Beach 2 Battleship has a flat bike course. Most people might think “woo hoo” when they hear “flat bike course”. Not me. The idea of a flat bike course has me scared.
The thing is, I like hills. My bike strategy is to work kind of hard up the hills. And, go easy down the hills. On rolling terrain, I figure I am going easy about half the time! On a flat bike course, there are no downhills for going easy. It’s all constant spinning and constant work. Throw in some good ol’ headwind, and it’s constant hard work!
In order to train for this, I have changed my riding style on my long rides to simulate ‘constant spinning with no rest’. I did this by trying to keep my cadence at 90+ all the time. And I tried to keep my heart rate in Zone 2 (~142 bpm) all the time. You can see in the picture below that I could easily glance down and see both numbers while riding. I had to use two watches, because I can’t show both cadence and heart rate on the Garmin 50, which is a bummer.
Holy Crap, that is hard work! My legs were already kind of toasty from yesterday’s 5 mile run. This constant spinning quickly made my legs even more fatigued.
- During the downhill segments, even tho I was in my hardest gear, I still had to really super spin to get my heart rate in the zone.
- During the flatter sections, 85 cadence and 135 bpm felt natural. So I had to spin faster to bump up both numbers.
- I normally like to grind a somewhat hard gear on climbs. Instead, I had to shift to my lowest gear and spin faster.
No rest for my weary legs during today’s 4 hour bike ride! My legs and hips are very sore now because I am not used to riding this way. I hope this is the right way to simulate a flat bike course. It feels right.
You have no idea how hard that picture was to capture! I had to hold my cellphone camera up above my head, spin hard and look at the numbers on my two watches until they were 140+bpm, and 90+ cadence. Then snap the picture. Then check the picture. Repeat. About 10 times. LOL, it was fun!! I took some more pictures today, and put them in this blog post.
One more thing, not sure if I told you this before but if the sponge tends to fall out of your aero drink system you can put a zip tie through your sponge and then thread it through the hole for the straw. It works pretty well since only 1 side of the sponge is attached so you can lift it out to clean it. I have lost that stupid yellow mesh thing so many times but the zip tie works wonders. I hope this makes sense.
I am one of those folks that says “woo hoo” to a flat bike. One of the reasons I like flat is that I can put out a very controlled constant effort and just sit there in my rhythm. For some reason when my heart rate is all over the place with hills I have a hard time and just can’t find a rhythm. A big challenge for the B2B bike course was freezing and then the boredom. It was SOOOO boring so make sure you mentally prepare a way to stay kind of focused.
I love the pic, only a triathlete would take that picture
Hi Carol,
When you race at B2B on the flat course, periodically put your bike in a very big gear and stand up and pedal to stretch out your back and change muscle groups. This will help with the fatigue and feeling of overuse.
Ginger