 This is because we were marking each other in anticipation of an attack or saving our energy for a final sprint. As we entered the final mile of the race though, I assumed that we would just sprint it out in the last few hundred meters. Drew had other plans though. Welcome back to another video. This past weekend was the second race of the Southeast Gravel series, the Greenwood Gravel Grinder. This is a local race series for me and I use these races mainly as training for bigger gravel races to come later in the season, but there's been some very solid competition at these races lately, and this race would be a good opportunity to take a look at some tactics and I'll also talk about some changes I've been making to my gravel race setup lately. With that, let's go ahead and jump into the race. The course was 69 miles with just over 3700 feet of climbing. The climbs in this race were mostly gradual rolling hills, nothing too steep or long. Gravel races, although not always, usually tend to be races of attrition, meaning that the lead group gets smaller and smaller as the race progresses, and the last one standing wins, or it may come down to a sprint finish from a small select group. The attrition rate is often dependent on how challenging the course is, and there are many factors that can contribute to this, from the amount of climbing, the technicality of the gravel, whether or not there's any single track or pinch points, and the distance of the race. The longer and harder a gravel race is, the smaller the lead group will be at the end, generally speaking of course. Tactics do play a role in this and we'll get into that. We've already touched on the distance and the amount of climbing in this race, neither of which give this race a very high attrition rate on paper. In fact, in the last southeast gravel race, which had a similar distance and amount of climbing, it came down to a 10-person sprint finish, which is a huge lead group at the end of a gravel race. This race was a bit more technical, though. For starters, there was a single track section just four miles into the course, which would quickly split things up, and the gravel was a bit chunkier, too. Going into the race, my plan was to make the race hard, so that the lead group to contest the finish was as small as possible. I've gotten more confident in my sprint over the past couple years, but I still like my odds against one or two people as opposed to ten. I like where your head is at. I give myself the best odds of winning sprints, too. For example, I take every stop sign sprint on the Sunday morning social coffee ride. You see, we don't really designate these sprints ahead of time. I just kind of make them up as I go, which catches everyone off guard. People love riding with me. Making the race hard does not mean just mindlessly pulling at the front and giving everyone a free ride. There's a bit of strategy to it. For example, let's talk about the start. With a single track section so early in the race, my first objective was to get into the single track first and ride it as hard as possible. You don't get a lot of draft when you're in single track, so you aren't just giving competitors a free ride. And because single track is a pinch point, in fact, it's about as pinched as it could possibly be. It's called single track after all. That means that competitors near the back are going to get squeezed out and have to do a lot of work to catch back on. The plan didn't go perfectly though. I had the lead going in, but a rider nabbed it from me right at the last minute as we entered the trail. I did manage to pass him though, and when we exited the single track, I actually had a small gap. My intention was not to do a solo breakaway at this point because 65 miles is a long way to go on such a flat course, and the odds would not have been in my favor. That being said, I wasn't going to just sit up either because I wanted the group behind to burn some matches to catch me, and hopefully by the time they did, the front group would be dwindled down a bit. The smaller your group, the harder the race is for each person in the group because each person has to do a larger proportion of the pulling. Again, this is something that I wanted. I was off the front by myself for about 15 minutes before I was caught, and that effort took a normalized power of 383 watts and an average power of 342. Sure enough, when the chasing group caught me, it only contained four riders, making for a five rider lead group, which was perfect. Unfortunately, though, we didn't quite have the firepower to stay away from the 10 rider group rolling quickly behind us, and they caught us soon after and the lead group was back to a decent size. In order to dwindle this down further, I was going to have to be strategic with my energy. For example, if we were on a climb, that was a good place to go harder because riders behind me were getting less of a draft. Also, in gravel, you can gap people on downhills if you're riding a little bit more confidently on them. The next hour of the race was not particularly hard at a 278 normalized power, but you can see some big surges, some of which came from me and some of which came from Tim Coffey, a young pro road racer with a massive 400 plus watt FTP. Going into the race, I knew that Tim was one of the favorites. So I was marking him. The other rider I had my eye on was Drew Dillman. Drew is best known for his cyclocross results with collegiate national titles and a fourth place at nationals at the elite level as well. But he also has some killer gravel results with a third place at Mid-South, which is one of the biggest gravel races in the country. So I knew that he would be tough to beat as well. Drew was also playing the race a bit smarter, doing no hard pulls on the front and staying back in the pack to conserve energy as much as possible. If this had been a bigger gravel race with a higher level of competition, this would have been my tactic as well. And when I saw him doing this, I thought that maybe I had been doing too much. During this portion of the race, a few riders did try to break away, but nothing was successful. About halfway through the race, though, Tim and I worked together to shell most of the riders we were with on a climb, and we managed to dwindle the group down to six. This effort required a normalized power of 354 watts for just under 10 minutes. Unfortunately, though, it was also at this time that Tim got a flat and his race was done, making for a five rider lead group, one of which was Drew Dillman. The group worked well together with everyone taking their pull and no attacks. And for about 35 minutes, I had a normalized power of 287 watts through this section with a little less than 20 miles left to go. Now is the time to start thinking about making a winning move or at the very least getting this front group even smaller, if I could, with 16 miles to go. I put in a hard dig up a short climb, averaging 550 watts for 30 seconds. As I crested the climb, I looked back and the only rider still on my wheel was Drew, and now I just had one rider to worry about heading into the finish. During the stretch that finish, I made one attempt to break away from Drew on a series of short climbs with a normalized power of 405 watts for five and a half minutes, but these attempts were unsuccessful. So I decided to reel it in and prepare myself for a sprint finish. The next four miles were probably the easiest of the race with an NP of just 260 watts. This is because we were marking each other in anticipation of an attack or saving our energy for a final sprint. As we entered the final mile of the race, though, I assumed that we would just sprint it out in the last few hundred meters. Drew had other plans, though. Drew caught me off guard with an attack a little less than half a mile from the finish and opened up a small gap on me. I managed to claw my way back on right as we hit the final corner with about 250 meters to go. Sorry for the lack of GoPro footage at this point. Drew's camera died right after his attack and mine died well before that. Dude, you wouldn't GoPro on your bike. I mean, I know you think you're a YouTuber or whatever, but that's like 80 grams of extra weight right there. The final 250 meters was slightly downhill and fairly uneven gravel, making it difficult to sprint. But Drew was pretty cooked from his attack, so I managed to come around him right at the finish. The last minute of the race from when Drew attacked all the way to the line required an average power of 544 watts and a max power of 1056. It's funny, Drew and I actually spent the week leading into the race, training and working together, and we joked about how similar we are as riders with the same height, weight and FTP. Sure enough, we were not able to drop each other and it came down to a very close finish. Drew is a cycling coach as well with his own YouTube channel and race recap video, which I've linked down in the description below if you want to check it out. All right, let's get into some stats for the race. The race covered 69 miles and we completed that in three hours and 11 minutes, which was an average speed of 21.7 miles per hour. The average power for the race was 257 watts, max power 1149 and a normalized power for the race of 309 watts. My average heart rate was 153 beats per minute and I hit a max heart rate of 183 right there at the end. All right, at the beginning of the video, I mentioned how I've been playing around with my bike set up and I was going to talk about it. So if you manage to stick around for the whole video, then here's the reward, I guess. Trust me, dude, it wasn't easy. Watching you ride in those aero bars on a gravel bike. It was cringe inducing to say the least. It just doesn't look right. Plus, you know, something about safety or whatever. By far the most common question I get about my gravel bike setup is what tires I'm using. And if you're a regular viewer, you know that I'm a big fan of the Specialized Pathfinder Pro and I use them in the 42 millimeter width. Well, I've been seeing other tires. Sorry, Pathfinder. In an attempt to find the perfect tire for the Unbound 200, I've been looking at wider and wider gravel tires. 42 is already pretty wide for a gravel tire with 38 being the most common width. So why go wider? Multiple tests done by different tire manufacturers like Schwalbe and Reneehurst have found that wider tires are not actually slower like many people believe. In fact, on rough terrain, like, you know, gravel, wider tires are actually faster. Unbound has some very rough sections and wider tires are a clear advantage in these spots. Couple of this with the fact that it's harder to get a flat with wider tires and you can run them at lower pressure. And we have a winning combination. There are a few different tires I have my eye on. But the ones I ran this weekend were the Pirelli Centurado in the widest option, which is 45 millimeters. And once the tires are mounted onto my Envy 3.4 AR rims, they measure in at 44 millimeters. So pretty true to advertised size. Most tires are a bit smaller than advertised. I think the thing that really got me to give these tires a try, though, was the reported rolling resistance according to bicyclerollingresistance.com. These tires in the 40 millimeter width were the third fastest tires tested and ranked ahead of the Pathfinder Pro. I'm not certain how the rolling resistance on a drum relates to the rolling resistance on gravel, but it seems like it couldn't hurt that these tires were ranked so highly and so far so good. The added volume only makes the ride more comfortable over chunky gravel. And yes, I am still running the Tubolite gravel tire insert as well. And I think these are also going to be a must for Unbound. Anything to help avoid flats on Kansas gravel is a plus. I'm not 100% sold on these tires just yet, but I would say that they're on my short list for Unbound. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like. Subscribe for more cycling content just like this and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.