I’m guessing the descent is technical but do-able in usual xc style?

I wouldn’t say much of it is technical, although a few short sections are a combination of steep/narrow/slippy when wet/rooty which can feel a little sketchy on an XC bike with a skinny fast tyre up front.
Nothing to worry about really though – only thing I cant consistently ride is the corner at the end of love tunnel, and my skills are pretty much full mincer level.

Parking, IIRC you park in the “lower carpark” – the usual one on the RHS?

Parking has been in the field beyond the overflow (first left) car park last 2 years

I hope you’re doing a warm-up

Walking lunges round the office in the snug lycra surely 🙂

Cant see Sunweb getting any help from Sky today, if anything, it’ll be the opposite, as sky will be trying to get their entire team in the break to go for the Stage win.

Doesn’t look like NQ or VN have the legs to break TD, there will certainly be some action amongst the rest of the top 10 though.

And Landa sits on the front, tires himself out and leaves an inside line open again. Unbelievable.

Black chilli compound is generally quite durable, as it doesn’t rely purely on softness for grip, its whatever magic nano particles they have in there that does the job.
Most durability issues you see with Conti are from agro riders tearing sidewalls.

I’m certainly interested to see some reviews of the new addix tyres. If they are genuinely a step up from the current compounds i’ll definitely be keen to try a burt/ralph combo

Ahh yes, the love tunnel, dark, damp and ribbed, always a challenge to keep things under control 😆

Guess my advice would be to run front tyre and fork a couple of psi less than normal. Nothing rocky, but plenty of small roots that can beat you up by lap5.

@moonsabaloon, the plus hardtail will be a really good choice assuming you’ve got fairly light fast tyres on it.

Are we assuming from the info available that the bloke in charge of addix was poached from conti and addix is more or less black chilli?

Not me this year, after 2 years of glorious weather i had a gut feeling rain was on the cards, and rain would turn that course from epic to misery for me.

Sunweb have been disappointing as a team.
Geschke and and especially LTD are good climbers, but don’t seem to have been able to stick around long at all.
Although guess it didn’t help to lose their best mountain domestique to a parked motorbike.

Another vote for a PAYG sim. If it costs you more than £0.50/m for an emergency bike phone something has gone badly wrong.

I think it’s normal to be knackered just about warmed up after 18 miles of MTB isn’t it?

😆

Edit: More seriously, others have it right already. On the road you control the effort, on the MTB often the terrain controls the effort which means you burn through energy faster.

I’d say Z4 and ‘chasing rabits’ requires concentration and effort but each to their own.

Me too, but then we both ‘do’ training and our z4 efforts might last for 20mins at a time rather than 3-4mins, whereas for loads of people they just do it subconsciously, or they think hills are supposed to be hard and make them that way.

I do a ride with a social group once a month, and the guys that are fit(ish), but not actually training cyclists are regularly pushing on up every climb and leaving the actually fit people spinning along scratching their heads.
Likewise with a couple of friends that do actually cycle, but have no interest in training – I often joke that one of them only actually has 2 paces – tempo- and tempo+ – seems totally incapable of riding easy, and likewise as has no change of pace to go hard.

It’s quite alien to me really, but I suspect actually training makes me alien to a good many more people

Edit

For instance, using the old formula of 220-age gave me a maximum heart rate that allowed me to sit at 90% for several minutes, which is apparently not healthy

90%MHR isn’t really that high at all, not really that uncommon to be able to hold it for an hour. If it was that unhealthy cyclists and runners would be dropping like flies.

Actually the Strava estimation shouldn’t be too bad as long as you have your weight and bike weight/type set correctly so it can do a fairly accurate power estimate.
It’ll be poor on one way trips as it cant judge wind conditions, but on round trips it should average ok

Just ride at a pace that requires no concentration to maintain.

For most people that don’t really do the focused training thing, that equates to an interval session, z1 on the flat and z4 on any slight inclines.

Edit: or z3 everywhere for folks that cant resist chasing ‘rabbits’

What happened to J Neff?

Went out hard and exploded after lap 1

After last week, its hard to predict how anything will pan out.
Seemed a lot like many big names arrived seriously under-cooked and miles off the pace.

Based on last week I can’t really see any other outcome than Nino and Annika romping away with it.
Great news that MVP will be turning up in the mens, and will be interesting to see how he goes, but suspect he’s too heavy for most courses and Nove Mesto just really suited him as it favours power/momentum more than pure climbers.

If I’m making a conscious effect to ride steady without a HRM, I tend to use one gear easier than if I am “hammering it.”

Shades of grey…
Should be more like 4 gears between an easy ride and a hard one.

If you can’t breath through just your nose (have to use mouth too)then you are getting into Zone 3 imho

Similar for me.
Mouth breathing starts around mid z2
z2/23 boundary occurs at the point where breathing becomes noticeably deeper.
occurs around about 5.5 on the rpe scale above.

What’s the advantage of these low intensity fasted rides then?

Trains you to burn a higher% of fat rather than your stored carbs.

Should I be taking it easy or what on these rides?

Kinda depends. If you want the benefit above then yes.
But on the other hand going harder will raise metabolism for a few hours and burn more total calories which is probably better for weight management.

Edit: So fasted rides for when you want to have energy left to up the pace 5hrs into a ride. Short intense stuff for getting skinny

Looks good, have also just re-watched season 6 so i’m primed and ready for more

3 weeks training, 3 weeks of wind and showers.
Now its a rest week and the Sun is out – typical!

I’m thinking of being a first class hypocrite and swapping Saturdays ‘interval medley’ with a C race

It’s a C race, so you can go ahead and make pointless attacks for your intervals 😀

I’d recommend you all get big consecutive hilly miles in…its a hard shift in five days.

For me, i’m well aware how tough its going to be, i’ve done Raid Pyrenean/Alpine/Corsica which are all similarly hard, but feature better weather!
As a group, we’ve not quite got around to back to back days yet, but have a couple of hilly 100mi sportives organised for next month.
I knocked out this at the weekend, and feeling fairly happy with where i’m at:
https://www.strava.com/activities/999324535

Having had time to think about it, I believe i know the answer.
Right wing voters ride horses not bikes – too much effort chasing those foxes if you have to do it under your own propulsion!

I think your sampling population might be a bit skewed

I kinda suspect the same, but if that does prove to be the case, it poses the question that what is it about an internet bike forum attracts said population.

Carbon 29er HT, stiff and actually designed with climbing fast in mind.
Only problem is once you ride a properly fast bike all other bikes seem slow.

Sounds like the perfect opportunity to inflict maximum suffering to me.
As others said, you mostly want to just ride round with them, but every hill you want to find yourself on the front, and just ever so slightly wind up the pace over the course of the climb so they get drawn into following the wheel and right into the pain cave.
Takes a bit of skill to listen to their breathing and make sure they aren’t going to explode though.
Then on the final climb you can wind it up just that bit more and finish 30s in front.

This strategy shows you are the strongest, but without them thinking they are miles off the pace. This way you can get ‘in the club’ as it were, and give yourself more opportunities to inflict some pain. Win-win 😈

Looking forward to my trip in August – same stopping points as fatmax – and now he’s posted some potential cafe/lunch stops i’ll shamelessly steal those for our itinerary 🙂

Bad news is Culag Inn is already booked, so will have to hope fatmax caught them on a bad day and we have a better experience.

As mentioned a few times on various threads, this trip will be for charity, and over half the group were novice cyclists as of August last year (one didn’t even own a bike!).
We’ve had a couple of injuries, one dropped out, and another taken his place.
This week marks 3 months to go, to our trip, so time to start fundraising.
Our chosen charity is the Lifeboat Fund, so if you like the RNLI having lifeboats, please donate!
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/DPC-NC500

So I watched the full stage yesterday evening after carefully avoiding this thread all day.

WTF! So many times over!

NQ sends half team up the road, and then doesn’t have the balls (or maybe the legs) to try the bridge.

TD needs a potty break – sometimes it just has to be done. Loved his blunt interview response of “I had to take a dump”

And Landa……..
Why oh why leave an inside line open round the final corner – at least make Nibali come around you…….

Oh, and CCC guy – wtf did he have in his Sandwiches on the rest day 😐

but it seems to me it would be the sensible size to run

Sure, makes perfect sense, just so long as you have quads like Greipel. For mere mortals a 32 or 34 still makes more sense.

Helen Grobert for example ran a 32:
https://www.pinkbike.com/news/helen-groberts-cannondale-scalpel-si-xc-world-cup-round-1-nove-mesto.html

What’s the bike and what’s it used for?
32t chainring doesn’t seem that small for a typical 1×11 setup.

How does 4t change get the chain line so much?

He’s having to use a spacer to move the chainring further out as the larger ring will rub the stays on some frames

High 5 zero electrolyte in bottle and high 5 gels (non caffeine)

If it were me, i’d have one gel after my warmup and probably just use 2:1 in the bottle.
Going gels/zero route, I wouldn’t exceed high5’s recommendation of 3 per hour. The gels aren’t a 2:1 formula iirc, so you wont be able to digest any more than that. Guess that adds up to one after laps 2 and 4.

But, do they really have an affect ?

Yes they work, but they aren’t special voodoo magic, just sugar in a format that’s convenient. Much like energy drink, coca-cola etc.
The point of them is you can take them easily even when working hard, whereas you cant chew an energy bar whilst HR is red-lined.

question: how many gels do you normally go through in a race?

How long are you racing for, what type of gel are you using (1 zipvit gel = 3 high5 gels for example), and do you have energy drink in bottle?

Nove Mesto is a bit of a tyre killer isn’t it. Might be running something with a heavier carcass.

Pink bike article suggested the new Aspens come in Exo flavour, so yes, possibly tougher sidewalls than the usual paper variety that’d be used for bike weigh ins

Up too early
Climb, climb, climb
Suffering by end

Forum running like a hog on chrome both on android and desktop for last week or so.

Had dodgy popup trying to get me to download bogus chrome update earlier whilst on here earlier.

@Northwind, being a nice bloke sadly doesn’t redeem him wanting to borrow an extra £250bn in my eyes.

Leaning towards LD as ‘least bad’ option despite their anti brexit agenda (i voted remain, but don’t agree with resisting the result).

IT guy at work got paid for a job in bitcoin years ago cashed in some at $10 and promptly forgot about the remainder – until the topic came up at the pub a couple of months ago.

Bad news is he didn’t pay for an online wallet, and somewhere in the region of 20000 bitcoins are currently on hard drive(s) that he cant find. He’s managed to locate a couple of 100 so far.

Oops!

Doesn’t really matter who gets in, can’t really see good PM potential in any of them.

As for policies, can see a few i like and a few I don’t from all sides, but the one thing they all seem to have forgotten is we have a huge(and growing) debt, and are probably only 10years and 1 crisis(which may or may not be brexit) away from being Greece.

<10kg is hardly heavy for a FS bike – especially with that monstrosity of a cassette. Certainly didn’t seem to slow him down any!