 What I did at the start of this race is probably something that backwards hat dylan would make a joke about but it wasn't a joke and I actually did it at one of the most important races of my season. Welcome back to the channel. This video is fueled by the feed. Those of you who follow this channel know that my big goal for the season is the lifetime Grand Prix which has quickly become the pinnacle of professional off-road endurance racing in the US. Featuring three mountain bike races and four gravel races throughout the season including iconic races such as the Unbound Gravel 200 and the Leadville 100 mile mountain bike race. The Grand Prix kicked off in Monterey, California with the Seattle Classic. There are a lot of races over the course of the Seattle Weekend but the Grand Prix race is the 100 kilometer mountain bike race or at least it was advertised as 100 kilometers. The actual race distance for the two lap race was closer to 110 kilometers or 68 miles. Hopefully racers were aware of that before they started the race. This is about 17 miles or 27 kilometers longer than last year's course. The terrain is a bit more aggressive than rolling hills with most of the climbs lasting five to ten minutes although they tend to be more punchy rather than a steady grade. While not overly technical for a mountain bike race, the course was a bit rutted out and bumpy after some recent rain. Because of this, I opted for the Factor Lando full suspension bike as opposed to the Hardtail. If you want to see a full bike check, Adam Raberjneid did one over on his channel and I left a link for that in the description. Feel how easy it is to push this down. Yeah, you're right. It's like, it's really wet and not, it's really well greased. Personally, I thought a full suspension was the right call and a lot of the riders who were on Hardtails last year made the jump over to a full suspension after seeing the course this year. Although admittedly, I don't think there are a lot of courses out there that I would choose a Hardtail for. But interestingly enough, most of the mountain bike races in the Grand Prix are pretty tame, at least technically speaking. And it actually makes it an unusually difficult call between a Hardtail and a full suspension. I'll keep you updated as the year goes on on what bike I choose for each race. All right, let's get into the actual race itself, starting with perhaps the dumbest thing that I've done at a bike race in a very long time. What I did at the start of this race is probably something that backwards hat Dylan would make a joke about, but it wasn't a joke and I actually did it at one of the most important races of my season. Basically, I was off the front and leading the race for the first minute. I really wish somebody had gotten video of this or at the very least a picture or something, but I haven't seen any, so I guess I'll just tell you about it. What are you talking about, bro? I would never do something that stupid. I always make sure there's a race photographer present if I'm going to attack at the start. Okay, here's the context. The race starts on the Laguna Seca Raceway and there is about a two minute climb on the racetrack before you go straight into Singletrack. Last year, we sprinted as hard as we could from the time the gun went off until we got into the Singletrack, and I probably got into the Singletrack around 20th position. After this, there's 15 minutes where passing is nearly impossible. While this is a longer race and pacing yourself appropriately is usually important, getting as good a start position as possible is crucial. Because there is actually a lot of drafting on this course because a lot of the course is either wide open fast trail section or just straight up gravel road. The start will for the most part determine what group you'll be working with that day and obviously you want the group you end up with to be as strong as possible. Knowing this, I had been psyching myself up all week to put down my two minute max power at the start of this race. When I was warming up, I kept saying to myself, you've got to give it everything you've got on this start. And that's exactly what I did. I didn't get the memo that the rest of the field decided not to do that this year for some reason. So within about 15 seconds of starting, I found myself in the lead. I mean, literally first place and I actually got a gap over the rest of the field over the next 45 seconds. This isn't because I was stronger than everyone else, not by a long shot, but just because everyone else decided to go at a much calmer pace off the line this year. I'm honestly still scratching my head as to why that is. But this would come back to bite me real quick. With about 30 seconds of the climb remaining, that good old burning sensation in the legs really started kicking in. And I got passed by probably 40 or 50 riders in this very short stretch before we hit the trail. Yeah, not great. Don't beat yourself up, man. Now you can say you were beating Keegan Swensen in the lifetime Grand Prix at one point this season. You just got to come up with a couple of excuses for why you lost the title. Here are the numbers from the start. During that first two minute climb, I averaged 534 watts and had a max power of 950. But in that first initial surge, I did 760 watts for 30 seconds and 593 watts for a minute. And that's what really screwed me, because as the Peloton of riders caught me in the second half of the climb, I was only able to average 487 watts for the second minute of the climb, while the other riders were probably easily doing 100 watts more than that. And the average speed going up this climb was 18 miles per hour. So yes, sitting in the pack and drafting would have been the much better call. I got to be honest, I was pretty pissed at myself at this point. Obviously, if I had just stayed in the pack and started sprinting later like everyone else did, I would be in a much better starting position. When we exited the single track, both the lead group and the first chase group, and maybe the second chase group too for all I know, were well out of sight, which is a far worse position than I was in last year. If I had to guess, I'd say I was probably around 40th or 50th place at this point. It's in moments like these where it can be very easy to give up mentally. But I had to remind myself that this is a long race and there's still over 60 miles to go. In my early years of racing, this might have been something that would derail my race. Something wouldn't go my way and then either consciously or unconsciously, I wouldn't push as hard. Around my early 20s though, I had a bit of a mindset shift when it came to racing. Instead of putting too much emphasis on the result, I focused on simply getting to the finish line as fast as possible, no matter what happened and regardless of what place I was in. This seemed to be a good mental strategy for overcoming adversity in a race because no matter what happened, the goal was always the same. And interestingly enough, focusing less on the result actually ended up improving my results in races. This is probably a less applicable strategy to road racing because what the group does dictates how you race and conserving energy is important, but it seems to work well in mountain biking and I actually often use it in gravel races too. If you take Unbound for example, you are simply not going to have a perfect day. Bad things will happen, but how you deal with mid-race setbacks is a major factor in your performance at that race. Back to Seattle though, my goal at this point needs to become getting to the finish line as fast as possible despite my bad start and picking off as many riders as I can in the next four hours. I quickly found myself with a couple of riders and as we started catching guys, the group got bigger. I think at one point we had over 10 riders in it. This was a good thing because maybe with this kind of firepower on these open gravel sections, we'd be able to reel riders back in. And that's exactly what we did. One by one, we would see riders in the distance and then pull ourselves up to them. We ended up catching Brennan Wertz, a big rider with a massive engine and I knew that he would be helpful in the flats. With him, Justin Martin, Jack O'Dron, Steven DeVouse and a couple of others, we worked well together to keep the average speed as high as we could. I would say every 10 minutes or so we would catch another rider and this helped to keep the morale high. Towards the end of the lap, we caught Jeff Kabush who was actually on a gravel bike and while he did not have aero bars on his bike, the superior aerodynamics of the bike was apparent on the wide open sections, which are more prevalent in the second half of the course and letting him pull on those sections helped a lot. This first lap took two hours and seven minutes with a normalized power of 315 watts and an average speed of 16.2 miles per hour. At the feed zone, I picked up a hydration pack and this was actually my first time ever using a hydration pack in a mountain bike race of this duration. It's not something that I would normally go for, but if you remember from my previous video on testing gravel equipment in the wind tunnel, the pack surprisingly improved my aerodynamics and I have to say it did make hydration a lot easier out on course as I didn't have to reach down for a bottle. So why didn't I start with the pack on? Well, I wanted to be as light as possible for that opening climb and we all know how that went. I digress into the second lap at this point. The group that I was with that had been riding strong in the first lap was really starting to fade. I'll admit I was starting to fade at this point too, but not quite as much as the group was probably a quarter of the way through the second lap. I dropped the remaining riders in the group in the single track and I found myself solo. Despite this being a mountain bike race, being alone on this course is not optimal. As I said, there's a lot of drafting and at this point it was just me breaking all of the wind. It didn't help that I started to feel cramps coming on at this point as well. A quick note on cramping. It's a pretty commonly held belief that cramping is due to an electrolyte imbalance. Well, that may be a factor. A lot of recent research on cramping shows that it's actually due to fatigue. The answer that people don't want to hear is that if you want to stop cramping, there isn't a quick fix. You need to get fitter. Now, there is a large genetic component as well, but being in shape is the best remedy. I personally don't cramp too much, but if I do, it's usually in the first few races of the season and this makes sense because I'm pushing my body harder than it's been pushed in a few months. This was the first race of the Grand Prix and only my third race this season. So the cramps made sense, but fortunately they never got so bad that I had to slow down significantly. I was catching fewer riders in the second lap than I did in the first lap, but I was still moving up in the field as opposed to moving back. The last climb of the day is by far the longest and hardest of the race at a little over three and a half miles and taking almost 20 minutes. Now, it isn't uphill for the entire time. There are some short descents in there, but you do gain 700 feet of elevation at the bottom of the climb. I saw two riders off the trail and I was determined to catch them about halfway up. I made contact with them and saw that it was Sam Andrews and the current U.S. Cyclocross National Champion, Curtis White. I took a moment to catch my breath and then made another move and was able to get a small gap. They managed to claw their way back to me though. And now with the finish line nearly within sight, clearly they had more left in their legs than I gave them credit for. On the final pitch of the climb, Sam launched an attack and Curtis followed and I simply had no response as I was on the ragged edge of cramping at this point. We crested the climb and I still had them in sight, but with just a short descent to the finish line, catching them was going to be impossible at this point. So they ended up getting the two spots ahead of me. On that final climb, I had a normalized power of 294 watts for 20 minutes and 337 watts for two and a half minutes on that final pitch. That entire second lap was quite a bit slower than the first at two hours and 21 minutes, a normalized power of 270 and an average speed of 14.7 miles per hour. Part of the reason for this is simply the nature of the race. The start matters a lot. So a lot of riders just plan to go very hard at the start and then slow down a little bit throughout the race, although hopefully not slow down too much. This was my plan and it's in start contrast to the plan that I used at the Unbound 200 last year. The difference with this race is that being that it's a mountain bike race, pacing yourself appropriately at the start would mean that you get caught in bottlenecks in the single track sections and lose massive time. However, as I said in the second lap, I was still catching riders. So even though I was fading, I wasn't fading quite as much as the riders around me. In the end, I ended up finishing in 30th place out of the 84 riders in the pro men's field and 22nd out of 35 in the lifetime Grand Prix. This is not the start to the series I was hoping for. Last year, Seattle was actually my best placing in a Grand Prix race with a 17th overall in the race and 13th out of the Grand Prix riders. So I had high hopes, but I think this is where it's important to have a little bit of perspective before just writing it off as a bad race. Last year on the shorter course, my normalized power was 306 watts for the whole race, which took three hours and four minutes. If we look at the first three hours and four minutes of this year's race, my normalized power was only two watts lower at 304 MP and I still had well over an hour left to race. Given this had the race been the same distance this year, it's very likely that I would have had a higher normalized power this year than I did last year. My normalized power for the entire race ended up being 294 watts for four hours and 28 minutes with an average speed of 15.4 MP. This is nothing new for me. My career has fallen during a period of massive growth in U.S. off-road racing, particularly on the gravel side. And while this isn't a gravel race, it is part of the lifetime Grand Prix, which has brought out the best riders in the U.S. and international riders as well and absolutely raised the level of competition. It really does seem like every race I compete in now, I'll do a higher power output, a higher average speed, a faster finishing time and a worse placing and I'll be honest. It can be frustrating, but I'm grateful to be part of this period of growth in U.S. cycling and I'm determined to be competitive. I want to take my audience along for the ride this year in the lifetime Grand Prix, whether it's a good race or a bad race or a good race for me, but not a great race on the results sheet, which is kind of what this one is. I had great legs and great power numbers and with the exception of that start, I thought I rode a good race and at the end of the day, I think that's all we can ask for. I do think that when evaluating a race performance, too many racers judge the success of the race based on how they did relative to others as opposed to relative to their past self. Of course, the goal in a race where you're racing other people is to win or to place high, but you should also strive to ride better than you have previously. If you're doing that, then you're succeeding. All right, we get it. Jeez, man. Had I known this video was going to be so freaking sappy, I would have just turned on the notebook instead. Thanks for watching. If you want to follow my racing closer, be sure to check me out on Instagram. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, subscribe and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.