 I saw no need to attack on the climb because I knew the descent that was about to come. I went into the descent first and took more risks than I normally would in order to establish a gap. Not only is this descent very steep and rocky, but it's also long. It took me 20 minutes and 47 seconds to get down it, and it comes late in the race at mile 83, so you're already fatigued going into it. Welcome back to another video. Today, I'm going to be taking you through my race at this year's Shenandoah Mountain 100. I'm going to be talking pacing, strategy, some key things that I did with my bike setup, and power numbers. Let's go ahead and get into it. For those of you who don't know, the Shenandoah Mountain 100 is a 100 mile mountain bike race in Virginia that's been going on for 22 years now. It's also part of the National Ultra Endurance series, which is a national series for 100 mile mountain bike racing here in the US. The Shenandoah 100 was actually the first 100 mile race that I did back when I was 15. I've been chasing a win here for a while now and have come agonizingly close. For example, in 2016, I was in a battle with Christian Tangay and dropped him with 15 miles left to go. Unfortunately, not long after that, I ran out of juice and bonked, and he caught me with 5 miles left in the race and beat me by just 2 minutes. Given that I've done the race 7 times at this point, I know the course extremely well and have learned a couple things over the years. The course has 6 climbs in it. The 2nd and 4th climb are very steep, technical single track, and in fact most people will have to get off their bike and hike for at least part of these climbs. The rest of the climbs are gravel or double track, and the descents off of all 6 of these climbs are moderately technical single track. And then there's some flat road and gravel sections in between each climb. The biggest of these 6 climbs is the 2nd to last one and is known as the Death Climb, and it's aptly named too as it starts with 7 miles of false flat gravel before you get onto the main climb, which takes you another 10 miles before hitting the most technical and longest descent of the race. This is going to become very important later. One thing that I've learned from doing this race so many times is that it always goes out too hard. I thought that this year might be different. In order to keep some social distance, we started in small groups of 10. It didn't matter. All the heavy hitters were placed in the first group, and the pace was strong as ever, with Matt Acker leading the charge of the first climb. I followed his wheel paying close attention to my power and heart rate, and I realized that I was riding right at or even above my FTP or 1-hour max power. This is obviously not sustainable for a race that's supposed to last over 7 hours. I don't know what you're talking about, man. I do 7-hour rides at FTP all the time. It's called not being a soft little b**ch. So I made the conscious decision to drift back in the group as we made our way up the climb. I was doing everything I could to put out as little power as possible. This is something that takes discipline at this point in the race because you feel invincible, and it's extremely easy to go out too hard. I've looked at a lot of race files from ultra endurance races, and almost universally, everyone goes too hard in the first hour and then fades throughout the race. Research into pacing for endurance races finds the same thing. People simply don't have a good perception of what is sustainable on race day. Fading throughout the race is rarely the optimal strategy, though. Let me show you how playing it conservative on the first climb paid off. Matt Acker went into the woods first, completing the climb in 31 minutes and 24 seconds. Meanwhile, I was the last one in the group, 10 riders back and almost a minute back on time. Take a look at the difference in power, though. Due to drafting, drifting back in the pack over the course of the climb and putting out power as sparingly as I could, I managed to put out 60 watts less than Matt on this climb. Who's a similar weight to me? This saved valuable energy for later in the race. That being said, after the descent, I found myself in the second group on the road about a minute back. Luckily, I had my teammate Logan Casper with me who had won the 100k race the day before, and earlier in the summer had done four Everest in one week. Yeah, the dude's crazy and crazy strong, and before too long, we'd caught the front group without using too much energy. The second climb in the race is the steepest and most technical. There is no saving energy on this climb. In fact, I had to put out my peak 20 minute power of the race at 334 watts just to stay upright and not get off my bike and hike. I also hit my highest heart rate for the race on this climb at 181 beats per minute. Usually, if I go over 180 in a 100 mile race, that's a red flag, and it's a sign that I need to back it down immediately. However, on this climb, the alternative was getting off and walking, which I obviously didn't want to do. I crusted the climb with Matt Acker, and the two of us went into the following descent together. The descent has a lot of switchbacks and technical rock sections, and we managed to get a small gap over the chasing group. Seeing this, we decided to work together on the following flat road section to try to make the gap stick. However, we were caught just before the third climb. I did feel pretty strong on the third climb though, and I decided to push the pace at just over 300 watts for this 30 minute climb. The only one in the group to go with me was Will Lovner. Now, I've never raced Will before, so I didn't have a good idea of what his strengths and weaknesses were, but we did ride up and over the third and fourth climb together, and I noticed a couple things. The first is that he's an extremely strong climber. He was having no problem sticking to my wheel any time we went up. However, when we got on the flat sections, the speed was much higher when I was pulling through. This is probably due to the fact that I ran arrowbars for this race, which take minutes off your time on all the flat sections. Also, given that I knew the trail pretty well and I was running a dropper post unlike Will, I noticed that I was riding the downhill sections a bit faster as well. This is probably a good time to talk about my bike setup for the race. Shenandoah can be a hard race to choose the right bike for because there's such a wide variety of terrain, from long steep climbs to technical descents to flat road sections. For me, this means meshing components that you might typically see on a TT bike and an Enduro bike, if you can imagine that. Oh, here he goes again. Dude, you're an embarrassment to all of cycling. You know that, right? A dropper post will save time on the descents, but you don't want to adding a ton of weight to your bike, which is why I go with the Bike Yoke Divine SL, which weighs just 345 grams. That's roughly 150 grams heavier than a normal seat post, and it makes it really hard not to go with a dropper post when they're getting so light. I use the Niner RKT9 RDO frame with a Fox 32 step cast fork. So 100 millimeters of travel. Some riders were opting for 120 millimeter travel forks for this course, but I decided to go with a lighter setup. Because the conditions were dry, I decided to go with a tire with less rolling resistance over one that handled better. I used the Continental Race Kings in the 2.2 width, both front and rear. This can be a scary tire, especially when it's wet, but it's extremely fast rolling, which I was banking on for all the gravel and road sections. Finally, the infamous arrow bars. The course has a lot of flat sections, and the biggest thing that you can do to get more arrow over getting a new set of wheels or an arrow helmet or shaving your body head to toe is changing your body position. The arrow bars allow you to do that while staying relatively comfortable and still putting out decent power. I use the NV Clip-On Arrow Bars for this race. All right, back to the race. In my mind at this point, I decided that if I was gonna drop Will, it was gonna be on a flat section or a downhill section because he was climbing so well. But I also knew that a group of five was chasing us and I didn't want more riders to contend with. After the fourth climb, we got word from the lead moto that we had a seven minute lead over the chasing group. In order to consolidate this lead, I decided to do the majority of the pulling in the false flat gravel section leading into the death climb, which is the fifth climb of the day. This is how valuable the arrow bars are for this race. This section before you hit the death climb took us 40 minutes. Doing some quick calculations on bikecalculator.com using arrow bars for this section alone would save you over six minutes. And this is not the only section of the course where you can use them. Sure, arrow bars look absolutely awful and borderline sacrilegious mounted onto the front of a mountain bike. But I thought that this was a bike race, not a fashion competition. Yeah, well, you thought wrong. We hit the death climb and the lead moto informed us that we had an 11 and a half minute lead over the chasing group. And I knew at this point that they weren't catching us. And I think Will knew this too, because we both played it super conservative going up the death climb, holding about 250 watts for the hour long climb. Will did attack twice towards the top of the climb, but I managed to stay on his wheel. I saw no need to attack on the climb because I knew the descent that was about to come. I went into the descent first and took more risks than I normally would in order to establish a gap. Not only is this descent very steep and rocky, but it's also long. It took me 20 minutes and 47 seconds to get down it. And it comes late in the race at mile 83. So you're already fatigued going into it. This is not the kind of descent where you can take it easy and recover. It's the kind where your arms are screaming at you. You have to be hard on the brakes and you have to constantly be vigilant. Again, the choice to run a dropper seat post for this descent alone was a game changer. My efforts paid off and I managed to get about a minute and 45 seconds on Will in this section. When you get to the bottom, there's about 10 miles left in the race. And with the gap that I had, there was no more holding back at this point. It was time to empty the tank. I put out a little over 300 watts for 15 minutes on the last climb of the day. I kept looking over my shoulder hoping that Will wouldn't be there. At this late point in a race, there's nothing worse than getting caught. I kept thinking back to 2016 when I got caught by Christian on this very same climb. With no sight of Will though, I crested the climb and then it was all downhill to the finish where I crossed the line in seven hours, 13 minutes and 27 seconds. The air bar through the turn. Woo-hoo! All right, Dylan, Johnson, Clayton, seven hours, 13 minutes, 20 seconds. We'll finish five minutes later. Super impressive performance from him given that it was his first Shenandoah 100. And considering that he's just 23 years old, he could be a real threat in years to come. All right, here are the stats from the full race. I had a normalized power of 268 which for me is about 3.8 watts per kilo. My TSS or training stress score was 435. I had an average heart rate of 157 and my average speed was 13.2 miles per hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it. Um, guys, my average watts per calorie per minute and my speed times my normalized heart rate per hour was above average for the third quartile of the race. Look, the real question is how many kudos on Strava did you get for this ride? That's the only metric that I care about. It felt great to finally get a win at the SM100, especially since it was one of my only races this year. I wanted to make more racing content because you guys really seem to like my analysis from Dirty Kanza and the Sugar Cane 200, but there simply weren't any races to report on. Let me know down in the comments if you like the race report videos and I can do more of them when racing comes back in full swing. Maybe I can even mount a GoPro on the front of my bike so you guys can see the action for yourself. If you wanna follow my racing closer, be sure to check me on an Instagram to stay up to date. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like and subscribe for weekly cycling videos just like this one. I'll see you in the next one.