I've been looking at the climbs in my week in Slovenia, to see if I can work out how fit I want to be to make the challenge routes achievable and enjoyable.
The key to that is the time it will take me to complete the routes: not because I'm racing anyone, but because I need to be fast enough to finish in daylight, with the support of the guides and vans, and to give me recovery time before the next day's challenge.
I can estimate my time to complete a day-long ride in the UK using some rules of thumb. For an audax-type challenge, I target an overall average speed of 20 km/h, including stops. For more leisurely rides, I target 24 km/h while moving, and add in time for stops. A hilly route and/or headwinds reduce my average speed, other things being equal. In the UK, however, the reductions aren't huge.
In the high mountains, it's different. I know from experience that my average moving speed on those days is nearer 15 km/h, but it varies a lot depending on the climbs involved. I'd like a better way of working out how long a big climb will take me; or, for training purposes, how much power I'm likely to need to put down, for how long, to complete the big climbs fast enough on the challenge routes.
On the climbs, the challenge isn't speed over the ground, it's rate of vertical ascent. I dug around this afternoon to learn how to take account of that. It took me back to Higher physics, because gravity needs to be a term in the equation:
time (in seconds) = mass (weight of bike + rider) x 9.8 (m/s, to overcome gravity) x elevation gain (metres) + an allowance for overcoming rolling and air resistance (say 10%), all divided by average power (Watts)
Of course, the same formula can be reworked to give the power required to complete a given climb in a certain time. I applied it both ways to a couple of the climbs I did in Mallorca. It gives predicted values within 2-4% of my actual results, which is pretty good.
The hardest climb in Slovenia may not in fact be Monte Zoncolan, even though that's the steepest, gaining 1,204 m at 12.2%. Monte Crostis (on the same day!) gains 1,430 m at 9.8%. Some of the other climbs are much longer, in terms of ground covered (up to 29 km or so), but don't gain as much height.
For comparison, these climbs involve getting on for 4 times as much ascent as anything I did in Mallorca. There, the bigger colls were taking me about 30 minutes. If I can scale my current fitness up to two-hour efforts at about the same intensity, I should complete the challenge routes in good time.
Using this method, I worked out an estimated time for the final, hardest day in Slovenia. On achievable numbers for power and weight, it will be fine: about 6 hours on the bike. I could afford for it to be more than an hour longer than that.
That's a good incentive to achieve the power (and weight) numbers. My training data gives me a power curve from which I can see my best efforts for a given duration. Here's the key bit of the curves for the past three years.
In 2025 so far, I haven't really done rides challenging enough to give me a best effort for 2 hours comparable to that for other seasons: the best efforts drop off quite sharply at exactly 90 minutes (the duration of my longest and hardest turbo session this year so far). I need to work up to road rides like the loop to Innerleithen that gave me my best two-hour power in 2024; and then I'd like to push that number up to something closer to where it was in 2023 or earlier.
My two-hour power was close to 200 W in 2018, and my all-time best is 206 W, in June 2022, riding from Lochluichart to Lochinver (a sub-10 hour hilly 200 km, one of my strongest rides). That was a time when my measured FTP was under 200 W, interestingly. I do seem to produce very good long-duration efforts, relative to my performance at the shorter distances where most measurement happens.
The differences between the curves above look quite stark; but they're not comparing apples and apples. The best efforts in earlier years, not surprisingly, come later in the season, when I'm fitter. The clever software can show me "season matched" curves, showing best efforts up to the current week. That looks closer:
In 2023, I was more than 50% stronger at the end of the season than I was in the Spring. In 2024, the gain was about 30%. This won't just be a function of getting fitter: it'll be because I do more challenging rides as the weather gets better, which creates more chances to put in a best effort.
I haven't included 2018 in these curves, because there's something implausibly high about my power numbers for up to about 2 hours that year, and all the best efforts are in Mallorca, not later in the season. I may have miscalibrated my power meter when rebuilding my bike in Mallorca. Out at 3 to 4 hours, the 2018 curve is much closer to more recent years; and my target rides for this season will be that kind of duration.
So my challenge is to get my two-hour best efforts for this year back up to where I was about this time in recent years; and then push them up further as the season progresses: ideally by a bit more than in previous years.
I rarely do a turbo session of more than 90 minutes, because I get bored; and obviously I can't improve my two-hour efforts without doing longer rides (about 3-4 hours, in fact, because downhill bits don't contribute to the cause of fitness).
Thus, the first pay-off from this bit of self-coaching is that I plan to replace Thursday's scheduled one-hour turbo session with a three-hour ride to Perth, to meet Ursula for our visit to an exhibition there. The training software isn't ringing alarm bells about that plan. I'll aim to get a ride of 3-4 hours into each week's training from here on, providing that doesn't overload me.
Thursday's ride might be on Skinnymalinky, if Ultrarandonneur isn't serviced before then; and the cranks are different lengths, so I'd better calibrate the power meter right!
