 With any luck, I'd be able to catch some strong roadies who lacked mountain bike skills and we'd be able to work together on the rolling pipeline section leading into Columbine. Sure enough, this is exactly what happened. At the bottom of Powerline, I caught Rob Britton and Nicky Terpstra, two big roadies who were powerhouses on the flat. The Leadville 100 is one of the oldest 100-mile mountain bike races in the US and is certainly the most prestigious. The course is considered old-school mountain biking, consisting of mostly gravel forest roads and double track. I think there may be a total of two miles of single track in the entire 100-mile course. So yeah, it's basically a gravel race. That being said, it's still rough enough that you'd be significantly undergunned on certain sections of the course if you were to do it on a gravel bike, making a mountain bike the right choice. However, most participants choose to do it on a hardtail, which in 2022 is pretty rare for a mountain bike race and says a lot about the technicality of the course. Eh, gravel bikes are starting to look more and more like hardtail mountain bikes every single day. Watch, in a couple of years, they're going to be marketing this thing as a gravduro race. And of course, you can't talk about Leadville without talking about the altitude. This is probably the race's defining feature. The town of Leadville sits at 10,000 feet where the race starts, but the race goes as high as 12,000 feet. And while there are a lot of high altitude races out there, few of them are this high for this long. During Leadville, you're gasping for air type elevation for the entire race, not just at the tops of the climbs. Being that this is the case, your altitude acclimation process is very important for this race. And while I don't normally talk about my preparation leading into the race in these race report videos, I do feel like it's necessary to give you an idea of what my altitude acclimation process looked like in this video. All told, I was at altitude for a little over a month leading up to the race, but I didn't just go straight up to 10,000 feet right off the bat. Altitude can have a negative impact on your training quality, so I decided to stair step the elevation that I was staying at leading into the race. To do this, I chose locations around Colorado to stay at that gradually went up in altitude. I stayed for a week at 6,000 feet and then 7,000 for a week and then 9,000 and then for the last two weeks leading into the race, I was in Leadville at 10,000 feet. Over the course of this stay at altitude, I dropped about six pounds, which actually isn't unusual at elevation as your appetite decreases and there's a little bit of muscle atrophy as well. This isn't such a bad thing for Leadville because there is a lot of climbing in this race. That being said, I did need to make sure that I wasn't getting too light that I was losing a significant amount of power. On race day, I was roughly 147 pounds or 66 kilos. The lightest I've been in probably six years and I was getting seriously close to my prepubescent body type that I had in college. Fingers crossed that while not attractive to the opposite sex, this would help me go faster on race day. Now, I don't have time to get into all the science of altitude training in this video, but fortunately, if you are curious about that, I already have a video about it and it's linked down in the description below. Okay, that's a bit of background on the preparation for this race. Now let's get into the race itself, starting with an overview of the course. The Leadville 100 is actually 105 miles and is an out and back meaning that with slight deviations here and there, you pretty much race 50 plus miles out of town, turn around, and then race the same way back. In my mind, there are four major sections of this course. There's the first climb, which is St. Keyvins. There's the second climb, which is Powerline, a flat to rolling section in the middle, which is Pipeline. And then the biggest climb of the day, which is Columbine, which starts at 9,200 feet and goes up to 12,500 feet. And then, of course, you turn around and you do that all in reverse. Yay. Going up Powerline on the way back is the harder direction. And the beginning of the climb is the steepest bit of the race, with grades hovering around 20% for about a quarter of a mile. All right, one last thing before I get into the actual race breakdown is I have to mention the insane level of competition that this race attracted this year. This race is part of the Lifetime Grand Prix. And of course, that brought some of the best US gravel and mountain bike racers. But it also brought some international competition, like former Perry Roubaix winner Nikki Terpstra and Cape Epic winner Matt Beers. This very well may be the deepest field that Leadville has ever seen. So with the stage fully set now, this is how my race went. The race starts with a slight downhill road descent out of town that turns into gravel before hitting the first climb up St. Keyvins. Sometimes in these races with this kind of a start, the pace off the line is actually pretty mellow, as riders anticipate going very hard on the first climb and wanting to save their legs for that. With this in mind, I wanted to see if I could break away from the pack, not to try to go for a solo win or anything like that, but just so that I could start the first climb with a 30 second gap or so. And that way I could ride it at my own pace without getting dropped from the front group. Unfortunately, though, they weren't going to let anything go. And ultimately, I wasn't going to burn a huge match trying to make this work. So I did start the first climb with the front group. However, I didn't abandon my plan of riding at my own pace. On top of making it harder to breathe and reducing your power output in the moment, riding an altitude also increases the likelihood that you're going to blow up. It doesn't help that most people are riding way harder than they should at the start of a 100 mile race, even when it's at low altitude. Of course, none of this stops riders from pushing into the red on the first climb at Leadville, and knowing this, I was perfectly content to let the front group drop me. Some of you may remember this particular tactic which I used at Unbound. I'd say the tactic that I used here was similar, but I was hunting for fast riders to latch onto on the flat sections in the early part of the race. If that meant going a little too hard to catch their wheel, then so be it. So I'd say that this tactic was a bit of a hybrid. As I crested the first climb, I was probably around 30th place, and that first climb required a normalized power of 283 watts for 22 minutes. Now, these power numbers that I'll be talking about in this video were all done at 9,000 to 12,000 feet, which makes them hard to compare to sea level power outputs. Given that, I'll also be giving you the sea level equivalent power output for a bit more context. So for example, 283 watts at 10,000 feet for an acclimatized rider drops your power to 83.7%, equating to 338 watts at sea level. Sea level conversion? Pfft, this guy. All right, yeah, I'd do that too. Even when I'm already riding at sea level. I could already tell that I had conserved a bit more energy than the riders around me because I was catching riders fast. And as we hit the road section between the first two climbs, I had the front group in sight. Going up the second climb of the day, I could see riders getting shelled from that front group one by one. This climb required a normalized power of 275 watts for 25 minutes, or a 335 watt sea level equivalent. What followed was the descent down power line, which is by far the most technical descent of the race, with multiple rock gardens and a steep off camber section near the bottom. With any luck, I'd be able to catch some strong roadies who lacked mountain bike skills, and we'd be able to work together on the rolling pipeline section leading into Columbine. Sure enough, this is exactly what happened. At the bottom of power line, I caught Rob Britton and Nicky Terpstra, two big roadies who were powerhouses on the flat. Over the course of this pipeline section, we worked together and probably caught five more riders before we hit the base of Columbine. Starting the climb, our group contained four riders. Myself, Rob Britton, Nicky Terpstra, and Ian Lopez. This climb was likely going to take around an hour and take us to the highest point of the race. Given this, it was important to conserve a bit at the bottom. Rob Britton made it clear that he wanted to work together and I was on board. We traded pulls and before long, we had dropped Nicky Terpstra and Ian was dangling off of our wheel as well. About halfway up, Lachlan Morton came by and I attempted to get on his wheel, but he was simply climbing too strong and I wasn't able to hold it. As we approached the top, I was able to count the number of riders coming down to see what place I was in. I crested the summit in 15th place, and that climb took just under 56 minutes, with a normalized power of 256 watts, which is a sea level equivalent of 316. After the climb, you turn around and bomb straight back down to the bottom. This is probably the most dangerous part of the Leadville race, not because this is a particularly technical descent by any means, but because there are hundreds of riders coming up the left side while you're ripping down the right side just feet away from them. I had certainly clocked some faster times on this descent in training leading up to the race, but on race day I found it difficult to take risks on this descent given the two-way traffic. By the time I got to the bottom, I could see Corey Wallace 30 seconds ahead of me, and Rob Britton and Ian Lopez were 30 seconds behind me, and as we hit the flat pipeline section, we quickly formed a group and started working together. It was around this time, however, that I felt my power start to fade, and I knew it was going to be a difficult second half. Perhaps I had gone too hard up Columbine, or perhaps what I thought was conservative pacing at the beginning of the race wasn't conservative enough. About halfway through the pipeline section, I lost touch with this group and found myself riding solo, not a position you want to be in on this section because the speeds are high and drafting is highly advantageous. I got to the aid station and down to Coke and restocked on gels. Maybe if I increased my fueling, I'd be able to reverse what was happening. A small group containing Payson McKelvin, Alex Wilde, and Braden Lang blasted through the aid station, and I quickly got on their wheels. All three of these riders are in the lifetime grand prix, and I didn't want to give up any points to them if I could help it. We worked together on the flat road section that followed before the infamous powerline climb. Going up the steep section, Payson rode away from us, but Braden and Alex stayed with me. As we crested the first steep pitch though, I felt completely gassed. This effort required an NP of 258 watts for nine minutes, or 308 watts at sea level, five hours into the race. The legs felt completely drained at this point, and I still had 20 miles left to go. I saw Braden and Alex go up the trail, and before long, I was also caught by Jack O'Dron. You may remember Jack from the Unbound video, he was one of the riders that I recruited for my pacing strategy. As I crested the powerline climb, I was relieved to get it over with, and I was hoping that I could recover a bit on the descent for the final climb of the day. My power for the entire powerline climb was 220 watts for 37 minutes, or 262 watts at sea level, which really gives you an idea of how far in the hole I was by the top of that climb. I did feel a little bit better going up St. Kevens, but I still wasn't moving quickly, still only managing about 220 watts up it, and I was caught by Eddie Anderson at the top. It was at this point that I started trying to do some mental math to determine my placing, and it turns out that doing mental math is actually quite difficult when you're 90 miles into Leadville. If I had been in 15th place at the top of Columbine, and I had lost this many places then, was I still in the top 20? To be honest, I wasn't sure, but I knew it would be close. The final few miles of Leadville is a false flat drag on gravel, up into town, and to the finish line. On that final drag, I looked back, and I could see a rider coming up in the distance. I didn't know who that rider was, or how much they had left in the tank, but I was determined not to let that rider catch me. So what little energy I had left in my legs, and believe me, it was very little at this point, I completely emptied all the way to the line. I ended up holding them off as well, and in this last 14 minutes of the race, I managed to eke out an NP of 253 watts, or 302 watts at sea level to cross the line in 6 hours, 46 minutes, and 27 seconds in 20th place. That rider hunting me down was none other than Nicky Terpstra, and let's just say I'm glad I didn't have to sprint against him. Alright, here are the full race stats. 105 miles with a TSS of 279, which is obviously too low because of the altitude. The sea level adjusted TSS would be roughly 380. I had a normalized power of 235, and an average power of 199, which is a sea level equivalent of 280 and 237. My average heart rate was 160 beats per minute, and my max was 189, and my average speed was 15.6 miles per hour. By the way, if you've been wondering about the accuracy of this sea level conversion that I've been doing throughout this video, these numbers actually track really well with the numbers that I'm able to do at lower altitude 100 mile mountain bike races. For example, my normalized and average power from the Kohutta 100 this year were 273 and 235 watts for almost the same time duration compared to a sea level adjusted power of 280 and 237 at Leadville. The effort at Kohutta required an average heart rate of 157 compared to 160 at Leadville. So how do I feel about this performance? Terrible. Unsubscribe. I'd say very similar to Unbound. Just like at Unbound I had a very fast time and I performed well for myself. Sure, I could have probably paced this race a bit better, but even given that, I likely only gave up 5 or 10 minutes. Any other year to get 20th place at Leadville, you wouldn't even have to break 7 hours. Alex Wilde, who got 16th place, put up a post on Instagram about how his time of 6 hours and 39 minutes would have gotten him well within the top 10 any other year that the race was run and often inside the top 5. The Lifetime Grand Prix has absolutely stepped up the level of competition at these races, both by the riders actually in the series doing these races and by attracting riders outside of the series. I'm currently sitting in 16th place in the Lifetime Grand Prix and I would say that my biggest goal for the remainder of the season is to improve on that with two races to go. If you want to follow along then the best place to do that is over on Instagram. Also, if you're interested in coaching then I have coaches available trained by me that I can set you up with and I also have training plans available on training peaks and today's plan. Just follow the links in the description below. Finally, give this video a like if you enjoyed it, subscribe, and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.