Nash seeks world record in Day of the Hour cycling event

Time to rev up your imagination.

You’re in a vehicle travelling 46 km/h, non-stop, for exactly one hour. That point-to-point trip, which would take you from Kanata to the outskirts of Cumberland, has controlled heating, comfortable seating and, most likely, little stress.

Carry that thought to a velodrome track, where an elite cyclist will put a whole new twist to that experience through the ultimate test called the Day of the Hour. Cyclists carefully ride the lower portion of the expensive, wooden track as fast as they can to see how many kilometres they can travel in one hour.

Ottawa’s Mike Nash, a 50-yearold director of product management at Signiant, doesn’t have to imagine. He has lived through the excitement, the pain and disappointment, and the glory and forgotten most of it on all three occasions.

And he does it well. The Ride with Rendall cyclist set the Canadian record in the men’s 50-54 age group on Sept. 23 on the Mattamy National Cycling Centre track in Milton, Ont. This happened almost six years after breaking the men’s 40-44 world record in his second Day of the Hour in Manchester, England.

It seems so simple, yet it’s so complicated and taxing.

“You’ve got a fixed gear bike, you just need to ride around in a circle in perfect weather conditions (indoors) for an hour. How hard can that be?” Nash wrote in an email, after a one-hour telephone interview.

“But, the thing is that the turns come every few seconds. And, that means you are essentially going up a small hill (bank of the track) every few seconds, which changes your power demands; not to mention the G-forces that press you down onto the bike each lap (and the centrifugal forces that try to take you off the ‘measure line,’ the black (boundary) line at the bottom of the track).

“You only get credit for the ‘measured distance’ and not the actual distance you are travelling. So, you have to focus diligently on riding that ‘measure line.’ Doing 260 metres in a lap only counts for 250 metres. And that will add up when you are trying to do close to 200 laps.”

Nash, who only started competitive cycling at age 35 after stepping away from sports like hockey and soccer, had a most interesting introduction to the Day of the Hour competition. In October 2011, in Manchester, he did not one, but two one-hour marathon sprints and they were separated by only four days.

That’s hardly the textbook approach to this body draining experience, but it worked for him. In his inaugural Day of the Hour, Nash missed the men’s 40-44 age group world record by 39 metres (about three seconds).

Four days later in Manchester, the opportunity presented itself for another shot at the world record. More motivated than disappointed, Nash powered his way through the hour to then world and Canadian records of 45.95 kilometres, adding 300 metres to the old mark. He held that Canadian open record for five years.

“I was definitely happy to have the record,” he said. “I was sore, but relieved when it was done.”

Nash continued road cycling, but stepped away from the Day of the Hour until last September, when he received a Facebook message that a handful of Canadians decided to go all out on the 2015 Pan Am Games track in Milton.

“I wanted to try again. The challenge was I didn’t complete the journey. If I try to do my best effort, it’s a combination of being well prepared and having good results. In Manchester, I had good results (world record), but I didn’t have my best performance. It was sitting in the back of my mind to do it again.”

In preparation for his third Day of the Hour race, Nash made the nine-hour, round-trip drive to Milton once or twice a week from June through September for training. Everything was falling into place to take a serious run at the men’s 50-54 world record set by France’s Pascal Montier at 48.892 kilometres on Nov. 6, 2016.

But during his final training session a week before Day of the Hour, he crashed going 50-plus kilometres an hour and slid about 80 metres along the track, suffering bruised ribs and absorbing a few track splinters. Undeterred, he carried on with a bit of discomfort.

Nash started his first Day of the Hour in six years strong and was on world-record pace from the eighth to the 18th minute. Then, he slowly started to fall off that demanding pace and finished with more than 185 laps on the 250-metre track for a distance of 46.434 kilometres, which was worthy of a Canadian record.

“After 15 minutes, I realized I was going too fast for what I could do that day,” said Nash, who watched former Ride with Rendall teammate and national team rider Ed Veal set a world record of 48.587 kilometres in the men’s 40-44 class.

“As you do with these events, you renegotiate for the best outcome. My minimum goal was to do better than before and I’m proud of that. It felt weird to say I was disappointed, when I set a Canadian record, but no world record. But it was a better outcome than six years ago.”

And he’s planning at least one more world-record attempt at the end of March at altitude in Aguascalientes City, Mexico.

“This time, I’ll pay attention to all the details and get it right,” he added. ranked as high as 12th among world juniors in February, while Wren entered the Scottish open at No. 327th. Wren’s road to the title included victories, in order, over Tino Mackay of Scotland, 3-1; No. 3-4 seed Keane Appleton of England, 3-0; No. 9-16 seed Uzair Rasheed of Pakistan, 3-2 in the quarter-finals; and the No. 1 Scot, Christopher Murphy, 3-0, in the semifinals. “I have had a stunner of a tournament,” Wren said following his emotional final win. “I’ve never played so well and this will go down as my best tournament and the final, one of my best-ever matches. I have worked hard this year and it all came together this week. My brother and dad are over and their support really helped me get over the line.” At last week’s British Junior Open, Wren won four of his six boys’ U19 matches for 73rd place. Ottawa’s Iman Shaheen, the U.S. Open bronze medallist and Canadian Open silver medallist, placed 13th in the girls’ U13 division with a 3-2 record.

WOODS TOP CYCLIST

Michael Woods of Education First-Drapac p/b Cannondale had a year to remember racing the best in the world in 2017 — a Canadian-best seventh overall in the Vuelta a Espana, including a third in Stage 9; sixth- and eighth-place results in the Giro d’Italia; and a ninth and an 11th in two single-day Spring Classics. The effort by the former elite middle-distance runner earned him multiple awards by Canada’s top cycling magazines. Pedal made the Gatineau resident its best overall cyclist, best overall senior/U23 male cyclist, best road senior/U23 cyclist (male or female) and tied for best Canadian cycling moment performance, while Canadian Cyclist announced Woods was its male cyclist of the year after tabulating votes from its cycling enthusiasts. Canadian Cyclist’s best individual performance went to Rally Cycling’s Matteo Dal-Cin of Ottawa for his Canadian championship men’s road race victory. Derek Gee of Osgoode shared Pedal’s best track senior cyclist award with five other team pursuit riders, including former Ride with Rendall athlete Ed Veal.