Episode 147: Takeaways from the Haute Route Cycling Race and the White Mountains “30 Verty”
In this week’s episode, Jim and Katie recap their most recent adventure events, including Jim’s seven-day multi-stage cycling race in the Alps and Katie’s 30th birthday bike/run challenge in the White Mountains. Highlights include training approaches for long endurance events with a lot of elevation, how to approach fueling and hydration across racing contexts, mindset approaches for when the going gets tough, how to effectively recover between back-to-back-to-back stimuli, and the role of identity in tackling big challenges. We hope this episode inspires you to plan some endurance adventures of your own while providing some helpful tips for prep, execution, and recovery. Check it out!
Insights
Jim:
Lessons from Big Bike Training / Haute Route - www.hauteroute.fr
Training Approach
Patience to stay on the bike for 3 hours as a standard ride.
High cadence between 90-100 develops another gear, especially up short roller climbs. Watch the pros and you'll see the same.
Fueling is key. Build a strong brick every time. The goal is to stack strong bricks.
I don't need much intensity for this event. SS 1x per week is plenty.
Focus on a lot of climbing. Have a climbing goal for nearly every ride.
15-20 hours a week on a bike doesn't solve your problems but it certainly doesn't create any new ones! Except saddle sores — those create very uncomfortable problems.
2x 5-hour rides per week really bumps the fitness and durability.
Every 500 miles there seems to be a bump in overall fitness
Find good audiobooks and podcasts.
Saddle Sore Resources
Good article from a Dr on the EF staff:Treating Saddle Sores with Dr. Kevin Sprouse
Assos Repair Gel also does wonders.
The Mental Game
Mileage can be addicting if you use that as a main metric for success or status. Found it hard to get off my mileage goal — sometimes take a break with gravel or mountain bike. What you measure gets managed and becomes your currency for inner status.
Nose breathing and power balance became favorite rides and natural intensity checks.
Your inner life will be revealed with all that solo time. 15-20 hours a week doing one type of activity is a direct path to your inner story. It's different than triathlon training, as you aren't switching modalities.
Friends become huge mental boosts. Trying to get at least one ride per week with a friend is key for sustaining weekly momentum. Those become free miles.
Set a goal of learning new roads and new destinations. Having an explorer's mindset can bring in creativity and adventure.
Planning & Logistics
Route planning becomes central — having a plan the day before reduces mental friction on the day of. Strava is an excellent route planning tool, especially the heat maps.
Plan the week based on weather. Be flexible to change as weather and energy change.
Tapering Into Race Day
As we get closer to race day, reducing volume because:
Saddle sores are very real and uncomfortable, and the first priority is to show up as near to 100% healthy as possible.
I need to string together 2-3 weeks where I'm not exhausted and feel strong on the bike. I'd rather be 5% undertrained than 1% overtrained. Feeling strong for an extended period before the event is a big psychological boost, since I've spent many weeks feeling quite tired.
A few weeks out, get the bike professionally maintained. New tires, brake pads, new chain, clean drivetrain, etc. A clean bike with new components is a fast bike, and it's a huge mental and slight physical boost.
Order all your nutrition weeks out. Make a general plan for daily nutrition.
Letting Go of What You Can't Control
I'm not concerning myself with travel/route logistics. I don't need to know the exact timing of each day, which col we're climbing, where we're staying, how many aid stations, etc. I signed up for a well-run race and I put my faith in the race organizers to tell us what we need when we need to know it.
My primary concern is showing up prepared — physically and mentally — with proper gear, nutrition, and equipment. Hiring a good tour operator saves a ton of hassle and stress. There are many things I don't need to know or have figured out or hope to work out. Show up, be present, play the schedule day by day.
As I started to get anxious during travel/event week, two thoughts helped calm me:
You have to do it slow before you do it fast. No pressure doing an event like this the first time. The goal is just to finish.
If I find out this is really my thing — what makes me feel really alive — I can come back in following years to be competitive. The first year is learning; subsequent years can be for honing my craft.
Lessons From the Race Itself
It feels like an avalanche of emotions and lessons and I think it will take a few months, maybe months to sort it all out. But here’s a few that are immediate:
It’s the people you meet along the way. We do these events to challenge ourselves but just as important is connecting with our tribe and feeling like being something bigger than just our own athletic project.
Special shout out to Paul, Santiago and Audrey for including me in their pod. That meant more to me than the event itself.
And shout out to my main local training partners who really helped me put in the long miles on key weekends: JSmitty, Audrey and especially Carlos.
People are remarkable. I didn’t look at any results through the week but went to the award ceremony and I was blown away by the times in all age categories both male and female. Crazy fast times! Incredibly inspiring.
You meet a lot of experienced athletes at a race like this. I’ve met many Kona qualifiers and very experienced bike racers who also did a lot of triathlons. Like going to Kona, it’s humbling to be around so many good athletes. Lots of inspiration.
The human body is resilient and highly adaptable. You can do WAY more than you ever thought. I spent nearly 40 hours on the bike over 7 days traveling 500 mountain miles with 60,000 feet of climbing. By the 3rd day it became routine. That’s nuts!!
But your day, and every day, will get very challenging and push you to your absolute limit. When things get really difficult, show up for yourself, back yourself. Have confidence in your training and experience, and be proud you showed up to challenge yourself to the limit. You just have to give what you have to the best of your ability, and that's the biggest win of all.
The mountains here are way bigger than what I've experienced. Climbs are 2x-4x longer than our long climbs. And the descents can be very difficult with the speed, wind, and road surface. My hands would go numb from all the braking, with no real mental break because it was high alert going down at those speeds and through those hairpin turns.
Having done some group riding beforehand would have made riding in a group a little more comfortable, but overall I'm experienced enough with groups that it wasn't a major stress point. Still, it's always a little sketchy riding with a lot of riders you don't know.
Having raced, or done Wednesday Night Rides, would have helped with the racing aspect of the event and provided a better workout stimulus weekly.
Everyone's back hurt — in agony — on Day 1 with the big climbing. That could have been partially mitigated by having stayed on a strength program.
Recovery between stages is a big controllable. Besides eating regularly, hydrating A LOT was key off the bike. You have to be able to wake up in the morning feeling somewhat ready to go, and for me the linchpin is being well hydrated — otherwise I feel creaky and tired.
Rapid fire of questions for Jim on the Haute Route!
What was your high of the trip?
Felt best - Col de Sarenne on Day 3. My body started to kick into gear and it felt like my performance was equivalent to my training. Best high/scenery - coming down the last col on the last day. First time I could relax and really take in the scenery.
2nd best scenery - Col du Lautaret - Day 3 - gentle climb into the high mountains and glaciers.
What was your lowest low of the trip? (Mentally or physically or both)
Did anything in particular help you get out of it? Lowest - probably the first day when we started with 112 miles and 13,300 feet of climbing. Col Lobarde crushed my soul. I went too hard getting there and the climb was steep and took 1:45. I felt very unprepared for the week and doubted I would finish the event. I had to ‘back myself’ many times during this trip, have trust in my fitness and remind myself this is why I signed up. It’s easy to say you want to do hard things and hard when things get hard - touching reality.
Best thing you ate on the trip / what did fueling look like in general in an international location known for AMAZING food?
Fueling - I brought what I estimated to be about 70% of my on bike fueling and glad I did. The rest stops were not particularly appealing with meat and cheese and NeverSecond products sometimes. I ended up having enough Maurten drink mix and SIS Beta Gels to do all stages, supplementing with Coke, bananas, yellow pound cake and some NeverSecond gels. Amazing food - I ate quite simply but had a very nice Persian dinner on the night after the last stage with my pod. We wandered away from the gala dinner and found a really nice spot to celebrate the week. And nice to be home in America where you can get a nice big cup of non-machine made coffee!
How will you approach recovery in the immediate term?
Prioritize sleep and healthy eating. No hard efforts for the next week. Do some walking. Start back in with some light strength training. Regular check in with how I’m feeling and let that guide my effort level the next 1 - 2 weeks. My TSB was -61 after the week so that’s DEEP fatigue.
How will you approach your off season?
With open arms! I’m really looking forward to hiking, mountains, strength work, gravel rides and some disc golf along with casual road rides with friends. But I also might pop off a couple long weekend rides this fall as it’s fun to be in this type of shape and fun to go big with it sometimes.
Would you ever want to do something like this again?
That’s the question everyone asks at the end of this event - would you do it again? My initial response is no as I’m not a bike racer and this race is primarily a bike race. As such, you don’t get time to enjoy the scenery and soak up the experience of being in a new, dramatic place. So many times I just had my head down trying to survive and that seemed like such a wasted opportunity. Even when the sections aren’t timed (like most downhills) you are still in race mode as you can’t dally about as you need to get the stage over with and get to real food, hotel and start recovering for the next day. There is very little downtime.
Or do you already have aspirations for something else next season?
No. I want to let this experience percolate for a few weeks, maybe a few months and let that guide me organically to the next thing. It’s natural to want to jump back into a BIG goal but rushing that process has never served me well. I do have some ideas and projects that I have not done locally that might come back to the surface. I’m also slightly curious about multi-day long distance biking in Europe but at a slower rate. Maybe credit card bike packing. And there are plans to try to do Mallorca 312 next April as the first big event of the year.
Katie:
Quick lessons and insights from 30 Verty weekend!
Recently got some close friends together to celebrate my upcoming 30th birthday with a big weekend in the White Mountains. We were lucky enough to get spectacular weather on Saturday and a decent day on Sunday and tackled:
Franc Ridge run/hike + 90’ climb ride to Kancamagus on Saturday
2200’ climb ride to Moosilauke Ravine Lodge on Sunday, hike/run Moosilauke, bike back down
Overall mostly type 1 fun and had the best time crushing big (eastern) vert with friends! Some takeaways:
Creative DIY adventures are the best kind; grateful for the many years I have spent exploring the White Mountains that given me the frame of reference to know what some of the best options are
If you plan to do something that is outside of your current endurance volume level, things you can control to stay injury free include:
Fueling REALLY WELL before/during/after
Being cautious around huge run volume and mixing in biking
Good gear (new enough shoes, etc.), warm layers
Mobility/ rollers/ theragun etc. after and between
Also: Vert/hours are potentially safer to stack than flat volume. I would not have taken a group of friends on back to back massive road runs unless we had the fitness to support it. Always mitigate injury risk to the best of your ability!
Conditions in the Whites can change really fast! Beautiful all weekend and cold/rainy/windy on top of Moosilauke; even the gorgeous day on Franc Ridge was cold in the wind. ALWAYS have gloves and a windbreaker at a minimum.
I LOVED all of the trail time, but one of my favorite things about the weekend was actually pacelining on the bike with friends during some of our rides. There is something so cool about working together and knowing that one person is working harder so that other people can have a break, and then taking turns being that person and taking the commitment really seriously (and going fast!!!). I hadn’t had that feeling in a REALLY long time (lining up time to do long things with friends, let alone multiple friends, is so hard with busy schedules and a baby) and it was such a high. Hope to mix in more stuff like this in the future! And shout out to support team, Connor, for a full weekend of childcare and baby deliveries at trailheads so I could do all of this while still exclusively breastsfeeding. It was the first time since Luke was born that I was pretty much effectively able to turn off my mom brain during the adventures and I felt almost exactly like pre-pregnancy me, which was really cool!
Challenge or Resource of the week
Katie: Resource - Super Secret Ice Cream in Bethlehem NH. Challenge of the week is to go there!
Jim: From Carl-Eric: “I just went through my four wheels. I basically did a deep clean on them, took off the tires, put sealant and did a detailed inspection and on two of them, I found small but very deep cuts. One of them was on the front wheel. I think for anybody that has a late season race and has been riding a lot doing a thorough visual inspection of your flat tires would be a good idea. I’m doing it a month out, two weeks away from a race so that I can have the time to work the new tires in.”
Gear pick of the week
Katie: Terignota Shorthorn Socks
Jim: Best recovery tool: big Hydroflask and PH 500 tabs.