Top 10 at the BWR SAN DIEGO DUBBLE HEADER!

and you home [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] hey evc here so we're gonna break down the double header of the bwr weekend so on saturday the waffle that's the big 135 miles 10 000 feet of climbing 40 dirt and then on sunday is actually the smaller one the wafer which is only 76 miles same exact course uh they're just a section that's cut out so then i'm going to do both of them uh two days of racing total time places you overall so let's break down the bike uh it's my favorite bike to ride the canyon ultimate that i've made into basically a gravel bike now the wheels that i'm running are the kdex 36s ultra stiff ultra light bladed spokes carbon spokes ceramic bearings in the hubs they're amazing i'm also running my uh rotor oval ring with a 52 52 a 5252 the rear cassette is a 52 the front is a 52 so i it's a one to one ratio amazing i've got my arundel cages not gonna lose bottles this time here's the kidx wheels paired with the irc uh bocan plus so it has like um a flat section in the middle with some knobbies on the side now they were 32s but on the kadex wheels the hookless bead wheels um these actually blew them out to 34 and a half which was to me the perfect setup so a really wide tire uh on this pretty much road bike um got some sick bar tape got my bar bag i'm ready to race all right so now we're gonna start with day one it's a big day uh lots of hitters here now i do have the power overlay for a little bit of the race it's really hard to sync up power across an eight-hour day uh so i'm just gonna show you kind of when it really counts which is that now look normally bwr has been over two days uh it's the waffle and wafer usually iran on the same day but that puts too many people on the course at one time so they broke it up into the waffle on saturday and the wafer on sunday now they also changed the course and they started uh right into a pretty good sized climb this isn't the climb yet this is just getting to the climb but what was so amazing is that this really thinned out the field right it puts you in your group before the race really even started uh but also that you could blow yourself up really quickly i mean just we are one minute into this race and we are just absolutely sending it now there was a little section uh that went downhill so you kind of could recover you could bring your heart rate down but then it went straight into this about 10 minute climb um a good part of it maybe seven minutes was on road and then you uh entered the first dirt section now last year and in years prior it was a absolute [ __ ] show getting to the first gravel section i mean just a crap shoe last year i came into the first gravel section 250th place so i was a huge fan of having the course this way where you started on a climb thinned it out you kind of found your group right away you know but it's a long race it's like seven eight hours if you're racing it uh and so i set sort of a limit to myself like okay hold 350 watts average for about 10 minutes and that was not enough i mean the guys were just absolutely sending it and so i ended up doing closer to 400 watts for 10 minutes which was way over what i wanted to but the front group said gone so 192 beats per minute and we are maybe 15 minutes into the race and we hit the first gravel section but i'm pretty far up at this point uh maybe top 100 ish um and so it's not very crowded which was a good thing uh this this first dirt section was so much fun and it was really fast really sort of had like a top layer of gravel so it was kind of slippery in the turns but already you can see guys having issues and that was for a lot of people you know their day is done just so quick um because you know getting a flat or having a mechanical now my tire setup my bike setup i'm so confident in it uh brian mccauley here he to the right very interesting guy i i've raced with him a few times now and every time i blow by him on a climb thinking i'm great and then later in the race he comes by like a freaking freight train and then ends up getting top 20 somehow i i just it's it's wild it's wild his power profile and how confident he is and how patient he is now my profile is a little bit more of like a puncher so you know four to eight minute power that's that is my best uh or my strongest suit and so these type of things like i feel good doing this i feel good going hard on some of these steep things for that short period of time uh it's a little bit harder for me to just hold really high power for a long time so right here i'm trying to hopefully use my skill set uh and get as far up front as possible so that when we get into the road section um i'm with a good group so i'm trying i'm trying to get ahead as far as i can you know catch as many guys as i can hopefully i can grab on to you know the second group on the road uh maybe the third group on the road we get through the first gravel section and we jump down onto a really fast descent and if we're on a descent what do we do well how do we go faster we hit the hairy ball power-up and that is exactly what we did [Music] so [Music] so we come out of the second gravel sector uh we're something like 30 minutes into the race again probably top 100 uh i see a small group right up the road i gotta get to them because we're on road now and it's pretty um flat-ish i mean there's a couple little risers but for the most part if you're in a group you are absolutely going to be flying so i liquidate uh quite a few matches to try to bridge up to this group um and and just to stay in there with them and and hopefully i can get to the real technical section the the real first major gravel section and i do and i i make it with these guys uh again brian mccauley i just talked about guy was motoring he was really telling everyone to go hard was just being like a great like road captain if you will and so then i got to recover a little bit eat a little bit and we're just about to head into now the third gravel sector which in years past this is where the race started this is where you came in with a thousand people into this one road all jamming into this one single track so much better this year absolutely way better uh the course was now this is my second third bwr and each time i have done this i pre wrote this part of the course so i'm familiar with this part of the course i'm feeling good you know i'm with my people the week in warriors the the world tour pros are up the road so i'm feeling confident but then i start realizing that this guy in front of me he's got the calves of a greek god it's unbelievable kaphosaurus here don't flirt with him i'm not going to [Music] ah king helen freaking kaphosaurus right i mean the guys that was i've never even seen anything like that before so we hit the first main gravel section uh i'm feeling very confident i've ridden this several times before the kdex wheels being ultra stiff and ultra light that's great but the ones that i'm running the 36s actually are super wide and so it pulled my irc tires which were 32's out to 34 and a half which is everything i've wanted but see irc they make a 32 and then a 33 and then they jump to a 36 and the ultimate another guy here having a problem uh the ultimate only fits 35s and so i i want a 34 but irc doesn't make them anyway this guy tokyo drift [Music] just on the top tube dude like freaking drifting in there wildly impressive but so a lot of these guys i i noticed that they all stayed almost in the draft and i didn't feel comfortable doing that uh i want to see where i'm going i want to see what i'm running over and that's one thing that like okay yeah maybe it's taking more energy because i'm just slightly off the wheel sometimes but haven't flatted ever in any gravel race ever uh two unbounds three bwrs every impossible route okay so i like to look where i'm going and so that when i see something i'm gonna run over or it's like oh bro this is going to smash my bike i kind of get light i sort of i don't want to say like bunny hop um but you're never on the saddle okay that's one way to flat for sure like 100 percent just sit on the saddle and have all your weight on the saddle and then hit a rock bro you're going to slice your tire for sure doesn't matter what tire you have uh and so what i do is i sort of just like like i said you kind of lift the bike but you're not jumping you're just all of your weight is sort of above the bike and so when you run over stuff you don't have all this weight pushing into the tires um so you know like yeah i'm a little bit off the wheel sometimes but i don't have a mechanical i don't have a dnf i don't have an issue i know it's early on but power's looking good i came into this really pretty fit i i put in a solid training program before this and i actually added a comma to my power five seconds a thousand nine watts a comma for me in my power that's unbelievable so we're rolling and i'm feeling good we're hitting down some of these technical sections and like i said you know you can fly down these things like this cal poly guy but a lot of people ended up having flats i mean i don't know if you can see how jagged the rocks are but it takes a lot of skill to pick your line and not to just run something straight over right got an email ruin the video anyways fun so much fun we are flying through this section um and look i pre-wrote this uh with sam the day before and there was a couple little sections that i'm so glad that i pre-road especially this really technical section um that you're gonna see dude what did i hit that was not good [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you sir god damn it sorry sorry now that was a whole new section to the course and i loved it it it really took some technical skill to maintain your uprightness that you weren't slipping there was that one section i slipped a wheel right and then you dab and then it's so hard because it's like 12 15 so it's so hard to get back going but it was so much fun flying down this section i had actually tried to source a dropper seat post for this setup which i feel like would have been perfect i was going to get one through crank brothers but they didn't have one of the cables or i just i couldn't find the parts um but the next year i do this i will for sure have a dropper post on this bro ef education guy flew past me and i was do i thought i was strong i was like bro i'm riding so strong i'm so great i'm like self-high-fiving myself and then this guy just brought now we're heading into the first rest stop where people actually started to stop i think we've gone through two rest stops at this point um at one of them i did have a bottle hand up i'm looking for bottle hand ups and oh my goodness do i see bijou bijou the holy man himself the savior of food and cooking yeah yeah boom i could not believe he was there it me i was so happy i just i just like his face i like bijou so very much so anyways now we're on to the really hard road section so we've gotten through most of the the technical gravel stuff on the way out because it's basically just like a you go out and back sort of right so all the gravel stuff that we had just done in the beginning we're gonna do that on the way back but this road climb is absolutely brutal one it's super steep you've been full gas the whole time i take a pull only because photographer right so instagram clout and then what you do is you take a left the wafer goes right the waffle goes left and then this part it's just this like infinite road climb forever and it's hard i mean everyone's i would say pretty much like at threshold like no one's attacking but no one's going easy and everyone is uh is drilling it i'm hoping i can stay on this group as long as i can at this point i'm feeling pretty good um at this point i feel like i can hold this pace all the way to the finish oh we gotta saw a little group here we're probably top 50 top 60 something like that and uh we've got 82 miles to go we've been racing for three hours like just pretty much full tilt we got the cal poly boys on the front crushin it's good times man now we roll through the rest stop that i pretty much everyone stopped at i had to stop i had to refill bottles we're uh on to the sixth sector or coming out of the sixth sector this part got pretty technical kind of sandy but you can see how many people there are right like this rest stop sort of bunched everyone up so i sort of went from top 100 to around top 60 because some people stopped you know to fill up their bottles some people caught back on uh the group really came together at this one look how sandy this is right everyone's like freaking out doesn't know what to do running uh getting through getting sand in your shoes it's all good um i'm seeing a good chance that i can place well but man the group was just too spicy for me and and i really tried to learn from past experiences where like okay right now i could dig super deep but i might crack and i know that there's a big climb coming up so i'm gonna actually relax a little bit i'm gonna fall back to you know to an easier group and hopefully i'll have a second wind and i'll come back through now this black canyon the the washboard was insane um but let's just regroup let's recover and then we'll attack again [Music] so [Music] now i did get a super second wind and this black canyon climb i don't know what they called it but it's a new climb for the courses no one's done this one before and technical steep punchy climbs are just that's my jam i really like it now maybe not for the front of the group maybe there's the guys at the front that are doing a thousand billion wants okay that's not where i belong but here i mean i've actually now caught back a ton of those guys that i dropped off of and that's what's so wild about most these gravel races is that you know you could think that your race is over and if you just stay within yourself and you hydrate and you focus and you just keep pedaling you can actually completely come back to a group that you had no business being in later on in the race so man i'm feeling so good about myself because i had to let these guys go i was like they're too spicy you know they're they are not mild salsa i'm gonna just hang back and now when it got to this real steep climb where my skill sets are going to shine you boy your boy made it up i started coming through the pack and then we get to the back side and boy this was fun ew now i make it back onto this group and this guy right here gosh i wish i remembered his name and i don't remember his name right now but he was so nice and he's like cheering me on like yeah dude you came back and uh and what's wild about him is that he was dangling like several times and then he would go forward and he would do really well and it was just i was really cool to ride with him i am really having a second wind i'll tell you uh we're on a pretty massive climb right now so time to dig deep 57 miles to go you so i ju i just looked down and my front skewer is like hanging out uh it's very dangerous so i borrowed a multi-tool from this legend back here and i'm gonna try to tighten it while riding let's see how that goes huh there we go there we go there we go i lost my hand i lost my bride thank you [Music] [Music] so [Music] brutal dude we're hitting this super steep road climb my legs are just on the verge of complete cramp city like every pedal stroke it's like about to send me off the edge like i am just on like my muscles are just like this the whole time i've actually never cramped ever before uh so it was very strange the feeling of cramping and what that was like i'm not sure why so we go downhill for a little bit we hit some gravel again um we go over a bridge that's cool we start pedaling a little bit hard on the way back we do a little hike bike over that rock section um this is the part that we came out on so we're doubling back and we are headed to the final climb uh double peak where it gets real brutal last climb last climb there you go last climb [Applause] yes [Applause] here we go what phenomenal humans right this guy right here had messaged me earlier and he said what he was going to be on double peak what did i want and i said bro you know what would be awesome grapes there he was with grapes uh fantastic humans all around this little section right here is brutal and actually what's funny is that they were taking pictures and bro i flexed i did like tried to do like a bicep flex my whole upper body seized into a cramp that i've never experienced before i'm still sore from this upper body cramp because i tried flexing for a picture i'm so stupid so this is the last gravel section i'm feeling really good i don't know what position i am in but i believe that i'm actually further up than i am i feel like i might be top 30 which wasn't totally the case um final little kicker eew [ __ ] yeah then i mean i'm like a mile from the finish and i'm about to catch a guy and a guy catches me and then we're like there's like three guys heads up racing you know and look it's total time okay so my placing doesn't really matter it's my total time for today combined with my total time tomorrow that's going to give me my overall placing but i dug deep dude i believe going into the final climb i was in a group that was between 39th maybe 35th and like 55 somewhere around there so we get close to the finish i'm kind of in no man's land uh great vibe for wilson second place flavia oliveira that is i was hoping to do a little bit better but again it's total time so right pretty much eight hours uh for the event i got 50 seconds lots of hitters but dude there's no time to rest because i have a film premiere so i had to skedaddle [Music] day two started off so rough now i woke up to an eight percent recovery and a 70 resting heart rate that's the worst resting heart rate that i've ever seen in my entire life and i've been using whoop since 2018 so i know objectively i'm smoked um and so most people after one belgian waffle ride okay very intense very difficult you are waxed for like a couple days it takes you a while to come out of that um now if i had gone home and i rested and i ate and i just chilled everything was cool maybe that would be different but the thing is that i had to literally find an uber jam back to my airbnb finish the edit i still had not finalized the export for the premiere that was in a couple hours okay so i'm racing bwr the day before this thinking dude what happens if something goes wrong and the export doesn't work okay so stress to the max stress of getting the film done to the max uh the fact that i have to premiere this in front of all the sponsors and if something goes wrong it's my fault right everything comes down to me so i'm like i don't want to do this i want to run and hide i talk to my brain brain do i have to do this do i have to and you have to do it you have to and internally there's two people inside and i've talked about this several times and through the impossible routes i've really gotten comfortable with like negotiating with myself and so look there's so many excuses that i have just tons and tons and tons with the impossible route film edit the fact that i've done six of these in essentially a year time span i know one was in 2020 we did four and 21 and then this this west texas in 2022 but anyways look it's a lot of stress and uh and so like bike racing becomes sort of a second hand thing like i'm not i'm getting blown by for one just people passing me left and right i come over this little hit and then all of a sudden everyone's there i'm like well how did i i teleported bro um and so then i'm trying to catch on to this group i'd love to get on this group before we you know hit some of the real gnarly sections and look it's deja vu literally almost to the t everything is exactly the same but i'm pretty far back to be honest i think i'm i don't know top 60 50 something like that feeling way more comfortable with the bike handling we come to this same exact spot did where i was trying to bridge before and then i asked my legs for everything [Music] okay so you're doing the double header as well yeah tell me about that amazing loop score you got dude it was one percent it's like the lowest of the low like five who basically just gave me a big thumbs up down and i woke up today yeah you shouldn't be riding you don't do this yeah what are you sitting overall though i think i'm fourth but i'm pretty sure like there's at least five guys in the front yeah nice i don't know now there's not a whole lot of story to tell you on this one right it's just it's day two uh there's a lot of fresh guys that this is all they're doing this was their a goal they did not race the day before uh there's a lot of juniors just shredding the front the overall gc look skidsville dude let the let's get it guy he had actually got like heat stroke the day before and then he didn't plan on doing the double header but that was what was really cool actually is that because it was a double header you could flat or have a mechanical or an issue on saturday and you could sort of get some redemption on sunday i felt way less anxiety knowing that there was two days so i really liked the format of two days but again i don't know who's who am i racing against like i don't know who's in the gc or who i should be racing against or whatever but it really honestly doesn't matter at this point i'm just barely hanging on um the the legs are warming up as we go but man i keep seeing a lot of like there's just people everywhere and i'm hoping that i'm gonna have some time to sort of come into the fitness come into the body and and perform better at the end but and i don't want to keep talking about this film premiere but the west texas project and all of the impossible route projects i take so very very seriously um and i pour my heart and soul into it and so you know that was just again this big huge like also then relief that it was done it was aired like people were stoked on it and so i started to get a little bit happier to be honest yeah dude hell yeah so starting to like shake out the cobwebs out of the mind a little bit and enjoy the ride it's like great weather you know i'm not feeling super great but who cares and so then we start doubling back on the rest of the group and dude the amount of love that i was getting from people on the way back good job good job then this triathlete passes us and he's he's a monster just an absolute monster doesn't even flick his elbow doesn't care if we're on his wheel and this is the wheel to be on but i don't really want to go this hard and so then i see jeremiah and i i don't know just seeing his face made me like think let's go for it [Music] so [Music] this guy is an absolute monster we are just getting a free ride i mean this guy's not even flicking his elbow or nothing he's just towing us home you're a legend mr all in black legend the dude was so crazy just motoring and uh i mean we're not going easy right i'm like 300 watts in his draft uh there's a huge crew and he bridged us maybe five six seven minutes to another group ahead of us unfortunately he bridged us straight into the final huge climb and then he got spit out the back and i felt so bad i was like i hope i can help you i can return the favor but the guy was i think 200 pounds and so climbing wasn't his thing but dude what a savior right and so i've now been bridged up to this maybe second group on the road and they were spicy uh they were putting it down but i've pretty much been doing nothing all day right and so then i kind of started to feel myself again feel the legs feel spunky and right here dude 700 watts right at the end of two bwrs okay now we're hitting double peak super long climb david's sweet right here in the allele kit he got fourth overall in the doubleheader did really well on saturday actually and so now it's just about trying to stay with his group as much as i can and we were kind of vibing with it man we were feeling pretty good [Music] [Applause] [Music] almost there man what was there [Music] now this guy was racing me hard and i love hard racing okay he did not want me to beat him uh he was attacking me every chance he could get and so it was really fun coming into the finish because we were straight up racing he's like attacking he attacked me like three times four times um and so that was that was really cool i was trying to stay with him i don't know what position we're actually racing for to be honest i feel like since we bridged up maybe we're top 10 you know but i don't know like i could i could be top 50. i have no idea uh the guy i would catch him in the dirt he would sprint away from me on the on the pavement um we had came into the final sprint and he had said hey i saw on strava you're you know you're working on your sprint you better you better be ready to test it out and boy when he said that i wanted to out sprint him so bad uh but you know dad i'm feeling like a bag of turds and so right here i should have like hopped the curb and done something cool and like pushed him into the barriers but you know whatever uh i was on his wheel i kind of i gave it everything i had we sprinted to the line and actually i got 15th overall in the wafer so that's that's what we finished in um i got 15th overall third in my age category and bro i got ninth overall in the double header top ten for your boy yeah that's fun well it took me a really long time for the legs to come around and i was definitely having a pity party for 80 of the ride but then that monster in all black bridged us to the group i was able to get some fuel in dump a bunch of ketones in and then i mean bro i was riding better than i have all weekend at the final like five miles so uh so third age group for today i don't know i still don't know what i got yesterday but the doubleheader which was my goal top ten overall ninth then i'm really happy with that ninth ninth overall at the bwr double header two bwrs back to back appreciate you watching i know this took a really long time to get out and actually get produced uh i've been working on unbound training unbound xl that is a big thing that i've been focusing on i also have best of both in oregon that event is coming up i'm really excited about that where you have three bikes actually so anyways i appreciate you watching thank you so much for all the support and until the next video as always vegan cyclists [Music] you

Channel: VC Adventures

Views: 150,616

Keywords: vegan cyclist, vegan cycling, health and fitness, bicycle riding, road bikes, cycling, bike racing, cycling tips, the vegan cyclist, go pro cycling, cycling go pro, bike hacks, cycling racing, tips for cycling, vegan athlete, cycling videos, cycling workouts, sufferfest cycling

Id: IsmHhPPQFK4

Length: 39min 5sec (2345 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022