BIKE RACING IS BACK! (Durango Iron Horse Classic ROAD AND MTB RACE)

we're sid and mackie for the past six years we've been racing mountain bikes professionally and living out of our van but in 2020 we had to pause both racing and van life because of the pandemic and so sid could recover from a nerve injury but now things are finally getting back to normal sid's been able to get back outside on the e-bike and racing is picking back up all over the country [Music] today we're heading to durango so i can race for the first time in over a year and see if my training is actually paying off [Music] back in the van yeah we're back in the van back to our old which is to say it is 8 15 the night before mackie is doing a race we're driving up some bumpy roads in the middle of nowhere trying to find our friends and i think we found them yeah so all as well we were just getting concerned but we were like they haven't called us so clearly this goes to a place that a person can keep it there's not even that many people here right excellent right good time this looks totally normal totally normal i am so hungry [Music] [Music] so you've learned nothing during van life it's that you can't crack an egg oh you can't you just have to try really hard to crack an egg on the dashboard apparently they make dashboards non-cracking wow the memorial of the story is if you're gonna hit your head on it don't do it hard don't do it hard lightly tap your head on the dashboard this feels like something that would be in like a dare class in high school where they're like this is your head [Laughter] this is your head on drugs in a car accident a driving truck it is the morning of my first race my first mass start race in a year and three months and judging by how poorly i slept last night i'm quite nervous um i found that for me that's usually a pretty good sign like if i if i'm not sleeping well that means that i'm nervous about the race so i'm nervous about the race um today is the durango iron horse road race it's like 47 mile five or six thousand feet of climbing from durango into silverton and then tomorrow i race the mountain bike race durango iron horse and they somehow combine your results from the two and give you like a overall for the two races and i'm pretty excited but apparently also nervous so i got a email from mike with like race strategy for the weekend and he talks about nutrition which it's gonna be hard to eat as many calories he wants me to eat between 650 and 850 calories during today's race so it's 150 calories every 30 minutes i'm gonna try but i'm not sure that will be possible but i'm gonna carry like two packs of chews two bars two rice krispies scratch rice krispie bars so i think that'll be pretty good talks about hydration yesterday i was drinking a ton alternating water and electrolyte drink but then it's the race plan that i really like so for the road race look for some wheels you know at the start but don't bury yourself treat this like a multi-day enduro and focus on being consistent on the first climb try to keep things under 295 watts unless absolutely necessary railed it a sense if you're with a group stay there the group will move faster on the big wide road than a solo rider on the second big climb a controlled version of all in and then my favorite point number five if you see super skinny roadie types do not try to go with them i think mike has a pretty realistic idea of the fact that i'm probably not going to keep up with super skinny roti types [Music] so there's the finish line down there that was an absolutely awesome race i had so much fun i haven't done a road race in a long time and that was awesome it was uh really really hard i definitely did not follow mike's race plan of uh stay below 295 for the first climb that did not happen definitely not but uh i sort of feel like after things exploded and blew apart and then like i kind of found a group to ride with once i found that group then i was able to keep it pretty consistently about 300 a little below for the rest of the ride i was able to sprint at the end so i had a little bit of energy left which was great overall it was just a really really fun race now i'm gonna go spin for about 20 minutes just to flush the legs out a little bit and then try to find a ride back to durango because the way this race works is you go from durango into silverton and then you have to find a ride back now that i've had time to recover a little bit drink a recovery drink and process a little bit i continued to be extremely stoked it was just so much fun um basically at the beginning we were all a big group i sort of stuck with the main group there there was a lot of rubber banding where like the front guys will accelerate and then the guys toward the back of the pack like i have to accelerate harder to catch up and then the front guys slowed down and like i'd forgotten that road races do that or like there's these weird surges and you know it's called rubber banding because it's sort of like rubber band it like stretches out and then blings back together um but it's hard because it's hard to keep a consistent pace when it's rubber banding you're like oh sprint hard and then oh i got to use my brakes to slow down and like if you could time it just right you could just go consistently the whole time but never seems to happen that way then it started kicking up and the front group kind of went and i kind of tried to stay with them i had timed it poorly so that i was at the back and so like people started accelerating and all sudden i was like oh i'm by myself that's not good so i worked pretty hard tried to catch back up caught back up essentially but then was like oh if i hold this pace i'm going to crack i don't want to crack so i backed it off a little bit there's sort of a group of four of us i think initially that we were all riding together and then people kept getting spit out of the main pack and we'd pick them up and they'd join and so at one point i think we had like 10 or maybe 12 people in our group all sort of working together but then we started dropping those people also and so at the top of the first pass there were four of us and then we like descended down the back side and started climbing the second one at the top of the second pass we had dropped one guy so there are three of us together and so i basically just tucked and had an a great time those that said it was so much fun there's like these 20 recommended like 20 or 25 mile per hour turns that you could do way faster than that because you can lean the bike and yeah so we're like ripping down the road was totally closed but they still had the yellow line rule and effect so you had to stay on the right side of the road so just ripping down that descent dropped the guys behind me a little bit but not enough that they didn't catch back up when we hit silverton so then the thing that fortunately a friend of mine had mentioned to me this morning is that you don't you're not done when you hit silver 10. you have to go all the way through silverton so it's like a mile just straight false flat so it's slightly uphill and i was like great i'm in front now they're all gonna be drafting me they're gonna attack right at the end so i just basically like backed it down i was like whatever if like if they want to go faster they can go around me they can do the work none of them did until like .2 mile from the end at which point everybody started sprinting i was able to out sprint the next two guys so i was the the front of our group which was fun but obviously we gotten spit off the the main group so i haven't actually looked at results let's let's take a look-see here i didn't really have any expectations for this race i just wanted to finish i wanted to have fun and i was very successful in both of those um but i'd sort of you know i'd sort of hoped for like uh like two and a half or a little bit more time-wise wow there were a lot of people in this race still scrolling all right i was 47th with a 2 35 36. the other guys in my group were looks like three seconds back and six seconds back the next guy ahead of me was like 38 seconds ahead so that would have been hard to catch up to and that's of looks like 72 finishers a little behind mid pack but like i said i just i had a great time i felt good i had a good race i'm i'm really stoked [Music] i spent the rest of the day recovering hanging out with our friends sean susie and cole and playing cole's favorite game of all time throw throw burrito burrito oh i don't know i think i got it without you again warming up for cross country on sunday and i'm pretty excited i don't feel too tired or sore from yesterday although uh let's say the undercarriage is feeling a little sore just from being seated on a road saddle for so long haven't seen the course yet but it's three laps so planning to just use the first lap as a pre-ride try to stay with the group as much as possible and then uh you know see what i can do on laps two and three so overall i'm really excited i think it's gonna be fun realize i probably need to go a little bit easier because my warm-up is not supposed to be a lot of effort just 20 minutes of spinning with two 30-second somewhat harder efforts just to kind of wake the legs up and remind them that a racing is a thing so you hear that legs racing is a thing so we are doing today to do the racing thing about to watch mackie start um he got a terrible start position so that happened but hopefully he will get some hole shots on the way out it won't be last [Music] [Applause] [Music] come on mackie come on come on [Music] right yeah when we see a good spot i'll take thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] right so despite the almost last start position uh mackie did seem to work his way up to about mid-pack-ish right out of the gate so he obviously put on the turbo charge for the start which hopefully won't come back to bite him we were talking a little bit about strategy he doesn't have the xc fitness that he used to and so he doesn't get the start positions that he used to and he doesn't really know how his body will respond to this effort but it is really just a training exercise and an opportunity to see where he's at against there's essentially a world-class field got national champions former national champions um one kid who was second in a u-23 world cup like two weeks ago so it's a pretty pointy field i'm just hoping that he has fun out there and doesn't take it too seriously because like whatever he ends up in this race is definitely like a starting point i feel for like what he is capable of i am gonna mix up his bottles and get ready to go to the feed zone [Music] [Music] [Music] i think the absolute fastest that mackie would come through this is on like 45 minutes 45 minutes a lap however he's never ridden the course this isn't the course that the amateurs sorry about the wrestling that the amateurs were racing so we really have nothing to base that off of so i'm gonna be early these guys are burying themselves right now here's maggie franklin and uh [Music] thank you with one lap down two to go her nine mile laps his first lap was like 46 minutes and it was top 20. so i'm super stoked for him on that i'm hoping he'll be happy with that hoping he can keep it up and not explode so are you stressed thanks buddy [Music] so oh is come on maggie hi [Music] yeah still filming me it is still filming me hey come on maggie we have a telepathic connection he can hear me i don't think he's going to catch this person but i've also seen that was a nice corner come on maki [Applause] nice job dude you still got it mentally i was there physically the fitness is not there yet that's the easy part i think the best way to summarize is i felt good mentally i was there i rode well i just don't have the fitness that i want yet and frankly that's not surprising um i'm pretty happy with that like i know that there's more fitness work i need to do it was really fun to race a mountain bike race again really fun especially across country race big group race mass start hadn't done that in a while especially on the mountain bike side and it was really fun my main takeaway cross country descents are very manageable so i was despite not getting to pre-ride this course i was able to ride the descent pretty hard and then on the second and third laps once i'd seen them once i was able to go fast on the descents without feeling like i was pushing it or like i was sketchy or like i was risking crashing and catch a lot of people like on my second lap i got to the top of telegraph which is this heinous climb and dropped into anasazi which is the first descent and it's pretty technical at the beginning and i very quickly caught up to four people who i had not seen at all on the telegraph climb so that's that's sort of what i was expecting and what i was hoping for is that like the the skills work that i've done the descending work that i've done is paying off and so now i really need to focus on my fitness so that i can climb a lot faster basically because i feel like i'm descending well and i'm happy with that i just need to get to the top of the hills with those front guys and then you know then who knows what would happen so that would be fun also do you guys like my really impressive dirt marks i've got a dirt stash i've got the dirt under the eyes and then i've got my dirt helmet marks oh and my unibrow so yeah it was a little dusty out there we will see you guys next friday and in the meantime don't forget to be more awesome

Channel: SYD and MACKY

Views: 13,247

Rating: 4.9837232 out of 5

Keywords: syd and macky, syd and macky tv, travel, behind the scenes, mtb, durango iron horse bicycle classic, iron horse road race, iron horse classic, iron horse mtb, durango road race, durango silverton road race, durango mtb race

Id: K3gfNi-_7RE

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021