 As we turned back down the descent though, my bike set up really started to shine and I managed to get a gap over the rest of the chase group on this descent, which now meant that I was solidly in third place on the road, which was on the podium and in the money. Clearly I shouldn't have been that confident though, because Tasman managed to catch back up to me in the single track section and passed me on a climb and immediately established a gap. Welcome back to the channel. This video is fueled by the feed. Just because a race is advertised as a gravel race does not necessarily mean that a gravel bike is the best bike for the job. Many gravel courses are so rough that perhaps a mountain bike would be the better option. Q the modern day gravel bikes are just 90s mountain bikes comments. More like modern day gravel facial hair looks like it came straight out of a bad 70s, but sure continue. This was certainly the case for the Bighorn gravel race in Gypsum, Colorado. For some context, this would be the first race in the high altitude portion of my season. If that wasn't already abundantly clear by the choice of decoration in this Airbnb. For those who've been following my racing, you know that my main priority is the lifetime Grand Prix and the next two races in the middle of the calendar are Crusher and the Tushar at 6,000 to 10,000 feet of elevation and Leadville, which is at 10 to 12,000 feet. For Bighorn gravel was the perfect tune up for Crusher and the Tushar because at an altitude of 6,000 to 10,000 feet, a 78 mile race distance and almost 10,000 feet of climbing, it seemed to match every demand that Crusher was going to throw at me. And on top of that, some of the notable hitters from the lifetime Grand Prix would be in attendance. That being said, I would put the roughness and technicality of this gravel race right up there with the Leadville 100, which is technically a mountain bike race. Now that's not saying a whole lot because Leadville is not known for being a super technical race. In fact, I think if the race was started in 2023, they'd probably advertise it as a gravel race and then everybody would show up on 38 millimeter tires and it would be even more miserable than it already is, but I digress. I think this further goes to show that the line between mountain bike racing and gravel racing is not black and white. There is a huge gray area between the two. And when a race falls into this gray area, you can either choose to under bike with your gravel bike or over bike with your mountain bike. Or you can create a bike that falls perfectly into this gray area and actually have the right bike for the course. I think you can probably guess which option I went with. Last year, I created this abomination of a bike by taking my Factor Lando hardtail mountain bike and putting drop bars on it. This is not a bike check video, so I won't get into every single detail here, but don't worry, that video is coming in the near future. For now, I'll just highlight the important bits. If the race that I'm using this bike for is more on the gravel side of the spectrum, then I will swap out the Fox 32 step cast fork, which has 100 millimeters of travel with a gravel Fox taper cast fork, which only has 40 millimeters of travel. This lowers the handlebars and steepens the head angle quite a bit, taking it from about 68 degrees to 71 degrees, which is actually a head angle that is in line with most gravel bikes and makes the bike handle a bit more like a gravel bike. The other notable change is that I slap on a 42 tooth chainring on my 1x SRAM Eagle drivetrain. That's right. Factor Lando just barely has clearance for this massive chainring, well, massive by mountain bike standards. And no, I don't swap out the tires for something in between gravel size and mountain bike size like you might think. Instead I just stick with the 2.2 Continental Race Kings, which is a straight up cross country mountain bike tire. A lot of people are not going to believe me when I say this, but this is actually the main reason why this bike is faster on a rough course. A fast pair of cross country mountain bike tires generally has a lower rolling resistance than an equivalent pair of gravel tires. Yes, you heard that correctly. The reason for this is because tire manufacturers can get away with using a thinner casing without an increased puncture risk because the volume of the tire is so much higher. While not always the case, generally a thinner casing means a faster tire. This is not just some wild theory that I'm pulling straight out of my ass either. I've done my own testing on this and this has been confirmed by bicyclerollingresistance.com. So I'm sure at this point you're probably asking yourself, well, if a mountain bike tire is so much faster, then why would you ever use a gravel tire? The answer to that is aerodynamics. A narrower tire is significantly more aerodynamic. In fact, we actually tested this in a wind tunnel and found that every extra millimeter is roughly a half-watt penalty at 35 kilometers per hour, so that extra 10 or so millimeters from a mountain bike tire could be costing you five or more watts. This is why for a race like Unbound, for example, which is flatter and has a higher average speed, it makes more sense to run a traditional gravel setup. Well, maybe not this year. When the race has a lot of climbing or rough terrain or single track or anything that drops the average speed down, then the arrow advantage of a skinny tire starts to diminish and it starts to make more sense to run a wider tire. This brings me to Bighorn. The Bighorn course contains very few flat sections. For the most part, you are either climbing or descending. On top of this, there are two very significant single track sections on course and the gravel roads are rutted out and extremely bumpy. Some of them seem more like cheap trails. Probably the kind of course that this dumb bike was made for. Even though this was more of a training race, like I said, there were some serious hitters from the lifetime Grand Prix here, including former XE Mountain Bike National Champion Howard Grotz, Cyclocross National Champion Eric Bruner, Australian Gravel and Mountain Bike National Champion Brennan Johnston and more. This was also going to be my first race of the year at altitude and given that I had just arrived in Colorado three days earlier, I was nowhere near acclimated yet. I was going to have to really think outside of the box in order to pull out a good result here. Sure, I was already doing that with my bike setup, which would definitely give me an advantage over the rest of the field, which for the most part showed up on traditional gravel bikes, but I went one step further and used my unconventional pacing strategy. For those of you who have watched my unbound video from 2022, you already know where I'm going with this. Oh God, here we go again. Instead of just trying to stay with the leaders for as long as I could until I blew up, which by the way is the strategy that 99% of racers use, I gave myself a power ceiling on the climbs and that power ceiling was 300 watts. So how did I come to that number? Well, I knew that the race would take between four and five hours, but a lot of that would be descending. Remember, this power ceiling is more so for the climbs in the race and I'd probably be climbing for around three-fourths of the time. So let's say around three hours, but then we also have to throw the altitude into the mix. And for that, I used an altitude chart and we can see that at 6,000 feet in my non-acclimatized state, I'd be at around 89% of my available aerobic power at sea level. 140 watts would be a good day for me if I could hold that for three hours at sea level. So if we take 89% of that, we get around 300 watts for the climbs on the course. Of course, I need to remember that I'm going up in altitude as I'm climbing. So if I need to let the power drift down, I will, but 300 watts is my ceiling. Unsurprisingly, giving myself this power limit meant that I was dropped immediately on the first climb, which comes just four miles into the race. In fact, I would say that five minutes into this first climb, I was sitting in around 40th place. Dylan Johnson is still behind me. So if I'm in front of Dylan, no big deal, right? And then all of a sudden here comes Dylan Johnson. And then I was like, oh, I should jump on his wheel. Nope. There was just no way I could get on his wheel. The dude went from like 50th or 60th all the way up to third. It was insane. So like he did the strategy I'd hope to do. Wow. What are the odds that not just one but two annoying vegan YouTubers would be at this race? I hope you guys got the chance to trade grass clipping recipes afterwards. When you find yourself so far back right off the bat, it can be easy to panic and just throw your pacing strategy right out the window. But it didn't take long before people started blowing up or realizing that this pace was unsustainable. And I started catching people nonstop. And by the time I crested the first climb, I was back in the top 15. This first climb of the race lasted just under 33 minutes. And my normalized power for it was spot on at 300 watts for the whole thing, which is a sea level equivalent of about 347. After this, we descended back down to start the second climb of the day. By this point, I'm just inside the top 10. And I can see a group of four about a minute up the road. And I presume that this is either the second or third chase group. By the top of this second climb, they're now within 15 seconds. This second climb was the longest of the day, lasting an hour and two minutes. And my normalized power here was 303 watts or 360 watts at sea level. By the way, the sea level equivalent power went up because the altitude went up. I swear I'm not just making up these numbers. The descent that follows this climb is single track, which meant that catching this group on my bike setup was actually pretty easy. And by the time we got to the bottom, I was firmly in the chase group on the road. Here's the race situation. There are two leaders up the road, which include Howard Grotz and Eric Bruner. And then three minutes back is our chase group, which contains Brandon Johnson, Tasman Ninkervis, Jack O'Dron and me. All six of us are in the lifetime Grand Prix, by the way. Jack O'Dron takes up the polling for most of this climb. And I'm happy just to sit on his wheel because the pace he's doing seems very close to my limit. This climb took just under 42 minutes at 295 watts NP or 355 at sea level. This climb is an out and back, which means we were able to see Eric and Howard coming down as we were going up and clock the gap. After this climb, they had four minutes on us with 30 miles left in the race to go. As we turned back down the descent, though, my bike setup really started to shine. And I managed to get a gap over the rest of the chase group on this descent, which now meant that I was solidly in third place on the road, which was on the podium and in the money. And with a single track section coming up at mile 60, I felt pretty confident about cementing this gap. Clearly, I shouldn't have been that confident, though, because Tasman managed to catch back up to me in the single track section and pass me on a climb and immediately established a gap. And then just as he started to disappear out of sight, he stopped gaining time on me. In fact, the opposite started happening. And before long, I had caught him and I passed him back and all of a sudden he was dropped. I didn't surge at all when I passed him. I just kept riding at my consistent pace and that was enough to shake him from my wheel. This is why I adopted this conservative pacing strategy specifically for this race. This was Tasman's first time racing at Altitude, so I don't blame him for making this mistake. But I have learned the hard way way too many times when I've raced at Altitude that going hard costs you way more at Altitude than it does at sea level. When you go into the red, it is much more difficult to come back down when you are at Altitude and it is way easier to blow up. And it seems like this is what happened to Tasman. With just one climb in the race to go, I kept my head down and emptied the tank. And it seems as though I paced my race perfectly because on this last climb, I still managed 299 watts NP for just under 20 minutes or 345 at sea level. I crested this final climb and descended into the finish to take third place. Just three minutes and 21 seconds behind Eric Bruner in second and five minutes and 23 seconds behind Howard Grotz in first and just holding off Jack O'Dron and Tasman who were two and four minutes back, respectively. For the entire four and a half hour race, my NP was 278 and my average power was 241 or a 321 and 278 sea level equivalent, which is an absolutely stellar day for me as far as numbers go. Oh my, bro, come on. You've been fluffing your numbers all video. I'm gonna start giving people my FTP in the EPO equivalent which is how many watts I could do if I was doping. I'm gonna be honest, I probably should not have been on that third place step given the strength of this field and my lack of altitude preparation. I even compared my power numbers to Jack O'Dron who I coach and at a similar weight, he had to put out nearly 20 watts more than me for the race. The difference here really did come down to planning. The bike setup that I chose was a huge help and my pacing strategy was invaluable. If I had tried to stay with Howard and Eric of that first climb, I very likely could have blown up halfway into the race and lost 20 or 30 minutes. Believe me, it's happened to me before when I've raced at altitude. Thanks for watching. If you wanna 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.