 Hey what's up everyone welcome to another video my name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS and pro mountain bike racer and today I'm going to be going over my race from the Mohican 100 which is a 100 mile mountain bike race in Loudonville, Ohio. I'll be talking a little bit about my nutrition strategy and how I adjusted it on the fly when I couldn't follow it anymore. I'll be going over my bike setup for the race and at the end of the video I'll talk a little bit about my power data from the race so be sure to stick around for that. If you're new to this channel I make weekly training, racing, and gear related videos going over tips and tricks that I've learned in my 12 years of racing experience that have gotten me to the top of the ultra endurance mountain bike game in the US and as a cycling coach at CTS. If you want to learn how to get faster or just more about the science of training in general then be sure to subscribe and if you have a training question or a topic you'd like to see me cover in a future video then be sure to leave it in the comment section down below. I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments. The Mohican 100 is part of the national ultra endurance series which if you're unfamiliar with it features 100 mile and marathon distance races across the US. The Mohican 100 is the third stop for the series and is a staple of the series. The course starts in downtown Loudonville and quickly gets into singletrack and the Mohican wilderness and then it becomes a mix of technical singletrack, gravel roads, farm roads and horse trail. The terrain in this race varies quite a bit so it can be tough to choose the right bike for it. The last time I won this race was three years ago and I did it on a 27.5 hardtail with no dropper post and no arrow bars. My how things have changed. This year I used a full suspension 29er with a dropper post and arrow bars so obviously the bike was a little bit heavier but what I lost in pure climbing speed I made up for in speed in other parts of the course. I went with the Niner RKT9 RDO which is Niner's full suspension XC race bike. Although there isn't anything that gnarly about this race it does get quite bumpy towards the middle of the course and a full suspension allows you to stay seated and save a little bit of energy which is really important for a race of this length. The bike also handles better in the technical sections than a hardtail which is ultimately where I got away. This is also why I chose a dropper post for this race. Riding the downhills faster than my competitors meant they had to work harder to catch back up to me and eventually I'd slip away with enough time on a downhill that I decided to go solo. I also ran arrow bars for this course. Oh great here he goes again talking about his arrow bars. Where's Jeff Gabush at? I just made a whole video talking about using arrow bars for mountain and gravel races and I'll leave that in the description below. This race has a lot of road and gravel sections where you can use the arrow bars but one point on the course in particular is the infamous rail trail section. On the second half of the course there's about a 10 mile section of paved flat rail trail and I'd like to take a minute and see what kind of time savings you could see using arrow bars on this section. In wind tunnel testing riding in the arrow position has been shown to reduce aerodynamic drag on the order of 20%. If we want to see what this looks like in terms of time savings if we head over to bikecalculator.com and plug in my stats we can see that in a standard riding position this section would take about 31 and a half minutes and in the arrow position it would take about 26 minutes and 18 seconds. That's over five minutes in this one 10 mile section of the course and that's not taking into account all the other road and gravel sections where you can use arrow bars. Yeah but Dylan what about the integrity of the race? I mean if everyone runs arrow bars the next thing you know everybody's going to be running double disc wheels and frames that look like exotic tri bikes. Yeah let them do it if it's faster. Next thing you know people are going to be running e-bikes I mean it's basically the same thing. Nope that would be against the rules. Rounding out the bike build for this race I used the Fox 32 step cast fork Nox composite skyline wheels, a Maxis Aspen 2.2 tire in the front and Recon Race 2.2 in the rear, a SRAM Eagle X01 drivetrain with a 34 tooth chain ring and Crank Brothers egg beater pedals. Oh and how could I forget the Quark XX1 Eagle power meter giving me valuable power information throughout the race. A power meter is actually a great tool for 100 mile mountain bike racing because it allows you to pace yourself. The vast majority of people are going to go way too hard at the beginning of these races and a power meter tells you if you're doing that. There's the bike setup now let's get into the race. The race starts with an opening road section before you get into the first single track and my position into the first single track section wasn't great at about seven or eight riders back. This left me chasing through the first single track section and putting down a little bit more power than I would have liked. When I do these races my goal is to always try to average as little power as possible while still staying with the front group until I break away and then my goal is to average as high a power as possible. This race was no exception when we got onto the road section after the single track. We were in a small group and I sat in as much as possible and when I did pull through I kept my pole really short and easy. At about mile 50 we got into some technical single track and that's where me and the eventual third place finisher Jeff Pendleberry got away on one of the technical descents. The single track here was littered with wet mossy rocks so if you had good skills you could put in some time here. As you can see even we were struggling. Within the next couple miles I managed to shake Jeff as well and then I was on my own for the rest of the race. My focus now was to average a high power but keep it manageable, pick the best lines and stay on top of my nutrition which didn't exactly happen and almost turned disastrous and with that I'll go ahead and get into my nutrition strategy. My strategy for the race was fairly straightforward. I was going to consume a gel or shop blocks every 30 to 45 minutes and on my bike I would have two bottles with me one just water and one with a light drink mix. The light drink mix would have electrolytes and about 100 calories per bottle. At eight stations I usually down some coke really fast while my bottles are being filled and if you put all of that together then my caloric consumption for the race is a little over 300 calories per hour. One review article on fueling for ultra endurance athletes stated that energy intake should be between 36% and 54% of energy expenditure during the race. Given that this was a 5400 kilojoule day and the race lasted around 6.75 hours that's around 800 kilojoules an hour. 36% would be 288 calories per hour so it is above the low end of the range there. I also made sure that the gels I was consuming had caffeine because caffeine has been shown to boost performance up to a certain point so there's no need to overdo it. A study on caffeine consumption and cycling performance took nine well-trained cyclists and fed them 0, 5, 9, and 13 milligrams per kilogram body weight of caffeine before a cycling max test. All the caffeine tests performed better than the placebo however there was no difference in performance from the lowest caffeine dose all the way to the highest. Now I want to stress here that this is my own personal nutrition plan for this race and it won't necessarily work for everyone. Everyone has different calorie, sodium, and fluid needs during racing which makes giving recommendations for nutrition for racing hard. Although I just referenced a review that did give a recommended range, that range was fairly wide and other research isn't so clear. A study on marathon fueling techniques stated that regardless of what research demonstrates or how complex a formula may be each athlete must be treated as unique. Age, gender, total mass, lean mass, lactic threshold, VO2, O2 max, projected pace, projected acceleration, fatigue rate, temperature, humidity, sweat rate, gastric tolerance, and fuel product all affect fueling needs and unfortunately no clear universal formula exists to calculate such precise expenditure. The biggest thing here is to experiment before your big race and make sure that your nutrition plan works for you. So let's get back to my race where did it all go wrong? Well I didn't actually carry enough gels to last me the whole race as I planned on picking up gels at the aid stations as I went. As it turns out the last three aid stations didn't have any gels. This was a problem as this was my main fuel source. What the aid stations did have was coke. At the last three aid stations I made sure to chug down a cup of coke and take another one with me to go. It's a little bit nerve wracking not having fuel on your person during the end of these races but I made sure to fill up on coke at each aid station and what do you know it worked. By the very end of the race I did feel a bonk start to come on but I was so close to the finish at that point that it didn't matter. I was pretty relieved because the guy who got second place Christian Tangay has caught me before at the end of a hundred mile race when I've bonked and taken the win from me. All right let's get into some power numbers. My normalized power for this race was 262 watts which is pretty typical for a hundred mile mountain bike race for me. I often see between 260 and 265 at these races. Keep in mind that when you're mountain biking your power is going to be a little bit lower because there's so much time spent coasting. The power for this race was a lot steadier than normal though. It's not uncommon in these races to see a higher power than normal at the beginning of the race when you're trying to make the lead group and then lower power in the middle when you're trying to conserve and then high power again at the end when you're trying to break away. Making the lead group selection for this race did require higher power at 307 watts for the first 25 minutes and 292 watts for the first hour but that's not the highest I've seen. Remember that at this point in the race I'm just trying to keep my power as low as possible. 300 watts isn't sustainable for me for the whole race and clearly it wasn't for anyone else doing the race either. Everyone goes out too hard in these races and you have to be very conscious of what you're doing not to do the same. Speak for yourself bro. My legs feel so good right now. I'm just going to punch it as hard as I can until I blow up and probably by that point I'll be so far ahead that it won't matter. In the first single track section once I caught the leaders I would let them gain a little bit of time on me on the climb and then gain it right back in the next descent while putting out zero power. This allowed me to average a little bit lower power than them. Obviously I don't have access to my competitors power files but I would venture to guess that my power was a little bit lower than them in this first section. The rest of the race was pretty steady with a normalized power in the 250s and never really fading. That's the race recap for you guys. Big thanks to Ryan O'Dell for putting on another awesome Mohican 100. This is definitely a race worth checking out if you're into long mountain bike races. Also all the mid-race footage in this video was captured by Phil from MTV Shack who is another video creator here on YouTube. I've left the link for his channel in the description so be sure to head over to his channel and show him some love. This is win number two for me in the Anui series this year and I've got another one coming up this weekend the Lumberjack 100. Head over to Instagram and follow me at Dylan Johnson if you want to stay updated. Thanks for watching and if you like this video be sure to give it a like, share it with a friend, and subscribe for more. If you want to see more training and racing content be sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you want to follow my training be sure to check me out on Strava. And finally if you're looking for a coach shoot me an email at djohnson at trainright.com