Taupo 2016 - Group 2 all the way

It seems to be a bit of déjà vu about these race reports.. a disappointing ride at K2 then a good ride at Taupo, except this year at Taupo I had an excellent ride ;-)

This is the kind of report I had wanted to write for K2… that I rode smart in the bunch, didn’t get dropped, didn’t cramp and came in under goal time.. well it didn’t quite pan out exactly like that... but pretty close.

In a lot of ways it was a fairly uneventful ride (in a good way) in that a lot of the riders that I started with, I finished with. After parting ways with Carl as he lined up in group 1C, I made my way into group 2. As soon as I got inside the barriers I saw all the NZC guys lined up so went over and wished them all well. I was happy to see Phil had lined up with them and hoping that he’d have a good ride too (and he delivered ;-)  I decided I didn’t want to ride with them as 1) I don’t train with them so didn’t want to invite myself in 2) I thought they’d be aiming for just under 5hrs and I was targeting more like Sub 4.50 and 3) most importantly I’d have a better chance of beating PC by going it alone ;-)

However there wasn’t a lot of space for me to move up as the group 2 area was already pretty packed (and I didn’t want to be one of those wankers who pushes their way to the front) so I only got about 1 wave ahead of NZC but I wasn’t too fussed, I didn’t want to get too far to the front of group 2 anyway and end up starting too fast. As all the riders moved slowly towards the start line (when the groups in front get let out in waves) it was great to see a familiar face, Gustavo was about 5 rows in ahead of me. He slowly worked his way back so we could start together, which was nice.

I was hoping our bunch wouldn’t go out too hard and they didn’t.. each time I glanced at my Garmin the HR was mostly in the 150’s and occasionally hitting the 160’s (which is good for me at race pace) and this continued for the first 40km and we were averaging around 29.5kph, so things were looking good. Second 40k went much the same, I was sitting comfortably in the bunch, the legs responding nicely when I needed to move around riders or move up in bunch position and I was generally feeling good. The wind was more over the shoulder now so the avg speed picked up too, 2^nd 40k @ 32.4kph avg. Somewhere about 60k’s in Gustavo disappeared from the bunch… I later found out that he needed to stop for a pee ;-)

Once we passed the Kuratau interchange, things got busy. Passing the all the relay riders wasn’t good, as they obviously weren’t moving at the same speed as us and not always the best at keeping left. But saying that some of my bunch were taking stupid risks to pass them (undertaking riders or overtaking on the wrong side of the road etc). So this made the run into the base of the Kuratau climb even more stressful as everyone was fighting for position. I took the “safety first” approach which meant I was getting shuffled back in the group but figured staying upright was a bigger priority. Once we hit the climb the bunch split apart (as usual), I was climbing well, feeling good and passing guys but the front of the bunch was still riding away (or at least climbing as fast as I was) so by the top I was riding in groups of 4s and 5s. Still the pace was good and with the drink stop coming up I just sat on any wheel that came past me and consolidated. I’ve unravelled on this section before so was happy to put it behind me and was still feeling reasonably good.

The Waihi drink stop is a great marker in the race of how you are doing and my previous best times to here have been around 3hr 5mins, today it was bang on 3hrs, so was looking good for a 4.45 if I could hold things together. I got both my bottles filled with water and moved onto the descent. Unfortunately I got held up by a couple of vehicles, on the best descent in the race! but thought better of passing them and hit the flats spinning easily and waited for a faster group to catch me.. and didn’t wait long (about a 1km). A group of 3 (2 guys and a woman) came smashing along so I jumped on the back. We had a full on tailwind on this section but the lead rider was consistently hitting 45kph so I was really working hard just to hold on and for the first time in the ride I wondered how long I could hang there. Luckily we were picking up small groups of 3s and 4s, and he would take a small break each time we latched onto the back, then the lead guy would pull out and press on.

This game of leap frog continued until just after the Turangi turn off, when a group of 5 guys came up onto the front to help us out. These 5 guys were a group that started right beside me, all wearing the same kit. They were solid boys with plenty of power on the flats and happy to do the work. So with them, me and the 2 guys/1 women group we continued to pickup riders until we were towing about 100 behind us (as usual lots of guys were just sitting in, doing no turns on the front, leaving it to us.. but a couple of others did help out). This flat section flew past (whereas in the past it’s been a drag or real sufferfest to hang on) and we quickly got to Hatepe. My goal was to just climb as fast as the big guys in the bunch, then I knew I’d get a tow home. As soon as we hit the climb I knew I was safe as about 3 of us eased away from the bunch and soon put 50 – 100mtrs into the rest. I had put the climb into my Garmin so knew exactly how far I had to go and also how far off my PR that I was currently... I saw I was 6 – 8 sec’s down. So stupidly I started pushing my pace, trying to crack a PR… and right at the top of the climb, bang! both my calves started cramping badly (up until this point I hadn’t had any signs of cramp but had been sipping that Hotshot potion regularly). Ouch! Luckily I now had a buffer of a few hundred metres on the pack, so I backed my pace right off and alternated between standing up, seating spinning, stretching and eating/drinking... and waited for the group to catch me again, hoping I’ll be able to jump back in when they did.

They didn’t take long to catch me and I could feel them coming, so when I attempted to up my pace and jump back in the bunch, the legs responded enough to do so (being on a downhill false flat helped too). From here to the finish it was more of the same… same guys doing the work, me chipping in now and then, lots of guys sitting on behind. Airport hill was climbed at a pace I was happy with, I kept myself right at the front knowing that things usually start to get hectic from here (with all the sitters-in starting to make their bid for glory.. ). There was a couple of hairy moments leading into the finish with lots of tired guys changing lines etc but I just sat back and rolled in mid bunch, very content with my ride.

Ended up with a PB of around 12mins and certainly the best I’ve ever felt for the entire loop. Mistakes? Maybe not moving myself up further on the run in to Kuratau? But would that have changed my result… probably not. Other than that I don’t think the ride could have gone much better.. so very happy with the overall result… but only reinforces of what could have been at K2.. next year will be my year ;-)


And as far as the overall stats go, that’s my 8^th lap of the lake and my 4^th Sub 5hr time in a row but my first sub 4.50  (4:44:13 to be precise) ... so what to aim for next year?? 

K2 2016 - Clusterf&*k

The ride report I wanted to write was “Rode smart and hid in the bunch. Paced myself up the climbs, finished strong and finally achieved a Sub 7hr time…” but this is the report I have written.. please excuse general grammar mistakes etc as I can’t be bothered re-reading and correcting it..

Another K2, another cock-up.. some new mistakes, some old.

It’s Déjà vu time, when it comes to the K2 it nearly always ends up badly for me, either via bad luck, bad judgement, bad conditions… it’s very rarely been good. This year it was bad judgement combined with some bad preparation that let me down.

A week before the race I had been full of optimism, my training had been great, my weight the lowest it’s been for K2, I’d been disciplined with my taper, and even had some new Cramp stop juice that had worked well on the one occasion I’d tried it out. Mondo was riding the K2 again and had organised to ride with the Mt Eden Cycles (MEC) group, they were targeting a 6.30 finish time. He mentioned that to me about a month ago and I dismissed it as an unrealistic target for me and left it there… however it was tempting, knowing that this tactic had worked very well for me at Taupo to get my first Sub 5 finished there.

In the last week (when we were trading emails about the accommodation etc) the subject of the MEC group had come up again, and after discussion with Carl and more prompting from Mondo, I decided I’d give it a go (and please note, this is no dig at Mondo/Carl or anyone else I chatted to about riding with MEC, it was certainly my own choice and based on the MEC plan I seemed like it could be a good decision... but Carl summed it up while discussing the topic that “It could be death or glory…” decision).

My first mistake occurred before the ride even started, I’d left my battery, for the electronic gear shifting on my bike, in the charger in my garage and didn’t realise until we were nearly in Miranda… doh! But luckily, we’d bought Tracey’s bike along so she could ride on the Sunday. Her bike has the same battery as mine and I had checked how charged her battery was earlier and it was flashing green (which should mean 50 – 75% charge and Shimano say that a full charge is supposed to be good for about 1500km) so I decided not to turn around to get my battery.

Getting onto the ride itself, the day dawned fine, it had been raining overnight but was now just overcast with patches of blue sky and very little wind. I rode to the start line with Mondo, his friend Gustavo and Tim (until Tim realised he’d forgotten to apply sun-cream so he went back to get some). We made our way through the pack of riders, got in position and waited for our start group to get the green light. The MEC plan was to take the climbs at a reasonable pace, careful on descents and hammer the flats, with 3 – 4 very strong riders on the front, pulling the rest of the bunch and all we had to do was hang on. From my perspective MEC stuck to this plan up the first climb and until the turn off to Hot Water Beach (HWB, which is only 16kms into the ride). From here I really noticed that the wind had picked up into a strong westerly but also that the pace of the bunch ramped up as well. As an indication of the pace we were going, there is a segment on Strava from HWB to Whitianga and we did this 1min faster than Group 2, who are targeting 5.40 – 5.50!

However I was still in the group and had made my way towards the front, in an attempt to limit the surging and generally the pace is more regular there. The next big climb is Kuotuna hill and the bunch did slow down up here but I was also employing the tactic of starting at the front of the bunch at the beginning of the climb and slide to the back as the climb progressed but still keeping in contact.. and that worked Ok (but my Strava segment said we were still 30sec faster up that climb than planned) . At the top of this Kuotuna hill one of the lead riders got a flat front tyre so orders were sent out to stop the bunch ahead.. I was stoked! I figured that I could ride easy, get ahead of the bunch, then let them catch me up… unfortunately this lasted less than 15min as they caught me on the next climb Myundermans (but I don’t know how they could have fixed the flat and got back to me that quick! Wheel-wagon? )

Myundermans was the last climb I did with the MEC group, I was just hanging onto the back as we crested and flew down the descent.. but once we hit the flats on the other side the tempo was up and with my HR hitting the 170’s I finally decided to let them go… and they slowly eased away from me (funny how they didn’t seem to be going that fast then ;-)  My avg speed was over 31 at this point so I was hoping that I could ride easy, recover a bit, get over the next hard hills and still salvage a good ride (and maybe even still get a Sub 7?)  I rode mainly solo from here and as easy as I could over Whangapoua, Manaia, Kereta to the start of the Thames coast flat section. I think it was near the top of Kereta where I saw the familiar figure of Guy Starling (a friend we ride with sometimes), so I suggested we work together down the coast and hopefully get a group going, which we did.. sort of. We picked up one or two other stragglers along the way but Guy was suffering with cramp and came to a stop just out of Thames so I carried on. My Avg speed had dropped to 25.5 at the bottom of Kereta and was slowly working its way up to 26kph again by Thames but the strong winds made it hard to make up time. I remembered the last segment from Thames to Tairua took me 1hr 45 last year (including 5mins fixing a flat), so I figured if I get to Thames at 5.15 ride time, then with the hell wind becoming a tail wind after the Kopu turn, I might still have a chance of going Sub 7. I hit Thames at 5.17.

The climb of the Kopu-Hikuai seems never ending but at least the wind was now at our backs. It starts with a false flat, then has a few false starts before the climb really begins. I was on about the second downhill that I went to shift into the big ring, and… nothing… my battery was running out. FFS!! That was a hammer blow to the morale, a sub 7 was definitely out the window now, the plan now was shift as little as possible and try to make it to the finish. So every crest or downhill I coasted not wanting to change gear, knowing that the next change could be my last (dramatic, I know ;-) but I managed to get to the top ok, staying mainly in my easiest gear.

From the top of Kopu it should have been fast and furious to the finish (especially with the huge tailwind) but I also knew there are a few forgotten hills to go, not big climbs but enough to take all your momentum away. I was sticking to the middle of the rear cassette now, grinding the ups and spinning the flats until I ran out of cadence and finally it happened, I had made my last gear change. I ended up in a gear that I could just get up the hills but could only go about 27 - 28kph on the flats before my legs couldn’t spin anymore…  and to rub it in people were flying by me at 40 – 50kph.. AND I was still 15kms from the finish line. I pulled over to try and manually get a bigger gear by adjusting the front derailleur but it wouldn’t stick there (but made a nice rattle) and I also stopped once to take the battery out and put it back in, just to see if I could get just one more shift, but that didn’t work either. I had to suck it up and spin up to 28kph then coast… then spin/coast/spin/coast repeats to the finish.

I’ve had a look on Strava and compared what time others did over the last 20 odd kms, and in one flat 10km segment alone I lost 7mins so I think I lost anywhere from 10 – 15mins by losing my gears… which might have got me close to a Sub 7 time, but I doubt it, probably still would have missed by a couple of mins.. but it would have definitely got me a PB for the loop.

So in summary, I’m bloody disappointed but only have myself to blame… hopefully Taupo will go better ;-)