In a week or so (haven’t totally settled on a day), I’ll be heading out West for Marathon Nationals. A few years ago, I raced my first Singlespeed race at Marathon Nationals in Breckenridge, CO. I had a good time and ended up 3rd.

This year, with a lot more training in my legs (and likely a bigger field), I’m hoping to improve upon that. Since the course is at altitude (not super-crazy Breck altitude), I’m changing up my acclimatization strategy. I’ve come to realize that the first day I’m at altitude, I feel like a rockstar- as in, “damn, the air here isn’t totally humid, so I feel awesome and can pedal really hard.” As is expected with normal human physiology, that feeling fades after about 24-36 hours. So, for the race at Sun Valley, I’m planning on avoiding altitude until the Friday evening prior to the race. In order to do so, I’ll pre-ride a little on Thursday, but spend most of the time leading up to the race in south Idaho (3-4K ft of elevation). It’s going to involve a lot of driving , but I’m hoping it will pay off with killer race-day legs.

Afterward, I’m gonna jet back home, recover, and, along the way, contemplate as to whether or not I want to pack up and make the haul to Cross Country Nationals in Pennsylvania less than a couple of weeks later. It’s really going to depend on my results and the degree of either contentment or angst that they produce. Considering the degree of heat, humidity, and poor air quality we get around Memphis that time of summer, it’d be a nice break to go train someplace where there’s just lots of heat and humidity. Otherwise, I’ll be mixing it up on the trainer like I did last year (not so bad, really… there are much worse things than a quick morning indoor interval workout).

For now, I’m enjoying the relatively nice weather. Yesterday, I went out on what was probably, at 112 miles, my longest ride to date. Initially, I wasn’t sure how long of a route I’d need for my prescribed 6 hours, so I started off with a 100 mile course that I’d previously completed in 5 hours, 15 minutes then tacked on an extra loop at the end. I felt strong the entire time, but I’m incredibly glad that 6 hour road rides aren’t a regular thing, because I was prettymuch ready to by sitting on a couch and not a bike by about hour 5.
Side note- sure, I’ve done my share of MTB rides way over 6 hours in the course of NUE races. This goes back to my previous post about training on the road, though. During a 6 hour ride, I had 27 minutes of coasting (you can look this metric up in training peaks or any other software that allows you to see how much of your ride was at a cadence of “0”). You can’t get that amount of pedaling if you’re only riding trails.

Today I’m laying low, going to a yoga class, and sticking around the house to work on some bikes. My repaired I9 wheel is coming back today, so I’m going to set my singlespeed up in race mode and get in some non-shifting miles before Natz.