Dickerson Mine Endurance 2025

JJ had a blast and took the win overall. Thanks 🙏 to so many of you who made sure she was safe and not overdoing it out there.

Not bad for 13 yrs old.

Somehow I got 2nd place by 34 seconds.

This was a tactical error. Duh.


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Glenn Rides After 4 PM CST said:
I don't know what causes it. Every year I do this race I get debilitating leg cramps.
I can do 100 mile 7k ride no problem. But this race I'm off the the bike and walking.
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What's your nutrition like on the bike?

Repetitive punchy efforts like this takes a ton of carbs to fuel the muscles. I cramped at Little Sugar and have been having a postmortem about it trying to figure out what went wrong.

I upped my carbs to 100g/hour on Sunday and felt fantastic.
 
Cassinonorth said:
What's your nutrition like on the bike?

Repetitive punchy efforts like this takes a ton of carbs to fuel the muscles. I cramped at Little Sugar and have been having a postmortem about it trying to figure out what went wrong.

I upped my carbs to 100g/hour on Sunday and felt fantastic.
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60 grams per bottle. Drank 1 1/2 before the cramps .That was 2 hours in. 1 untapped gel and one PB&J uncrustable.afyer lap 2

After the cramp. 1 gel and one more PB&J. Walked a bit and then rode to finish
 
Glenn Rides After 4 PM CST said:
60 grams per bottle. Drank 1 1/2 before the cramps .That was 2 hours in. 1 untapped gel and one PB&J uncrustable.afyer lap 2

After the cramp. 1 gel and one more PB&J. Walked a bit and then rode to finish
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Try gradually bringing that up if you can.

I was around that 70-80g/hour when I cramped too. Took down basically all the carbs I had and gradually came back to life over the last 30 miles. Could also be worthwhile to look at your sodium intake as well.
 
Glenn Rides After 4 PM CST said:
60 grams per bottle. Drank 1 1/2 before the cramps .That was 2 hours in. 1 untapped gel and one PB&J uncrustable.afyer lap 2

After the cramp. 1 gel and one more PB&J. Walked a bit and then rode to finish
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Since we’re all giving you advise, let me pitch in. Jim is pretty right with adding in some intensity with the longer rides. After your next Zwift race, do 10 minutes of recovery spin and then work in 60 - 90 minutes of z2 afterwards.
I’m assuming you probably pushed pretty hard in the first 30 minutes of the race and didn’t realize because the adrenaline was pumping. But you probably never recovered, got in a hole and no amount of sugar will get you back to a race pace. Sessions like this definitely improved my fitness.

If I’m honest with myself, most of my cramping came from riding harder than I trained for. I’m sure nutrition may have helped a little but I just didn’t train for how I actually raced.

Another approach would be to just work on going your own pace in the beginning and letting everyone go by and hope you’ll catch them in the later laps. Don’t get caught up trying to keep up. It’s really not as important as it is in a 90 minute xc race.
 
Steve Vai said:
Also work in doing longer rides at race effort or your nutrition won't matter. If you lollygag during centuries of course you'll shut down when you double the effort.
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Jeremy said:
Since we’re all giving you advise, let me pitch in. Jim is pretty right with adding in some intensity with the longer rides. After your next Zwift race, do 10 minutes of recovery spin and then work in 60 - 90 minutes of z2 afterwards.
I’m assuming you probably pushed pretty hard in the first 30 minutes of the race and didn’t realize because the adrenaline was pumping. But you probably never recovered, got in a hole and no amount of sugar will get you back to a race pace. Sessions like this definitely improved my fitness.

If I’m honest with myself, most of my cramping came from riding harder than I trained for. I’m sure nutrition may have helped a little but I just didn’t train for how I actually raced.

Another approach would be to just work on going your own pace in the beginning and letting everyone go by and hope you’ll catch them in the later laps. Don’t get caught up trying to keep up. It’s really not as important as it is in a 90 minute xc race.
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Excellent advice here from both. Dealt with cramps in my previous fitness life. Once I understood that no amount of nutrition could offset undertraining, haven't really dealt with cramping issues while riding since. Sitting around after riding, for sure. I'm well aware that my endurance HR is between 80-140bpm and can probably manage an endurance race with an avg HR up to around 150bpm, but need to be careful. My XC race avg starts around 155bpm.
 
Glenn Rides After 4 PM CST said:
MTB fitness and gravel/road fitness are to entirely different animals
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im late to the discussion topic but you already got great advice, and you said it perfectly here. And being more of the roadie/gravel endurance rider as well, I can relate to this statement.

I used to get cramps and figured out part of the problem is I sweat a lot, especially in the warmer months but even in this weather it can sneak up on me. I add some table salt to my G-Zero bottles and then I use something like NUUN tablets for any longer rides along with some electrolyte tablets. For the more intense rides (i.e. 30-50 mile faster/hillier rides) I will also fuel up a bit different during the ride as mentioned above with extra carbs. (clif bars, chewie gummies etc...).

I recently started doing some 30-40 min zwift races to get some intensity riding in, since I find myself enjoying cruising around outdoors for many miles but not pushing myself as hard as I might with a workout. I got some great benefits from the structured training I did for my charity event so I am trying to mimic some of what I was doing from March-Sept to carry it through into the holiday season.

HMU when you guys plan something either road/gravel. I have not been on my MTB since March so I will need to get some skills/muscle memory back before I do any real typ MTB rides.
 
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