- Riding a gravel event could well be a little
bit different to what you're used to.
Whether that's road racing or sportives,
or just the local club run.
Endurance, self-sufficiency, and comfort
could well become more important,
and so your training is gonna need to reflect that.
As Katherine here knows all about.
She's currently preparing for her first major gravel event,
The Dirty Kanza.
- Yeah, and as I try and figure out my training,
set-up, and equipment for the race,
we thought we'd go about making a guide for you guys too.
So here's how to get the best
out of your first gravel event.
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- As with preparing for any event,
the first thing you should do is actually choose,
and then enter, your event.
- [Katherine] Well, thanks for pointing out the obvious
with that one there, Si.
- [Simon] That's all right, that's what I'm here for.
- [Katherine] In my case, the Dirty Kanza,
is a 200 mile gravel endurance race,
across the Flint Hills of Kansas, in the States.
- I am so jealous about that.
Now, how ambitious you're feeling
is gonna depend a little bit, I guess,
on how experienced you are at bike-riding.
So, whether you're new to the sport,
or whether you've been doing it for a few years,
but the usual advice is to choose something
that is manageable, okay?
So something that you do think that you are
actually going to be able to complete.
If it's too hard, you might not enjoy it quite so much.
Now to put it in a different kind of context,
you're probably not gonna choose
a five day stage-race as your first road race.
And so the same principle, of course, applies to gravel.
- Yeah, that's not really a bit of advice
I followed there Si, is it?
- You will be absolutely fine.
Right now, once you have chosen your event,
the next thing you need to do is actually start to work out
what training you need, to get you there
in the best possible shape.
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- So having a structured training plan
can really help you get the most out of your event.
I'm really lucky to have Oli, who's my coach,
and talk me through what I should be doing
in preparation for Dirty Kanza.
So, Oli, what's the main difference between a gravel event
and a typical road event like a sportive or a club run?
And how can you prepare for that?
- So, your gravel events, sportives, or audaxes,
are just taking the difficulty of a long ride up a notch.
So, on a normal long distance ride,
what we're trying to do is ride as efficiently as possible.
So, an easier ride, dead flat and you can ride
at a standard power, and heart rate and effort.
As soon as you start adding any climbs,
what that's doing is throwing you away from the average.
So you're getting peaks and troughs in your ride.
That's gonna make it harder work.
Once you start throwing in gravel,
and climbs, it's double hard.
So what that's doing is it's trying
to throw you away from the average power.
Making you work less efficiently
and therefore making the ride a lot harder.
- So how are we going to work over
the, well from the past few months,
right the way up to Dirty Kanza,
to make sure that we're training as efficiently as possible,
especially given limited time.
- So if you look at the event you're doing,
obviously 200 miles off-road:
the two things we need to focus on is endurance
and then your aerobic fitness as well.
So most people think of it as the same,
but actually we want to try and split the two.
Your aerobic fitness is the amount of power
you can produce, without becoming inefficient
and going into an anaerobic state.
And then your endurance is your ability
to be able to keep that power going
through a really long period of time.
All right, so what we can do,
your shorter sessions, so your commutes to work,
your rides up to maybe an hour or two,
which are probably two or three a week.
We can focus on that aerobic fitness.
So that's not necessarily loads of base miles,
but it's working below your threshold,
so you can still have control of your breathing.
But then we're gonna be working at blocks
20 minutes, 30 minutes.
Some people have seen it kind of
sweet spot efforts work quite well.
They're kind of 15, 20 minutes.
And they're gonna try and push up your fitness,
and then on your longer weekend ride,
then we're really gonna focus on your endurance.
So that's the thing with endurance, muscle endurance,
it's being able to do thousands
and thousands of revolutions.
Some of them climbing, so slightly slower.
So you're gonna get stronger muscles.
And then the other thing is that fat efficiency,
so you're not just using carbs as a fuel source.
You're using fats, which of course,
we've all got plenty of.
- And in terms of building up to an event,
like Dirty Kanza, many people at home,
might tend to do shorter events.
Some people'll already be accustomed to riding
really long distances, but for someone, for example,
who's been riding cyclocross races,
which are only 40 minutes, throughout the winter,
how do you build up from going from 40 minutes to 200 miles?
- Yeah, I mean it's a big,
you've always got your exercise history that you've got.
You've done some audaxes in the past, so that helps.
You'll revert back to that in your new training.
The key is just building up slowly.
Normally suggest that people build up
the duration of the rides first,
and then add the ascent next.
It's the ascent and the climbing
that will cause the problems.
If you start throwing in loads of climbing from day one.
So maybe your rides are a thousand meters,
and you suddenly go to three thousand,
that's when quite a lot of the niggles
and injuries can kick in.
So we want to build up the duration first.
So flatter rides, bit boring, I know,
but you can build at the flatter rides first.
Once you've got that up to maybe 80% of your distance,
then you can start adding in
maybe more gravel sections, more climbing sections.
But what you don't want to do is start jumping in
from 100K to 100 miles gravel with loads of climbing.
Too big a jump, so just think of small increments,
maybe 10% per ride think as a maximum.
- And in terms of if you're living in an area
that isn't particularly hilly.
Or if you're training for a hilly gravel race,
and you don't have that available to you,
what sort of other changes can you do to simulate that?
- So what you wanna do is look
at the amount of climbing you're gonna do,
and roughly try and work out how much of that climbing's
gonna take in terms of minutes.
So say you might think that in your ride,
you're gonna spend maybe two hours of climbing.
Now you're not gonna do that
round the Mendip Hills local to us.
So what we're gonna do is add in
maybe 60 minutes of climbing.
But then include maybe a building up
to 60 minutes of other riding,
where we're gonna kinda simulate climbing.
So you might be in a slightly harder gear,
so a climbing power, and then just drop the cadence a bit.
So we might not be actually climbing up a hill,
but what you're gonna do is be doing
the same cadence and the same power.
So maybe 70 or 80 revolutions in a slightly higher power
for blocks on the flat, plus your climbing.
So in the overall ride, you've then got your two hours
of real world climbing.
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- Training for an event
isn't just about getting your body in shape,
but also your head, giving you enough confidence,
to get through the event as enjoyably as possible.
It's also a great opportunity to test out things
that are gonna be really important for your event,
such as your kit and your nutrition.
- That's right, those long training rides
in particular, are the perfect opportunity
to have a little play around and try different things.
It is okay to make your mistakes in training.
In fact that's the best place to do it,
because then that should leave everything
running nice and smoothly for the event itself.
And it is always worth bearing in mind that gravel events
tend to leave you a little bit more isolated
perhaps than road events, so you're gonna need
to be prepared to be a bit more self-sufficient.
So it's also worth thinking about what tools
you're gonna need to take with you.
And in fact where you're actually gonna take them
on the bike, so your luggage
that you're gonna have with you.
- Yeah, you also should think about your clothing,
your bike choice, even your tires, and even your gearing.
- That's right, and then of course,
the big ones as well, hydration.
So are you gonna be able to take enough fluid
with you on the bike to get you through
between feed zones or for the whole event itself.
And, of course, what are you gonna eat as well.
These are big topics and we are gonna cover them
in their own separate videos in the future.
- We hope that you found these tips helpful
in planning and riding your first gravel event.
- Yeah, if you've got any others
to add into the mix, then why not get involved
in the comments sections down below.
We'd be very interested to read those.
- Yeah, and if it's some more gravel action
that you're looking for here on GCN,
then check out this one, when Si and Dan,
road 650b wheels off-road.