CLIMBING VS DESCENDING
DO YOU NEED TO BE GOOD AT BOTH?
Greg Henderson knows a thing or two about going downhill fast. A professional cyclist of 16 years until 2017 – 10 of those spent at the top WorldTour level – this Kiwi rode 10 Grand Tours as a sprinter and lead-out man. Six foot tall and 71 kilos, on the days in between leading out the likes of André Greipel for sprint victories, he was a paid-up member of the grupetto – the group of riders that forms at the rear end of Grand Tour stages such as the Tour de France, particularly during the mountain stages. Its composition is a mixture of riders who’ve done their work and dropped back, stage hunters taking a break for the day, general classification riders who’ve catastrophically blown up or those who’ve been dropped early on. As a lead-out man working for his team’s main sprinter, Henderson would often be in that final category finding himself at the back of the race and often chasing time cuts, which if missed would see him booted out of the race, so an ability to go downhill quickly was a prerequisite for the job.
Now a cycling coach (coachhendy.com), Greg believes it’s a misconception that the guys at the front of the race are the best descenders. “On TV, you only see the leaders in the mountains. If you put a camera on the sprinters you’d be impressed to see how fast we go downhill. We can take three or four minutes out of the leaders on a descent, so if we’re six minutes off them at the top, we know we can halve that by the bottom. We’ve got the power to sprint out of corners, we’ve got gravity on our side and the bike handling skills of a sprinter.”
Even at the WorldTour level, the range of descending skills is vast. “A lot of the guys who go uphill fast are the slowest downhill. Euskadi [Euskaltel–Euskadi, the Basque team that disbanded in 2013], they were a team full of climbers. We used to call them mobile road cones, because you had to go round them on the descent. For some reason they could just not go downhill.”
This imbalance between climbing and descending skills is something I’ve always been fascinated by. It’s strange it even exists at the pinnacle of the sport. You’d think the disparity, once there, wouldn’t be so big. But at our level, as club riders, the gap is a yawning chasm. We’ve heard anecdotal tales of Joe Schmo being a faster descender than paid up WorldTour professionals, and at the other end of the spectrum there are riders – and I’d put myself in this category – who are tentative to the extent that simply getting down safely to the start of the next climb is the only goal.
The Furka Pass challenge
It was with this in mind that ‘Climber vs Descender’ came about. It would pitch me, a 75kg climb lover with nothing short of an allergy to downhills, against my colleague Steve Fearn, Cycling Plus’s marketing manager, who doesn’t much care for going upwards but combines his skill, confidence and 110kg heft to dizzying effect on the downhills. We’d head to the Swiss Alps, and the Furka Pass (2,431m), a 12.3km climb that gains 893m (7.3 per cent) for a one-on
one challenge against each other, up and over it. As you may have read in last issue’s Big Ride, the choice of the Furka was no accident, given that the car chase in the James Bond classic Goldfinger was filmed here. We’d record the ride with GPS, cadence and heart rate and examine it to find out how far good descending can take you and how we could improve our all-round mountain game.
From Andermatt, the ski resort where we were staying, Steve and I rode over to the ‘start line’ in the town of Realp, several kilometres up the valley where, at the Furka Pass sign in the town, and with a harmonious beep of our computers, the ride proper began. Immediately, I began to gap Steve.
“I guess I’ll see you over the top,” he said. I would indeed, but precisely where, time would tell.
Steve is a Land’s End to John o’Groats veteran, but riding in the high mountains was breaking new ground. But he’s a marketeer and loves a bit of analysis ahead of his bike rides. So with a test of fitness, a Strava segment analysis, Google and a Furka profile study, he reckoned upon an average target heart rate of 160 beats per minute – the top end of his zone 4 heart rate – for the climb, just below his lactate threshold; a sensible idea, which means his body can get rid of lactate faster than it accumulates.
“I found in training for this that my endurance in zone 5 is nonexistent and I needed a long recovery after being in it for a minute or two,” says Steve. “But my body was happy with zone 4.”
I did no such calculations, but knew roughly, having done enough Zwift sessions over the past year, that I can sustain zone 5 heart rate for a good chunk of time, and have ridden enough mountain passes to understand their rhythms.
Come the summit, Steve had, commendably, not wavered from his target – bob on 160bpm, in fact, and never breaking into the 170s during 1hr 20 minutes of climbing. Mine was a ventricle-busting 180bpm, 95 per cent of my max heart rate, over a neat and tidy one hour of climbing. That means it falls in the top zone 6 of British Cycling’s scale – “a 100 per cent sprint involving maximal effort” is how they describe it as a feeling. I’m not sure whether I should finish this sentence or call the doctor…
“It depends on how many passes you’ve got to ride,” says Henderson. “If you’ve only got one, like you two, sure, head out at threshold [FTP, or functional threshold power – the power/heart rate you can sustain for an hour], but if you have two, three or four, stay within your realms: 85 per cent of your max heart rate is a good target, and don’t go above 90 per cent.”
One thing that wasn’t measured but something we can mention anecdotally is position on the bike when climbing. Neither me or Steve are the sort of riders who get out of the saddle very often.When we do, it’s only to mix our position up and give our backsides a rest. A wise move, says Henderson.
“When you go above 80kg, there’s an energy cost to getting out of the saddle. That’s why the bigger riders stay seated the whole time. If they’re 60, 65kg, it costs them no extra energy in their hands and arms. That’s the advantage: that they’re able to change their muscle firing patterns. [By standing], you’re using the same muscles, of course, but the firing patterns are different. You can go dull after 45 minutes in the same position.”
What about cadence? “You don’t want to be doing 60rpm, then no one is comfortable at 100,” says Henderson. “The sweetspot is between 80 to 90rpm. If you have a gear ratio that can land you at that cadence you’ll be fine for most climbs.”
I averaged 83rpm for the climb, whereas Steve’s was much lower, at 64. That led Henderson to suggest Steve was “slogging a big one”. High gears and low rpm mean an increase in torque, “one of the hidden factors that cause a lot of muscle fatigue” says Henderson.
This probably wasn’t the case with Steve. With a low gear of 34/32, which he was in the whole way up, his low cadence was likely the result of disciplined pacing, though he might want to try my Giant Defy, with its 34/34 to put even less stress on his body.
Pacing was key to Steve’s climbing success, which isn’t always the done thing for riders new to high mountains, who can get both over
awed and carried away if they’re used to the kilometre climbs of home. There’s common ground in breaking a long climb down into sections from pro riders through to us.
“I’d do exactly that,” says Henderson. “Get to that tree, the next corner, the next bunch of riders. If you break it down into achievable goals it’s less overwhelming. If it’s your first Alp, you’re going to be a little intimidated, a little pensive. To do 160bpm I’m sure he’s held back in the beginning.”
I reached the summit on my absolute limit after an hour’s climbing and, though I wouldn’t know this until the end, Steve would arrive 20 minutes later, meaning I had that amount of time in hand to play with for the remaining 10km of descent. If you think that’s more than enough, you’ve never seen me descend.
I make a habit of wasting time on mountain summits, even when I’m notionally racing colleagues. In gran fondos it’s always where feed stations are situated and I like to refuel off the bike because I’m so incapable of doing it on the downhill. Here, I lost over a minute putting my arm warmers on for the descent. Did I need to? No, it was actually quite pleasant out. It was merely habit born out of an abundance of caution.
Still, it appears I’m in good company. “We were doing the Mortirolo, in the 2010 Giro d’Italia,” says Henderson. “I was out the back, I’d stopped for a nature break but it was okay, I was in grupetto, so there was no problems catching back on. Then Froomey [Sky teammate that year] comes past. We went across the summit together and we’re still off the back, and I said, ‘Come on, we can catch them on the descent.’ And he’s fluffing around for his bloody rain jacket and I’m like, ‘F**k your rain jacket, let’s go!’ I waited and waited for two or three minutes until I said, ‘Mate, I’ve gotta go.’ So I descended really hard, chased like mad in the valley and caught [the grupetto] before the final climb. And [Froome] is five minutes behind and gets caught holding onto a car? [he was disqualified for holding onto a motorbike – Ed]. He got DQ’d because he didn’t follow.”
Stopping unnecessarily to slip on arm warmers was just the start of my descending woes. A paltry top speed of 49.5km/h, a max cadence of 58, zone 2 average heart rate, a few bursts of pedalling and long spells of freewheeling is, in short, the story of my (21-minute long!) descent. Steve’s was a different story: a 71km/h top speed, a heart rate that went over 150bpm at times (close to his climbing average) and regular bursts of cadence, where he’d sprint out of corners. With a time of 13 minutes, he’d claw back eight minutes of time on me in just 10km of descent – equal to around 300ft of elevation from the opening section of the climb.
“You want power spikes out of the corners,” says Henderson, “bursts of cadence, where you get straight back onto the speed. It’s only 10 pedal strokes but if you do them hard you’re back onto 70km/h. Someone who cruises out of the corner will take 20 seconds to get back to that speed. For someone who’s accelerated, it might be half that. Across 10 corners you’ve already taken 100 seconds and you can see how it adds up.”
Given that we were stopping at the bottom of the descent, we could concentrate simply on getting down, but if this were a longer ride or event, with two of three more mountain passes to come, the descents (should you not have stopped at the summit) are a time to recover and refuel, because it’s hard to do so during the climb.
“You’re at altitude, where your body asks for carbohydrate but you’re under the pressure of the effort so it’s hard to reach for your bottle all the time,” says Henderson. “Take time on the descent to regain your hydration status. This can increase gastric emptying [processing the food you eat] and ensure you’re loaded with fuel for the next climb. You’ll be better on the fourth climb because you’ve taken the time early on.”
Aside from losing speed by coasting down the descent, should I have had another climb to do straight after, I’d have been in trouble – and possibly spent time removing my arm warmers!
“It’s going to take you several minutes to get going again, with all the metabolites that have built up from the climb,” says Henderson. “I have this trick that I learned during my Sky days. You’d be riding around 70km/h and we’d pull on our brakes and do 10 pedal strokes hard with them still on, to make sure the legs were still firing for when we got back onto the climb.”
Skills for the win
Over the whole Furka Pass, I put 12 minutes into Steve. But eight of those 20 hard-earned minutes on the climb were squandered by a lack of skill, know-how and focus on the way back down.
Of course, it pays to hone your fitness for the mountains – it’ll save you time, you’ll lose less strength as a longer day goes on and you’ll recover better for the following day. But there’s an argument to say that gains over mountain rides are easier to find by improving descending skills, particularly as fitness gains get harder to eke out.
At the time of the ride, I was in pretty decent shape, with an FTP of 272 watts. Without any descending improvements, to compensate for the eight minutes I lost to Steve downhill, I’d have to climb at 14.19km/h, almost 2km/h faster than I did. That’s considerable and would mean further hard training and weight loss (and I’m not particularly sold on either).
If descending struggles is something that sounds familiar with you, this isn’t about becoming some sort of daredevil overnight, or even at all, or flying round corners like a Moto GP rider. It’s about making achievable gains, such as sprinting out of corners if you don’t carry your momentum through them. If you can climb the Furka Pass for an hour in zone 6, you can surely stomp on your pedals for a few seconds coming out of a bend.