Gran Fondo Hincapie
I’m not sure how or when, but late last year I read about a cycling event that seemed right up my alley: an 82-mile road race in the hills of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. It’s a terrain very similar to what I ride regularly in Maryland, a distance I’m very comfortable with, and a low-stakes way to test myself in my first ever athletic contest outside of gym class.
I did what I always do: overdo it. Beginning in January, I started doing more intervals, more sprints, more climbs, and longer distances. I had some bad luck with weather, illness and travel, so I didn’t get to train as seriously as I had the previous winter, but I could feel myself getting faster and stronger. On group rides I’m always good on climbs, but I started getting much faster in more settings.
The first weekend of May, Shelley and I headed to the eastern shore for a repeat of the first century ride I’d ever done the year before. I did that ride on a 30lb hybrid the first time, but finished in a decent time, in part because of the guys in my first pace line. (The only real issue was that I pulled my patellar tendon and couldn’t ride a bike for two months.)
This time around I rode the whole thing solo, and averaged 3mph faster than I had in a group. I had a real road bike, my beloved 1995 GT Edge Ti, and nobody on the course could keep up with me. Because I was training for an 82-mile race, I brought a bunch of gels and assorted calorie-dense snacks, managed my food and hydration as best I could, and didn’t stop at any rest stops for any reason for the first 84 miles. I was VERY encouraged.
With 4 weeks remaining, I was excited and confident. So of course things started going wrong. First I got a chest cold, and next I discovered that I was a fool. (This wasn’t exactly new information.)
For one thing, 8 miles of the course is unpaved dirt and gravel roads. My GT had the biggest tires I could fit in the fork and frame: a 23mm up front and 25mm in the back. That’s… not acceptable. For riding on gravel, the wider the better. You can make do for short distance on 25mm tires, but 28 is where actual gravel bikes start, and people are moving up to 45 or 50mm at this point. So I went to my local bike shop, told them I needed a bigger fork to accommodate a 25mm tire, and got it ordered and installed. Problem solved! But there was another issue with the race.
I went on a ride with a guy in my club who was wearing a “Gran Fondo National Series” jersey, so after the ride I looked them up. It turns out that the ride I was doing was run in just the same way, and it was nothing like what I’d been training for.
Instead of being timed over the whole distance, it’s a “timed segment” race. There are 4 sections of the course with timing mats at the beginning and end, and the combined time it takes you to complete them is how you’re ranked. So I wasn’t really training for an 82-mile effort, I was training for 4 efforts totaling 19 miles with 65 miles of hills and getting worn out in between.
Because the rest stops are outside the timed segments, you can stop at them as you like. You don’t have to go all out the whole time, and can save your legs for the important parts.
Except that it isn’t that simple. The smart thing to do is to find a pace line going your speed and take turns at the front. This way you go faster through the course using less energy. But then you have to be judicious about what you do during the timed segments, decide when to leave your group behind, or if you want to stop at rest stops with the group. Suddenly, this all seemed like the kind of thing that rewards experience, and I didn’t have any.
So it was back to intervals and sprints for me, interspersed with group rides of longer distances and long zone 2 efforts at the recently reopened loop around a nearby lake. If I didn’t have racecraft, I could still just try to be faster.
And it worked! The group ride I went on 8 days before the race was a triumph. I rode from home and just absolutely flew up the hills. I was setting PRs on every segment, and not at all tired after an enormous effort. I felt invincible. The only issue was that my road bike was making a new noise.
A few months before, I started hearing squeaks from the bottom bracket area that wouldn’t go away. I would take it to my bike shop, they would tighten some things, and send me on my way, only for the squeaks to return. But on this day, there was an easier to recognize sound. As I pushed down with my left foot and got to the bottom of the pedal stroke, the chain and chainring on the right side would rub against the inside of the front derailleur. Over the course of the ride as I tore up long climbs in the big chainring, it got louder and more frequent.
Instead of riding home, I rode straight to the bike shop. I explained everything to the mechanic and he looked worried. After putting the bike on the repair stand and looking at the bottom bracket from different angles, it was clear: the frame was cracked. There was a crack that started on one side of the downtube, followed the weld that connected the seat tube to the bottom bracket shell around and up onto the other side of the downtube. The mechanic told me that the bad news was that I couldn’t ride the bike, but the good news was that I could tell people I was strong enough to crack a titanium frame.
(How the frame cracked isn’t that simple, but no explanation that anyone can come up with is satisfying. Either there has been a manufacturing defect in my bike’s frame that went unnoticed for 30 years until I started riding it last July, OR an amateur cyclist who didn’t even get a road bike until he was almost 50 is so strong that he cracked the frame of what people call a “forever bike” just by pedaling too hard. Both are impossible, right?)
I was dejected. With 8 days to go, I didn’t have a road bike to take on a road race I’d been preparing to ride for almost 5 months. I’d already paid for the hotel (no refunds) and the $225 entry fee (no refunds), and taken time off work to go. I’d also spent over $300 on that new fork and front tire. Technically I had two road bikes: a very heavy 44-year-old steel bike that would be hard to transport and harder to push up hills, and a 34-year-old aluminum and carbon fiber composite bike that is pretty light, but that I really could tear apart just by riding it too hard.
While I was disassembling the GT in the hopes of finding a frame to put them on, Shelley went to work and started scouring the internet for used bikes that were in my size, capable of being a decent replacement, not too expensive, and within a hundred miles. I loved one of them right away: a 2017 Cannondale Synapse Hi-Mod with disc brakes and a wired Ultegra Di2 groupset. Light and fast with an endurance geometry for long rides and carbon fiber layup techniques borrows from the race-focused Super Six Evo. Plus, it was “Vulcan Green” and “Acid Orange” with matching wheels. I contacted the seller.
The next day I was test-riding the bike and bargaining with the seller. It wasn’t perfect: it had a compact crankset with smaller chainrings than I’m used to, and the 2 smallest cogs in the cassette had a few broken teeth. But it was close enough. I took it home, changed out the commuter tires for the 25mm ones that had been on my GT, swapped the 11-30 cassette for the GT’s 11-34, and waxed a gold chain to replace the worn-out one it came with. Some bottle cages and a mount for my Wahoo, and it was mostly ready to go.
My remaining problems were that it wasn’t shifting smoothly and the rear brake needed to be bled. I had to work Sunday afternoon, so I took the bike down to my local bike shop figuring that they could sort it out that afternoon, be closed as usual on Monday and I’d get the bike on Tuesday. But Monday was Memorial Day, and between one thing and another, the bike wasn’t ready until Wednesday afternoon.
I took it on a group ride on Thursday, and went all out, pushing the bike extra hard just to get used to how to ride it. The electronic shifting was totally new to me, and the bike was a little bigger than my GT. But the real problem was that I couldn’t get into the smallest cog in the cassette. Any time I shifted into top gear, it would downshift again. On my GT I didn’t use the 11-tooth cog all that much, but it had a 52-tooth chainring. Stepping down to a 50/34 crankset meant that to go the speeds I wanted, I needed the 11 to work. So I took it back and had the shop work on getting that last cog to work. I also asked them to lower and flip the stem at the same time. I left happy, and on Friday morning, Shelley and I did 20 miles of slow laps at the lake.
That afternoon we drove to Allentown, PA, and I picked up my packet at the Valley Preferred Cycling Center - an outdoor velodrome that was the start and finish of Saturday’s ride. After getting dinner and some donuts at the farmers market, we checked into our kinda-grimy motel, and went to bed early.
A thing about me is that my brain is stupid and hates me. If I need to wake up early, it makes sure I wake up an hour before my alarm. If there’s something important to do, make that 2 hours. Or in this case 3. I was up at 2:30 but managed to sneak in 45 extra minutes a couple hours later.
Once 5:30 rolled around, I started getting ready. I ate my donuts, I dressed, I loaded the car and headed to the velodrome in the rain. Oh, didn’t I mention that? The forecast over the previous ten days had shifted from clear skies to increasing amounts of rain. By the time we got to the starting line, over 2 inches of rain were on the roads, including those 8 miles of dirt and gravel. Luckily, I had disk brakes and just-wide-enough tires, but it was going to be a chilly, muddy start.
But it actually went pretty well! They did a neutral start where everyone just rides along at an easy pace for a bit until the course marshals indicate that you can take off. By that point I was near the front and so I sped up and started following the pace car. Without trying to go super fast, I was out front alone for a bit. After a couple miles, a young man came around and got in front of me, starting a pace line. I thought that seemed great, so I did my best to hang onto his wheel.
It was then that I realized that I still couldn’t get the bike to stay in top gear. Nothing to be done about it, so I just upped my cadence and did what I could. After a bit, as I was struggling to keep up, I heard the sound of a bike behind me coasting. Looking back, there was a whole line of people drafting off me. I didn’t want to get dropped and have them all pass me, so I pedaled even harder. That was a mistake.
After another mile we came to a turn and headed up a hill. Not a very steep hill, but after going all out to stay at the front, it was a hill that I wasn’t ready for. And with that, the pace line started passing me. I downshifted and tried to keep up, but I was already pretty close to my max heart rate.
I felt terrible. Here I was a handful of miles in and already getting tired. All my plans seemed like they were in shambles. But I was still strong enough to recover and start passing a few of the people ahead of me. I kept it up and pretty soon I was passing groups of people. At one point I passed 3 people and a few miles later heard them talking behind me. They’d just decided to draft off me, and I’d been helping them along unknowingly. Since it hadn’t cost me anything, I figured that was fine.
Another mile went by and we entered the first timed segment. Because they’d spent the last few miles drafting, they all took off ahead of me while I fought to keep up. One of them seemed the strongest and the rest of us followed him…
…as he missed a turn and took us off-course. We didn’t realize it until he’d disappeared over the top of a hill, but our bike computers were trying to navigate us back onto the course. We followed their suggestion, since turning around might be worse, but we got dumped onto a busy country road with long steep climbs. Eventually we made a turn down a long descent and found the route heading to the left. Just to the right of us was the end of segment timing mat, so we circled around and slowly crossed it, figuring that any time was better than none.
We split up after that, and I found myself chasing various groups and passing them. I skipped the first rest stop because I wasn’t hungry, and focused on chasing down people who hadn’t gone the wrong way up big hills. Pretty soon I was 32 miles into the course and entering the second segment. That’s when I realized that I hadn’t eaten anything since the start of the ride.
Sports nutrition experts these days will remind you that your body isn’t like a car. Your car can go just as fast on a quarter tank as a full tank, but as your body runs out of fuel, it starts slowing down to conserve what energy you have left. Professional cyclist now eat 60-100 grams of carbohydrates every hour on the road, and as part of my training, I’d been trying to make sure that I could do the same without encountering any… tummy trouble.
But I wasn’t likely to have any trouble because I hadn’t eaten! While I was trying to get through the 8.2 mile segment as fast as I could, I was also gulping down gels and gummies. Pretty soon I was feeling fed and strong again.
I went through a gravel section before the next rest stop, and in addition to covering my bike and legs in mud, I got a small rock caught between my front rotor and brake pad. Nothing could dislodge it. At the rest stop they had a hose, so I washed all the mud off that I could, and hosed down the brakes which mostly just made them squeaky.
Things were pretty chill for a while, as I continued moving up, and occasionally passing and getting passed by a guy younger than me. Other than him, nobody had gotten in front of me since the first rest stop.
As I rode up to the final timed segment, I saw a cyclist with his bike on the ground. I offered to help, and he said “no” because his chain had snapped. I commiserated for a moment, then slowly rolled over the timing mat. I tried to get a good pace going, but most of the segment was gravel. As I was going on a gravel path through a field, a woman walking a dog stopped me to ask about the race, if I was involved, if there would be more riders… I did my best and headed onwards, slowed down more than I liked.
Near the end of the segment was a steep paved climb where I passed a number of people walking their bikes up the hill. They told me I was doing great, and I realized they were right. I’d been fast and consistent since the second section. As I finished the course I felt good. I’d made some mistakes and certainly tanked my ride, but it was still fun, and friendly strangers had buoyed my spirits.
At the end of the ride, you get to do a lap of the velodrome (which is pretty cool). I parked my bike, found Shelley volunteering at the food stand, ate lunch and walked around looking for something to drink. I was pretty happy with my ride, but accepted that I’d screwed up a few things on the ride and had some pretty bad luck beforehand. I mean, getting my bike all set up only to lose it a week out? Trying to get a new bike in order, only to still not have the top gear? But at least it was a fun ride.
At the velodrome, the emcee who had been talking over Jock Jams™ all day announced that the medal winners for all the categories would be announced soon, but that you could also just scan a QR code and look up your results. And there I was: 11th in my age group and 41st overall! I wasn’t going to be on the podium, but I’d done really well.
And finally I’d had some good luck: the timing mats for the first segment — the one I biffed badly — had failed, so nobody was being judged on them. In fact, a woman I’d been off-course with while following her husband won her age group category!
Last night Shelley asked me if having everything turn out well even with all the drama was going to help me be less anxious in the future, and my joke response was that I was definitely going to be less anxious about that race, now that it was over. But in all serious, the lesson I’ll probably take is that being anxious pays off.
