TIME LORDS
With a 10-mile time trial potentially deciding this year’s race, two of the country’s best triallers reveal the secrets of this very British discipline…
All things being equal, every single edition of the Tour of Britain should include a 10-mile time trial. As route director Andy Hawes said earlier in this preview, it’s the “quintessential British bicycle race”. The shortest, most popular category of race participated in by riders of all levels, up and down the country, throughout the season, it demands an all-out effort for between 17 (if you’re great) and 25 minutes (if you’re merely good) and is a true measure of form, talent and power.
It’s a fair assertion that all current British professional riders will have ridden a competitive 10 on home roads at some point in their careers. Some use them throughout, as a gauge for form.
Sir Bradley Wiggins set a Cycling Time Trials’ (CTT, the governing body for the sport in Britain) national 10-mile record in 2006 while riding for French outfit Cofidis and, last year, warming up for the Rio Olympics, gate-crashed the D10/1 race in Bickerstaffe, recording a leisurely (for him) 19.15 minutes.
Movistar’s time trial specialist, Alex Dowsett, is a regular on the TT circuit, particularly near his home in Essex. In May 2014, he broke Michael Hutchinson’s long-standing 10-mile record by 25 seconds while warming up for the Tour de France (a race he eventually missed through illness), and continues to take folk by surprise by pitching up for evening races decked out in full Movistar kit.
Homeadvantage
While Hawes is nominally the Tour of Britain route director, anybody looking at the route of this year’s event could be forgiven for thinking that he’d taken the year off and handed the reins to Dowsett, such is the degree to which the course is tailor-made for the man from Maldon.
Dowsett has been a prominent player in the race in recent editions, not least in 2014 when he held the leader’s jersey heading into the penultimate stage, but relinquished it after being dropped on the Ditchling Beacon climb. With the Tour this year being, in Hawes’ words, “the flattest route we’ve ever put together” – on top of the time trial being in Dowsett’s home county of Essex and the fact he’s not got a contract for 2018, at the time of writing – you’ll get short odds on him winning overall.
Another man whose eyes will have lit up at this course is Marcin Bia¯ob¯ocki of the Polish Pro Continental outfit CCC Sprandi Polkowice. The 33-year-old Pole, an established figure on the British scene having ridden for domestic teams since 2011, shattered both 10- and 25-mile competition records last summer in one weekend in East Yorkshire, in efforts that contributed to his deal with CCC and a year that saw him ride – and finish – his first Grand Tour at the Giro d’Italia.
On both occasions, it was records held by Dowsett that Bia¯ob¯ocki beat. He took 25 seconds off the 25-mile record with a ride of 44.04, but it was his time for the 10, 24 hours earlier, that was the bigger achievement, eclipsing Dowsett’s 17.20 with a stunning 16.35. It’s the equivalent of taking half a second out of Usain Bolt’s 100m world record.
“I feel like I lost all my kids in the divorce this weekend in terms of comp records,” Dowsett bemoaned on Twitter at the time.
“We had very good conditions with no wind, so it was ideal,” said Bia¯ob¯ocki, shortly after setting the new 10-mile record. “It was maybe a bit slow at the turn because it was a little bit damp, but otherwise perfect.”
Course conditions
Plenty goes into setting a good 10 time, not least form and equipment. At the top level, to extract seconds from formidable records, conditions on the day are crucial.
Now, with his record intact and likely to stay that way for some time, Bia¯ob¯ocki thanks his friends for giving him the heads up for the race on the fast course in South Cave, near Kingston upon Hull.
“A few of them told me I should go there. I’d been doing fast times on slow courses, and with a free weekend with no races, a friend offered to give
me a lift. Two days before I’d been in the wind tunnel at the University of Southampton, which taught me a few tricks, and I’d been preparing for the European Championships so was in good shape. The weather was pretty much perfect, without wind. Everything was spot on.”
But what makes a slow course slow, and vice versa? Obviously the weather is an uncontrollable variable, but choosing flat roads, with smooth tarmac, and as few corners as possible, is conducive to the fastest times. The South Cave course, with the five straight miles, a single roundabout, followed by the same five miles back (the classic ‘out and back’), allowed Bia¯ob¯ocki, in his words, to “stick to the power meter” and largely forget anything as inconvenient as bends and decelerations.
At the Tour of Britain, with the wind likely howling along the Clacton-onSea seafront, Hawes says the roads will be fast (in one direction, anyway) but with six sharp 90-degree bends peppering the mid-point of the race it isn’t what time trialists would describe as a fast course. It’s on the technical side, so one for the purists, who’ll be putting all their eggs in the basket of stage five in the hope that it brings them overall race victory. The best time trialists, says Hawes, could open up gaps of a minute here – potentially race-winning margins.
Worth the effort
Whoever wins will have earned it, for the 10-mile TT is an ugly, violent, physical effort, one where the thrill of the speeds involved (around 30mph throughout) is small recompense for how much it hurts. For Bia¯ob¯ocki, the 10 is more painful than the longer 25 (the next most popular distance in Britain) but is, at least, is over and done with quickly.
“For me it’s all about the fast speeds. Catching and passing moving cars in 30mph zones on the flat is something special. For me it’s not so much about enjoying the pain. Every time, with three miles to go, I’m thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’ But every weekend I keep coming back for more. For sure, if I’m not racing professionally I’m not putting myself through this!”
Before Bia¯ob¯ocki gets to that point of intense suffering, there’s groundwork to be laid. He will recce the course, in a car or on the bike. Preferably both. Often he’ll ride one to two hours before the race as a warm-up, punctuated with three, five-minute efforts at threshold power (the wattage you can maintain for an hour).
If he’s feeling good he’ll reduce that to half an hour, with the same threshold efforts. If possible he stays warming up until as late as three minutes before his start, and rides his bike to the course if it’s not possible to just jump off the turbo onto the start line. He’ll begin the time trial hard, at around 600 watts to get up to the speed he wants to maintain, then sit on between 440-460 watts, with a burst in the closing metres. For a hilly course, he’ll up the wattage on the climbs and recover on the descents. The top gear? 56x11. It’s a devastatingly simple strategy, with the small caveat that the journey of getting to grind out 460 watts for 20 minutes is anything but simple.
Mindovermatter
Another top tester, Richard Bussell, came from relative obscurity in 2015 to win the British national 10-mile, and followed it up last August to defend his title, and believes it’s his mental strength that’s his biggest weapon.
“The first two years of training for time trials, I was generally alone, on a singlespeed bike,” he says. “I built up a lot of mental strength by digging deep and dealing with [the pain]. A lot of people are capable of doing the same times as I do, but maybe don’t have it mentally so they back off. I’ve an ability to go deep and hold onto it.”
The consensus for pacing is to be in a position to go hard at the end and bury yourself, but Bussell takes a different approach. “My advice is to go out a bit harder than you think – I always regret coming to the end and not being fully empty. You can always do better than you think if you go hard and believe in yourself. The mental side is almost as important as the physical.”
Technological should also be added to the mental and physical, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the rider (and team) victorious in Clacton-on-Sea is the one who’s invested the most time, energy and money in preparing for this very particular discipline. Being fit is the least of it – all these guys are capable of humongous wattage. It’s about being able to parlay that into a package that cheats the wind and a mentality that overcomes the crushing solitariness of riding alone on the open road, against the clock.
“Whoever wins will have earned it, for the 10-mile TT is an ugly, violent, physical effort”