Pacing for endurance events, such as Leadville 100, is a common stumbling block for many athletes. Get it right and you can maximize results you get for the fitness you have. However, if you get it wrong you can have a disastrous result that doesn’t reflect your true ability, or the dreaded Did Not Finish (DNF).
I like to think about pacing like we might think about driving our car on a long trip where we want to finish quickly but also have to be careful to conserve fuel and avoid crashing or mechanicals. If our goal is to use a limited fuel supply we can use tactics like staying steady on the gas pedal (versus accelerating aggressively), coasting on descents and staying off the brakes, drafting other vehicles, and making quick stops at the gas (aid) stations to replenish fuel.
Training Your Pacing for Endurance Cycling
The first area to consider is your training. Your previous workouts should be building confidence in distances and durations similar to your goal event. For our car analogy this is all the driving we have done before to learn the intricacies of our car–How it responds in the mountains, how it sounds when it is working to hard, how far we can get on certain fuel. For an event like Leadville, I’ll often have athletes ride long tempo intervals at 80 to 85 percent of max heart rate and/or the related power zones and/or at an moderate RPE (feeling) to get used to controlling the pace they can hold for the event. This intensity is key to know for places we COULD pedal harder but will hold back early in the event so that we can endure faster later in the race and finish with our best finish time.
Use Technique & Equipment to Improve Pace
I find it comforting to remind clients (and myself) that we don’t have to pedal for the entire time or distance in these massive ultra-endurance races. With thousands of feet of climbing we will also (usually) have thousands of feet of descending. Since we have time on flat and downhill terrain we can go faster without being fitter (putting out more power) by getting better at drafting, riding aerodynamically and by riding better technically down the hills.
Back to our analogy of the little car with the limited gas tank, we can save energy but gain time if we can be smooth on downhills, corners and flats technically. We can also get low, narrow our hands and draft other riders so that we can conserve while maintaining or improving our goal pace.
Equipment choice is also a factor that helps your pacing, if we think about pacing as strategies that help us finish a distance in our optimal time. Using different bikes, helmets, tires, and shoes are the biggest variations with comfort, aerodynamics and lightness always being compared for which will get you to the finish line fastest. Be careful assuming aero or light are always the best for ultra-endurance (e.g. dual suspension is often a good choice).
Feeling: Boring to Start
While heart rate and power offer attractive and seemingly simple pacing guides, it is important to develop a feel for your sustainable pace because ultimately your feeling will guide your decisions and other metrics can fail or be misleading. Again, this is something we should be learning in training, but generally in endurance events, avoiding sprinting or extended efforts that cause labored breathing in the first half to three-quarters of the race will allow you to finish on pace at or under your goal time! For many athletes the suggestion of ‘be a little bored’ in the first parts of the race helps to avoid overdoing it while you are fresh and excited.
Our favorite workout to practice this for ultra-endurance racers is doing 4 hours hard. You go hard for 4 hours with all your race equiptment and fueling and the idea is you don’t fade and you aren’t completely done at the end. Many people don’t finish the first one or fade a lot so this helps build an understanding of ‘start boring’ or start easier than you think, especially because these athletes are generally racing 6-12+hour races!
If/when you are over your feeling or HR limit it is worth assessing whether it will tactically put you ahead or end up leaving you low on gas in the last quarter of the race. When you’re beginning to breathe hard, feeling muscle tension, embrace it and consider what you’re going to do with that: are you going to make it up the steep hill, or make it to the back of the pack ahead of you. You have the ability to push harder then 85%, it is just a limited fuel and so must be saved for critical moments (I like to think about this like hitting the ‘NOS’ button in a Fast And the Furious Car–Don’t Hit it Too Soon!)
Don’t forget: the first ten minutes of an endurance race generally isn’t the time for your best 20 minute FTP test. There is lots of clear road in the last 90 miles of most events so for most athletes and most goals there is room to let the first parts of the race be boring.
Plan Your Times
Another tactic not used as frequently in cycling is split times. As an example, in Leadville, having a split for when you’ll get to halfway or to a given aid station helps chunk up the race and keep you on your pace. For many big events there are pace sheets available online, if not also provided by the race organizers, that help base your expectations and pacing off past racers’ efforts.
While some people prefer many split times during the course but I find that 1 or 2 notable landmarks are sufficient to check in on the outcome goals while we focus most of our energy on executing fueling, navigation and technical goals that will get us to the outcome goal, assuming we have trained well and execute our plan well!
In training, we aim to do several rides where there are split times or goal average speed to maintain while also using the race HR/Feeling limits. It might be riding 3-6 hours at 30km/hr while also staying under the race heart rate limit as an example.
Plan Your Fueling
An often overlooked contributor to pacing is fueling. If we fail to fuel optimally, this will obviously affect our ability to sustain a pace, even if that pace was within our fitness capacity. Training with your fueling strategy and sticking to your fueling strategy (unless it’s obviously not working) is generally the best course of action.
If you find you are fading late in events then you should try practicing and racing with higher fuel and fluid intakes. In big endurance events we see athletes using *over* 240 kcal (60 grams of carb). Hydration is usually over 16 ounces of water per hour, with hotter and/or harder and/or higher races and paces requiring over 20 ounces per hour. As water consumption gets higher it is likely wise for most people to add additional electrolyte/sodium to the hydration plan.
The most important thing to take away about fueling is that it’s not just race day. It’s practicing putting the fuel in your body while training for months (and years) that enables you to do it on race day effectively. Trying to hit the high carbohydrate amounts on race day, without ‘gut training’ is a recipe for gastrointestinal disaster or for a lot of fuel to get carried around a race course and not used!
Tough It Out, Critical Moments
While pacing lets you be a little bored and take it easier early in the race that does not mean you won’t have low moments and certainly does not mean that when the critical moments in the race come that you are not going to be working hard or maximally. The last miles, the final hill the big attack will come, and you need to be ready for those.
Being able to stay positive and keep moving forward is essential, however the race goes.
Just like all of the other elements in our training, having a plan for pacing will help you avoid frustration or miscalculation during the race.
Check out our popular post about finishing the Leadville 100 MTB Faster for more about strategies to maximize your performance without training more!
