One of the key ways to prepare for a challenging athletic event is to break it down into its smaller, individual challenges. For instance, the Leadville 100 mountain bike race is 100 miles and takes me around – and hopefully less than – nine hours to complete. So there’s obviously an endurance component to preparation. The majority of the course is also above 10,000 feet in elevation, with the high point at 12,600 feet above sea level and the low point at only 9,100 feet. And within that 100 miles there’s a the normal climbing, descending, and flat/rolling terrain.

Today my ride was focused on preparing for the climbing aspect of the Leadville 100. I know from experience that there’s about 2.5 to 3 hours of total time spent going uphill during the race, so during the spring and early summer I gradually build up the total time I spend climbing during training rides. At this point, I’m pretty much replicating the duration of the climbing in the race, but completing it in a much shorter ride.

This morning I went out for 4 hours, and 2.5 hours of that was climbing. Of course, it’s very difficult to find a single climb that is that long – unless you want to ride up Pikes Peak or drive up to Mount Evans. In and around Colorado Springs, I link together several smaller climbs to accumulate a total of 2.5 hours of uphill riding:

30 minutes up High Drive (dirt road leading to singletrack)

70 minutes up Old Stage Road (back via Gold Camp Road)

15 minutes up Buckhorn Trail in Cheyenne Canon

30 minutes up High Drive again to get home

Plus some miscellaneous 3- and 5-minute hills along the way

For the most part, the ride I did today features similar challenges to the Leadville course. The elevation gains aren’t as great, but the climbs are somewhat similar in duration to to what riders face on race day. Why do I bother to seek out hills like this? It’s not the first climb or even the second that really hurts in a race. It’s the fourth or the fifth. But the only way to reach the point where you can improve your preparation for that later portion of the race is to ride multiple efforts in training. The first few climbs I rode today weren’t that bad, but they took some energy to ride and that made the later climbs harder. It was the efforts required to ride well on these later climbs that will lead to the adaptations and improvements in fitness I’m looking for.

Chris Carmichael

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