Ride Long, Ride Happy
A few years ago, everyone wanted to ride Sportives or Grand Fondo’s. The biggest and best sold out quickly. Gravel riding and racing is exceedingly popular now. Trends come and go but anything that encourages more people to ride bikes is good with me. Currently the desire is to run and ride long. Ultra Distance running is hot. Marathons are not long enough, and the calendar is full of longer challenges.
The same goes for bike rides. From a 4000 km trip from Italy to the very northernmost tip of the European land mass, to any number of north-south and east- west challenges all over the world, there are now ultra-races to suit anyone with the desire to suffer.
But there are issues which most people – me – never expected to encounter as the distance rolls under our wheels. During my recent seven day, solo, ride from Lands’ End to John O’Groats (LEJOG), a journey of almost 1500 kms, I had a great deal of time to contemplate some of these things and work on mitigation strategies. Here are a few that help me. I hope they can help you too.
Is there a sport more brutal to your backside than long distance biking? Long distance horsing perhaps? Is that even a thing? Sitting on a bike all day is not good for your important places. Sorry to bring up the subject of bottoms so early in this piece. The most comfortable seat at the start of the day can feel brutally hard after big miles. Every bump in the road feels like untold damage is being done to your undercarriage.
It has taken a long time to find a pair of bib shorts that works. I tried lots of different ones. I have bought many brands on recommendation, only to find they do not work for me at all. It has taken a lot of chafing over five years of trying, but I have arrived in a good place. However, shorts that work for a 100km ride might be agony at 300km. Testing is therefore particularly important and everyone’s butt is different.
The same goes for a saddle. I had a seat that worked so well, I rode it to destruction and I have never managed to replace it with one that works as well. My latest has a slot down the middle which relieves pressure and provides a bit of ventilation. Again, test. Try several and hang on to the one that works for you as if your life depends on it.
Put chammy cream on the pad of your shorts and on you: Make sure you rinse your shorts out every night if you can. Do not spare the cream and add more during the ride if you start to chafe. Find a cream that works for you.
Move around: Try not to sit in one place on the bike all day. Use tri-bars if you have them, they reduce pressure on your butt by around 30%. Keep your hands moving on the bars as this adjusts the angle of your body and relieves the pressure points.
Give yourself back-side a break: Every time you come to a short rise, get some blood back into your important places by getting out the saddle. You can almost feel the blood rushing back. Raise your body a little over bumps and ease upwards slightly in the saddle during downhill runs, just to get some air circulating and restore the flow to your sit bones. Any movement is good just to relieve the pressure of sitting in one place. Do these things from early in the ride and you will avoid the loss of circulation. Stretch your hip flexors as well. Clenching your butt cheeks also feels disturbingly good after sitting in one place for a long time.
It is tempting to pump tyres up too much in pursuit of speed. Softer tyres, particularly tubeless ones, can provide the most forgiving ride, cutting out a lot of the uneven road surface that causes your saddle to rub and your weight to be forced down through your sit-bones. Likewise, make sure as you ride, that you are in the correct gear, trying not to bounce up and down of the saddle by spinning a low one. But do not try and update your set-up just in time for your next long ride. Do not try anything new without testing it first.
Looking after my backside when I do stop has high priority. I have experienced unbelievably bad saddle sores on a long ride only once. Open wounds on your sit bones are not what you need with several hundred kilometres still to ride. Keep clean and apply Sudocrem overnight.
I used to have issues with all of my contacts points. Hands would be rubbed red raw until I stopped wearing mits. Feet are still an issue but the lack of circulation that causes the pain is now easily resolved by un-clipping from the pedals and swinging my leg back and forth, driving blood back into the extremities.
Now we are all sitting comfortably, we can start to consider how to manage an effort that can take multiple hours and sometimes multiple days.
I have learned that as I ride longer, particularly over successive days, the mid-day energy dip becomes deeper and deeper. For two to three hours sometimes, riding can be a grind as I feel my body runs out of resources to drive forward. I have tried eating more and that does help, but on long days, by early afternoon, I can be in a daze, not making good decisions, having to talk to myself - a lot. Applying a can of what one of the presenters on EuroSport called the ‘Black Doctor’, aka Cola, delivers a feel-good boost of enegy and some welcome caffeine.
Resorting to telling yourself that ‘this too will pass’ helps and come mid-afternoon, my mind becomes clearer, energy flows back into the legs and I can finish strong, no matter how long I have been riding. At the end of The Dean, a hilly 310 km Audax around the Cotswolds anf Forect of Dean, I was flying for the whole of the last three hours, into the dark, the mid-day fatigue a distant memory. It is very hard to train for something like this without putting yourself through successive long days. Nothing else seems to prepare you for it.
Gratitude is a great energiser and there are also many things that you learn to be grateful for on a long ride. For example, around an hour in, my body seems to start to work in a different way. When I was young and daft, I could never be bothered with warm ups. These days, it takes me at least an hour to get things working properly. But as the blood begins to flow and the energy courses through my veins, that is a moment to be treasured, the part of the day where you feel your very best, but where you also know, you are not likely to feel quite this good again for all the rest of the day!
A good cup of coffee or a hot bacon roll on a chilly morning is wonderful, but there is often only a catalogue of Gas Station road-food to be had. I have learned to handle the disappointment that I feel when a see a place to fill my pockets up ahead and it turns out to be one of those filling stations that only sells ultra-processed foods.
Lachlan Morton, the Aussie pro long distance rider, was pictured recently with his selection of Gas Station consumables. This consisted of chocolate milk, two packets of Oreo Cookies and a large jar of dill pickles, from which he was drinking the juice. I would have problems keeping this down. But it works for Lachlan. And that is the message. Eat what works for you.
As a sub-note to this. Leal Wilcox, who as I write is set on breaking the round the world record held by Jenny Graham, offers advice on shopping for road-food: Always buy twice or even three times as much as you think you need. In one clip on YouTube, Leal eats a portion of fries and a cheeseburger and stows the same in her bar top bag for future consumption.
It is possible to successfully fill your day with moments of gratitude. The amount of distance covered, getting to half way, a long downhill after an arduous climb or just the unbridled joy of the warm sun, a following wind and the skylarks singing full throated all around. On a long ride over the North Yorkshire Moors, the scenery made my heart sing. The joy of moving through Gods Own County was unsurpassed.
No matter how much fun you are having, stopping at the end relieves the ocean-sound in your ears, you stand, and your bones re-set as your body unwinds. You have a stretch and feel instantly more human.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, given he was a polymath, probably didn’t have a lot of time to ride his bike, even if he had one. But he did say something that I think is highly relevant to riding you bike a long way:
Do not hurry. Do not rest
This strikes me as the very best way to approach a long distance ride.