days of riding were around 650 km and I was totally exhausted by then. I typically shoot for 250-300 a day maximum.
Try an adventure bike, I can ride mine for over 10 hours and feel fine with just basic stretch breaks.
What does that mean? My best guess is that, at speeds around his target speed, it takes 25 watts less power to ride at that speed, but that seems too huge a difference to give up on to me (https://cyclingtips.com/2021/07/1026-km-austrian-ultra-cycli... says the guy doing >1,000 km in 24 hours had a normalized power of 275W, so, assuming the two riders to be of similar weight, that would mean giving up about 10% of power))
Watts@45 has become something like an informal standard unit in the field of cycling aerodynamics.
not a cyclist but E = 1/2mv^2
The cyclist in this case averaged 37.5 km/h, which is really impressive over 24 hours. 5-10x slower would be 3.75-7.5 km/h, so somewhere between a very slow walk and a very, very slow jog.
Plus, the skateboards they are using are not going to be regular ones but purpose built and similar to downhill longboards.
You're righht on special skateboards, I have couple long distancne boards and they special brackets low to the ground with larger wheels. Makes huge difference over standard skateboards or longboards.
It's very niche market, making those boards relatively expensive https://www.gbomblongboards.com/ But for 10+ miles rides worth it.
Now I actually wonder what is the efficiency for skateboard.
I started at 04:55 and ended at 20:30 - so a total time of 15 hours and 35 minutes including stops.
I was incredibly out of shape and under-trained. It’s amazing what your mind can push your body to do.
I can only imagine the mental fortitude required to stay focused for so long.
Different people have different motivations, so I can imagine that this guy was driven by the goal… goes to show how different people are motivated by different things. Regardless, a super impressive achievement.
Ironman distance is 180km and I think I could do it no problem if the terrain is relatively flat. The challenge here is not the distance or energy but just sitting in the saddle for as long. Not to mention that in Ironman race you have to run a marathon after this ride.
I have ridden 230 (hilly) km in a day (10.5 hours from start to finish, 9 hours actual pedalling time). So I'm going to guess that the conclusions are similar to mine, which are that it was tough and one simply can not eat enough salty potatoes.
After about 5 days, I could no longer afford the required volumes of regular food. So eg. half gallon of chocolate milk and a lb of sharp cheddar cheese for dinner. I always thought I'd get bored eating that much cheese but I never did :-). I treated myself to regular food for lunch. I also lost 15 lbs on that trip.
One of the best experiences of my life. I do remember being bored with chewing though.
To be clear, I'm not bragging here about an "accomplishment". It wasn't. RAAM, or PBP, those are accomplishments. The fellow who did the Tour de France route this year unsupported is a monster.
EF-Nippo's recipe for example: https://www.efprocycling.com/team-recipe-on-the-bike-rice-ca...
The difference between 100km and 200+ is significant, most people could probably do 100 km trips if they tried, my mom did these until she was well into her 70's, but around 150 or it changes and 200+ is really a different game. I'm not sure what the cause of that is, it's definitely not a linear increase.
Now, for not necessarily thin people, this requires mostly flat terrain, but in the Eastern US that's not uncommon.
If the route has a lot of vertical gain, well, you need to be fairly thin. Then it is pacing, staging your eating, and mindfulness.
If you examine the times posted in every Tour de Tucson, for example you'll see many excellent times by people into their 70s and beyond. I am very admiring of your mom, BTW.
There is, probably everybody knows, a community that embraces the contradiction of your observation with a tremendous gusto that is its very reason for existing:
"and receive equal recognition regardless of their finishing order"
I really like that. Much nicer than the behavior you get when the finishing order matters, especially when on public roads, and I don't see how you could do trips that long without doing them on public roads and still have something interesting.
Since COVID I have not done a century but I feel an overwhelming need to do several now, on public roads.
The amount of time it takes to complete whatever distance it is is immaterial.
But what I probably should have written better, is that on public roads means 'open to the public' as well, and the way groups that are on racing bikes tend to upset traffic even though the roads are open can be quite irritating. I've seen groups of guys on fancy bikes block traffic, make the bike paths very unsafe for oncoming traffic and cycle on the main roads as though other traffic did not exist. That's fine on a closed course but not when the roads are open.
Maybe they should interview that person?
Eating is the easy part. With care, I've managed to eat a burrito without missing a beat. I've squeeze/slurped body-temperature spaghetti and meatballs out of a ziplock... unwrapping bars and eating 'em one-handed is more common, but god it's nice to eat real food. Gas station hot dogs are usually a guilty pleasure, but on a ride, you can easily justify the salt replacement!
must have been down-hill most of the time?