Yesterday I went out to try and get a 3000 meter ride in. I created the route on RWGPS and made sure it was well over what I hoped to eventually climb, but in the end I only got 2800 meters. In any event, it was the biggest ride of the year so far and closely matched the meters-to-kilometer that I’ll be seeing in the event (if I don’t chicken out first).

First, my moving speed on the day was 20.1kph. I expected more, but I think the very technical descents of my local mountains slowed me down. I hope that the faster Alpine roads will let me make up a bit of time. I’m also still 71kg, so the speed going up will hopefully increase as I shed those precious grams.

On those climbs, my VAM was an average of 655, which is just over what could get me back to Les Saisies by midnight, i.e. I’ll need to increase this to build in a cushion on the day. My riding time was 6:13 and total elapsed was 6:33, so 20 minutes of breaks in around 6 hours. If I do this on the event that should extrapolate to an hour.

If I’m being optimistic things are looking okay. My 125km yesterday is 38% of the 330km of TMB and the 2870m I climbed, 35% of the the 8300m of the event. The event is 2.9 times the amount of climbing I did yesterday. If you multiply my total time on and off the bike yesterday by 2.9 I get 18 hours, meaning I’d finish within an hour of the time limit.

But of course that’s not the way things work in the real world. Firstly, there’s a real chance that I just can’t ride 330km and 8300m and my legs will stop turning. Secondly, 2800m is something I’ve done many times in the past and the fatigue did not build up very much. I can’t imagine how slow the death march will be on the last climb or two of the event. I need more cushion…lots more cushion.