10 WAYS TO SMASH A SPORTIVE

Fun, rewarding and unforgettable. Riding a sport ve is an enthralling exper ence, but you’ll need to be prepped for the challenge. Here’s our essential guide to preparing and pacing

1 PACING PERFECTION

Is there an ideal pacing template for a sportive? ‘Even pacing’ would initially seem the most e!cient. There are no spikes in power to drain your glycogen reserves or burn your muscles. The problem is, in reality it’s the hardest pacing strategy to follow, whether you’re pacing by speed or a physiological parameter (such as power output or heart rate [HR]). You see, if the course features the odd hill or two, no matter the gradient, maintaining an even speed means a power profile packed with spikes; if you’re looking to maintain an even power/HR profile, it necessarily follows your speed will be variable.

There’s also ‘negative splitting’, where you start slow and gradually increase speed. This is a possibility on pancake-flat sportives, but on hilly events, or courses where hills are skewed early or late, it’s not feasible. It’s also psychologically tricky to avoid going hard from the o". Which brings us onto the most realistic and arguably the most e!cient pacing model: the J-pattern.

“The J-shaped strategy is pretty e!cient,” explains Stephen Cheung, author of the book Cycling Science. “You start out harder than your sustainable workload and then slow down for most of the event because of accumulated fatigue from the early e"ort. Then, when the finish line is closing in, you feel you can push hard for, say, the final quarter of the event, depending on distance.” It’s a pacing strategy we’re all aware of and arguably comes down to motivation, which peaks at the start and finish, and then levels out when that finish line is miles away. So aim for the J-pattern, but don’t neglect the minutiae…

2 ESTABLISH YOUR ZONES

“Core to pacing is knowing where you are in the moment,” says Daniel Healey, former coach and head of sport science for pro team Tinko"-Saxo. “That’s where your functional threshold power (FTP) comes in. It’s the maximum output you can hold for an hour. An hour test can be debilitating so we test riders over 20 minutes and reduce that figure by 5 per cent.”

So, if your FTP over 20 minutes is 250 watts (W), reduce that figure to 237.5W to determine your FTP. This information