Going Up Against the Fastest Gravel Racers in the US. Gravel Locos 150 Race Report

at mile 120 pete stetna again surged hard trying to further thin out the group which was followed by some hard turns from colin strickland but the move that finally stuck came from lawrence 10 damn and when he finally attacked none of us would be able to follow his wheel last weekend was the gravel locos 150 mile gravel race in hico texas and despite this being its inaugural year fabian the race director managed to get some of the biggest names in us gravel racing out to his event including three past dirty cancer winners former world tour pros and a host of other seriously fast riders all of this to promote a race that had no entry fee that's right signing up for this race was free for anybody but if you wanted to you could make a donation which would go to the fire department in hico and it really seemed like all of heiko was out supporting the race people in this town could not have been more friendly to a bunch of strangers wearing overly tight clothing riding their bikes for hours on their local roads which was awesome to see oh come on dude have you seen my quads lately i've been drinking hypergain beast mode mass gainer raw edition like it's water of course people are going to be nice to me when they see me wearing tight pants the course itself was 155 miles or 250 kilometers of rolling hills with 8 200 feet of climbing or 2500 meters 72 percent of the course was gravel and the remainder was road which is a solid amount of gravel for a race of this length the gravel was finally crushed and packed meaning that it was extremely fast maintaining a high speed felt easy on this course well at least until it started dumping rain but i'll get into that later now although the gravel itself was pretty smooth there were still plenty of potholes and embedded rock in the gravel meaning that a full-on gravel bike with wide gravel tires was the right move i talked to the vegan cyclist before the race and he was saying that he wish he had his road bike with him that definitely would have been the wrong call i was still running the pirelli centurados in the 45 millimeter width because that's what i plan to run at unbound and i didn't want to change it there were a lot of people running narrower tires and while i generally think that people run too narrow attire for gravel racing you could probably get away with it on this course however i don't think i was losing much if anything with the 45s now let's get into the race we started out with a fairly calm pace the pros decided to keep it friendly for the first eight miles leading into the first river crossing and then pick up the pace after that and this was probably a good thing because with all the rain hyko had gotten over the past couple of days the river crossing was not ridable at all and we essentially had to cross single file holding on to some ropes that the fire department had laid out for us at its deepest point the water level was easily over our knees i would have ridden it after this we had a slow buildup before we got to what i would consider race pace at about the one hour mark this first hour of the race was relatively easy with a normalized power of just 198 average power of 156 and an average heart rate of 121. that's essentially easy endurance ride numbers but it was about to get a lot harder around mile 20 is when the pace started to pick up and with that came a thinning of the front group some of the big guns like lawrence 10 dam and pete stetner took some hard pulls on the front and we quickly saw that front group start to shrink these initial surges required a normalized power of 303 watts for about 30 minutes before settling back down again at this point the group had been reduced from a peloton to a lead pack some riders would yo-yo off the back for a while but the main lead group that formed included eight riders ted king lawrence 10 damn colin strickland pete stetna adam roberge sam boardman matt stevens and me what really solidified this front group were the three hardest climbs in the race which came immediately one after another 53 miles into the race these climbs were not very long taking only 30 to 45 seconds to climb but they were extremely steep with grades of 17 to 18 percent and had some really loose gravel meaning that you couldn't just stand up and mash up them you had to stay seated to maintain traction colin strickland was eager to lead the descent going into the first climb almost washing out in the corner going into it but unsurprisingly it was pete stetna who took charge up each of the three climbs as he usually does he was probably the lightest rider in the lead group and obviously as an ex-world tour pro he's incredibly strong and it showed he had us gritting our teeth any time the road went up these three climbs took about six and a half minutes to complete and required a normalized power of 411 watts and pushing well over 500 watts for the individual climbs themselves after this point we held a relatively steady pace with everybody taking polls on the front and keeping the speed high for the next hour and 15 minutes we would average 22.4 miles per hour but because of minimal surging this only required a normalized power of 250 watts 84 miles into the race though there was a rise in pace again as pete stetna surged up a climb and then we laid on the gas to see if we could get rid of any tired riders which required a normalized power of 311 watts for about 15 minutes and we did manage to get rid of matt stevens at this point and now the front group was down to seven for the next 45 minutes we took it super easy with a normalized power of just 238 watts in anticipation of the attacks that we knew were coming in the last third of the race sure enough at mile 107 the game started adam got in and out of an aid station faster than the rest of us and decided to go for a solo breakaway but with six strong riders chasing him it was unlikely that he was gonna make it and within a couple miles we had caught him again up until this point in the race it had been a dry overcast day with temperatures in the mid 70s perfect conditions for racing it would not stay that way though with 40 miles to go it looked like we were racing into a black storm cloud and before long the skies opened up and it was dumping rain on us the sand and the gravel got into our rotors and drive trains and made our bikes sound like rusty old 10 speeds that you might find in a junkyard and the spray coming off of our rear wheels made it extremely hard to draft without getting pelted in the face with wet sand is it going to be muddy is my bike going to be destroyed afterwards the good news is now the chance for mud is very little it's fast it's hard packed it's dry the chance for mud is almost non-existent before long i noticed that two other riders had dropped off ted king and sam boardman and now the front group was five riders strong at mile 120 pete stetna again surged hard trying to further thin out the group which was followed by some hard turns from colin strickland but the move that finally stuck came from lawrence 10 damn and when he finally attacked none of us would be able to follow his wheel considering lawrence's caliber it only took one attack for him to get away and i'm sure he was thinking eh it was cute riding with you guys for 130 miles but i think i'll just go on my own now dude i'm looking at his list of strava chaos right now and i mean it's okay but i'm pretty sure i got more wait what's that this dude got a top 10 in the tour de france i dug deep to try to hold his wheel but simply could not match his power and before long i found myself dropped from the chasing group containing pete colin and adam as well this move ended the hardest hour of the race for me from when adam made his first solo move all the way until lawrence's final attack to get off the front solo and it required a normalized power just shy of 300 watts and in the final surge to get on lawrence's wheel i hit 746 watts and average 482 watts for just under a minute and all of this came after 6 hours and 130 miles of racing before this race i had thought that my max heart rate was 190 beats per minute well it turns out it's a little bit higher than that because when i tried to follow lawrence during his final attack i hit a max heart rate of 192 and averaged 190 for a whole minute for me those are bonkers high heart rate numbers and are really telling of how deep a grave i was digging myself needless to say doing this this late into a race left me absolutely fried and i had a hard time maintaining power after this after about 15 minutes of chasing i saw pete stetna on the side of the road attending to mechanical and once i passed him i found myself alone in fourth place with 20 miles to go to the finish during these last 20 miles i pushed as hard as i possibly could but you wouldn't know that by looking at the numbers with a normalized power of just 252 watts and an average power of 242. 250 watts felt like 350 and i had to stop looking at my power data because it wasn't helping seeing my number so low i kept looking over my shoulder expecting to cp i never saw him though because unfortunately he suffered a bad puncture which required him to put a tube in during the last hour of the race my vision was going blurry and whether that was from the effort or all the sand and rain in my eyes i don't know during the last hour i also downed three gels to make sure that i wouldn't bonk the low power numbers had me worried that bonking was on the horizon but luckily it never got to that point finally after 7 hours 10 minutes and 29 seconds i crossed the finish line to take fourth place a little over six minutes behind the winner lawrence10 dam now that the race was over the wave of fatigue from my efforts that day hit me as i walked around a bit delirious before flopping on the wet pavement at the finish and rolling around in pain so you're telling me that both of the protein deficient vegan youtubers that attended this event were being overly dramatic and rolling around on the ground after the race shocking it's always a good feeling to know that you left absolutely everything you had out on the course and the result was a top five finish against competition that rivals some of the biggest gravel races in the country that's a result i can be proud of alright let's get into some stats for the race 155 miles covered with an average speed of 21.6 miles per hour or 34.7 kilometers per hour a normalized power of 269 watts with an average power of 226 average heart rate of 154 max heart rate of 192 and a training stress score of 424 that normalized power is in line with what i'm usually able to do in seven hour races and given how bad i was suffering for the last hour of this race i was actually surprised that it was that high my bike setup for the race was almost identical to what i ran at the last southeast gravel race which i made a video about the only change that i've made is that i bump front chainrings up from 50 34 to 52 36 this is the setup that i'll run at unbound next week and it's feeling absolutely dialed right now i just have some parts to replace after riding in some wet texas sand thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video be sure to give it a like subscribe for weekly cycling videos just like this one and share this video with your cycling friends i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Dylan Johnson

Views: 147,944

Keywords: gravel racing, gravel cycling, gravel locos, unbound gravel, dirty kanza, dk 200, gravel cyclist, 150 miles gravel race, dylan, dylan johnson, cycling race analysis, power analysis, gopro, niner, niner bikes, backwards hat dylan, aero bars, aero bars gravel, Laurens Ten Dam, Colin Strickland, Ted King, Pete Stetina, gravel bike, gravel bike set up, gravel race strategy, the vegan cyclist, cycling, bike racing, ultra endurance, endurance racing

Id: zL_VS9dHrbs

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021