pythko

I always love hearing about the logistics of trips like these, and this article leaves me with lots of questions.

On the AT section, they mention starting out with packs that weighed over 20 pounds, which is extremely light for backpacking. That’s probably a few days of food, a change of clothes, 2-3 liters of water, and an ultralight sleeping bag. But then they mention a tent, too! In contrast, I talked with someone who thru-hiked the AT in the winter, and they said that their packs were routinely over 70 pounds, and that they had ditched their tent in favor of staying in the shelters and wrapping their sleeping bags in Tyvek. How were the guys in the article resupplying? Trips into town every few days sounds very time consuming.

The article also casually threw out that they went through 26 pairs of shoes! Are they buying those at retail? Did they get sponsored by someone?

It also says they mailed themselves packages of food to be picked up at post offices, but it wasn’t dehydrated backpacking food: “Almost half of the airtight bags they had stuffed with rice and beans, tortillas and other fare broke, leaving their food covered in mold.” Has anyone else heard of people relying on perishable food to sit in a post office for weeks/months?

Overall, I read this article with a tremendous amount of respect for the physical and mental accomplishment (that’s a lot of miles and those trails are not easy!), envy, and…bewilderment, I guess? Is dropping $25k and taking a year off school to speedrun three of the most iconic trails in the US a good use of time or money? Part of me would have loved the idea when I was that age, but part of me thinks about all the travel, gear, time asked of family, and time asked of myself, and thinks it would not be worth it.

> The worst for me is when they catch the breakaway mere miles from the finish line. Sometimes a person stays away all day only to end up finishing in the group, or at least beaten by all the sprinters.

Yeah, this is why I (and most others, I believe) find most of the sprint stages in the Tour pretty boring. The break vs. peloton dynamic is critical for road races to work (e.g. if there's no one up the road, why don't we all just ride along at 25kph?), but in those flat stages, the sprint teams are so good and care so much about the sprint finish that it's almost a guarantee they catch the break.

It would be nice to believe, but when second place celebrates like she won says she wasn't aware of a rider up the road, it's not just not the story today. Perhaps if they had known and chased, Kiesenhofer still would have been able to hold them off, but we'll never know.

I also wouldn't call the rest of the peloton "unfortunate." They knew keeping track of the breakaway would be especially important given the lack of radio communication with a director in a team car, and they still didn't. I think Kiesenhofer deserves a ton of credit for this win; she was in the break from the very start of the race, and she was solo for over an hour, I believe. You can't do that without a lot of dedicated training and preparation. If anything, I think this is an example of "shoot your shot." You never know when things will break your way!

Part of the reason I love cycling races is that it's a combination of athletic ability and strategic thinking that you don't see in most other sports. The physics of drafting mean that a well coordinated group almost always has the speed advantage over a lone rider, but lone riders often win races because they don't have to deal with the coordination problems of a group. After 4+ hours of racing, people are trying to calculate optimal game theory decisions while at their max heart rate. It can be bonkers to watch!

Some additional context for those who don't follow professional cycling: the Dutch women's team was incredibly strong coming into this road race. All 4 riders on their team are stars in their own right, and the only reason there wasn't a clear favorite for the race overall is that people weren't sure which Dutch rider would win.

So you have a complicated group dynamic, where the majority of the peloton has no interest in pulling the group to catch the break, since they would just get beat by one or more of the Dutch riders, and the Dutch riders didn't seem to have a clear plan on how to control the race and who would sacrifice their chances and work on the front for the rest of the team.

As others have said, there were no radios allowed for riders in the race, so all information about the breakaway came from the race director's car trailing the peloton. This was a well known fact about the race coming in, and it's the same way that the annual World Championship race is run. It's normal for riders to drop back to the team car to get information about the break, and the lead moto for a group of cyclists will occasionally show time gaps on a whiteboard.

At least one of the Dutch riders claimed to have known about the lone rider off the front [1], but somehow that information didn't make it to the rest of the team. It seems that most of the peloton didn't know (or didn't care) how many riders were up the road, and the Dutch team failed to communicate amongst themselves and establish a plan.

All that leads to Kiesenhofer's solo move working out. All credit to her for an extremely strong ride.

[1]https://netherlandsnewslive.com/miscommunication-and-underes...