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 ;-)