 I got to the front as well further down the descent and as we neared the bottom, I looked back and saw that we had done some serious damage. The group was completely strung out with riders dangling off the back. It's at this point that I looked over to Russell and said, it's time to put the hammer down if we're going to make this gap stick. And that's exactly what we did. Welcome back to another video. Last weekend was the second stop in the Belgian Waffle Ride triple crown of gravel series in Asheville, North Carolina. I live just down the road from the race start in Brevard, so a lot of the roads used in the race are ones that I ride on a weekly basis. The race consisted of 40% gravel and 60% road, making it a bit tricky to choose tires for. It can be tempting to go with a narrower, more roady gravel tire with a split like this, but the gravel in this area is pretty chunky and loose, especially towards the latter half of the race where decisive moves were going to be made. I ended up going with the tried and true 42 millimeter specialized Pathfinder Pro for this race. Yup, I'm back on these tires for most gravel races, still one of the best all around gravel tires in my opinion. I also had a brand new RLT9 RDO gravel bike for this race and I'll probably get a little bit deeper into build on this bike in a future video, but I was excited to put this thing through its paces in its first race. The race course after a reroute due to some flooding earlier in the week was just under 100 miles and 10,000 feet of climbing with the steepest and arguably most brutal climb of the day coming in the last 10 miles of the race with an average grade of 10% and pitching up to 13% in sections. The race starts with about eight miles of road before we hit the first major gravel climb of the race. By the way, this footage is from one of the fastest cyclocross racers in the US, Kerry Warner, who was one of the main contenders in this race and has his own YouTube channel with racing content, which I've linked in the description if you want to check it out. During this opening section, my teammate Logan Casper tried for an early solo breakaway and slipped off the front. There was a bit of shuffling for good position, but the pace wasn't anything too crazy, requiring a normalized power of 296 watts for the first 24 minutes. That was all about to change though as we hit the gravel. Dude, what is this camera angle? Is that... is that a nipple camera? We got to the base of the first climb and Russell Finsterwald got to the front and started turning the screws, and this effort definitely hurt. Holding Russell's wheel on that first climb required a normalized power of 400 watts and an average power of 397 for about 8.5 minutes. By the top of the climb, we had caught Logan, and as we entered the pavement, I looked back to see what kind of damage we had done. Unsurprisingly, the front group was a fraction of its original size, but there were some flat sections coming up that gave the chasers a chance to catch back on. As the front group started to grow again, Logan got to the front to drive the pace, and this section through the valley required a normalized power of 287 watts for a little over an hour. Things started to shake up again though as we hit another major climb around mile 40. This climb started off on pavement, but then soon turned to double track, and with the rain we had the week leading into the race, there was some standing water and mud holes to navigate. Again, Russell got to the front to push the pace on this climb, and I put out a normalized power of 344 watts and an average power of 330 watts for 12 minutes to stay with the front group. After this effort, a very select group of about 10 riders was established, and all of the heavy hitters were still in contention, including the race favorite Ian Boswell. Ian won the Unbound 200 earlier this year and has been crushing it in gravel races ever since. The former World Tour Pro really needs no introduction at this point. From riding and talking with Ian though, it's evident that he doesn't like to take a lot of risks on the descents and technical sections in these races, and that actually makes a lot of sense. I think it's one of the reasons why he managed to make it to the finish of the Unbound 200 without getting a flat. Mechanicals are commonplace in gravel racing, and taking Ian's approach when you're as strong as he is and can chase back on is actually pretty smart to avoid ruined races. With that in mind though, I knew that the descents in this race would be the opportunity to put Ian under pressure, and sometimes in bike racing, calculated risks need to be made in order to gain an edge. Wow, riding your bike down a gravel hill, I'm on the edge of my seat with all this risk you're taking. Blast through a red light on the social coffee ride to drop your riding buddies, and then come talk to me about risk. Others in that front group were thinking the same thing. Adam Rowebers and I actually talked about this the day before the race, and the way that Russell Finsterwald was riding, I knew that he was in the same boat as well, and given that he's the current US Marathon Mountain Bike National Champion, he definitely has the skills to do so. There was one gravel section in this race where I thought a split might be possible, because it's long, it has chunky gravel, and critically, it's downhill. This comes at about 70 miles into the race on Pinnacle Mountain Road, but we had a fairly long gravel climb to contend with before we got there. This climb would prove to be a real test. Russell, again, got to the front, and just like before, holding his wheel was no easy task, requiring a normalized power of 332 watts for over 20 minutes. This section is also particularly rugged, with ruts traversing the gravel and large embedded rock. The speed was slow, and the effects of drafting were minimal. By the top, I looked back, and it was clear that our front group had shrunk, but with the downhill coming up, I was determined to make some big moves happen. If I could get off the Pinnacle Mountain descent in the lead in a small group of three or four riders, that was an ideal situation, because there's still 25 miles of riding left to go after this descent. We hit the downhill, and Russell was on the front. This was fine, because he was pinning it, and this is despite the fact that he had a broken spoke slapping against his frame. Didn't really seem to phase him at all. I got to the front as well further down the descent, and as we neared the bottom, I looked back and saw that we had done some serious damage. The group was completely strung out with riders dangling off the back. It's at this point that I looked over to Russell and said, it's time to put the hammer down if we're going to make this gap stick, and that's exactly what we did. Towards the bottom of the descent, the group seemed to be reduced to Russell, Kerry, Jeremiah Bishop, Adam Roeberge, and me, a strong group to go to the line with. As we hit the road, though, it wasn't even a minute before we were joined again by Ian Boswell and Brennan Wertz, giving me six riders to contend with in the last 20 miles. Now, there was one last gravel descent where we could try to break up the group. This one was not as technical, so we would really have to push the pace in order to do so. Sure enough, Kerry got on the front on this descent and did just that. By the bottom, we had dropped Ian. I would find out later that he dropped his chain, had to dismount, put it back on, and remount again, costing him valuable time. We got back onto the pavement after this final gravel descent, and Brennan launched an attack, but wasn't able to shake anyone. After this, we refocused our efforts on the final climb of the day. There was a bit of a lull and pace before this climb with a normalized power of just 213 watts for the six minutes leading into the climb. In hindsight, this was a mistake. We really should have kept the pressure on, and the result of us slowing in pace was that Ian caught us right at the bottom of the final climb and then went on to obliterate the remaining front group on this climb. At the bottom of this thing, I was doing 400 watts and he flew by me like I was standing still and he was not slowing down either. It probably only took about a minute before he was completely out of sight. Russell charged hard after him, followed by Adam and Brennan, and I found myself in fifth place trying to maintain a steady pace. An important thing to keep in mind on climbs like this where there's very little drafting benefit is that the fastest way to the top of the climb is to keep a consistent pace, not surge hard at the bottom and then fade throughout the rest of the climb. Easier said than done, I know. Sorry man, that just doesn't add up. I mean, if I can hold 500 watts for 30 seconds, then surely I can hold it for 10 minutes going up this climb. With this in mind, I decided to hold the power that I thought would be sustainable for this climb, which I guessed would be in the high 300 watt range. This was an overestimation on my part because we can see from the file that my power was decreasing throughout the length of the climb. Still though, I managed a solid 350 watt effort for about 10 minutes before the climb flattened out and this all came at nearly four and a half hours and 90 miles into the race. And at this point into the race, 350 watts for 10 minutes felt like sheer agony. For comparison's sake though, let's take a look at Strava to see what kind of out of this world numbers Ian was doing up this climb. Ian got the KOM in seven minutes and 22 seconds putting nearly a minute and a half into me with an absolutely insane average power of 451 watts. I don't even know what to say to that other than Ian, you completely deserve this one. Nice work dude. The race was not over for me though. Towards the top of the climb, I started to reel Russell back in and it looked as though he was paying for his hard initial surge. By the top of the climb, I had caught him and I was actually relieved to have somebody to work with on the petally final descent to the finish. I looked back and saw that Kerry was within sight of us and it didn't take long before we had a group of three. We worked well together and we were keen to catch one of the three riders that we had ahead of us but alas we were unsuccessful and we prepared ourselves for a final sprint finish. This would be a somewhat critical sprint too because the podium at BWR goes five deep and we were currently sitting in fourth, fifth and sixth meaning that one of us would be left off the podium. I knew I had my work cut out for me because Russell has been the US Short Track National Champion in mountain biking and Kerry is one of the fastest cyclocross racers in the US, both of which require a very high top end. Sure enough, when they unleashed their sprints, I had nothing for them and I crossed the finish in sixth place in four hours and 46 minutes, three minutes behind the winner Ian Boswell. Sure it could be easy to dwell on how agonizingly close I was to a podium finish here but I'm actually very pleased with this result against some of the fastest racers in the country across various cycling disciplines and the fact that I gave it everything all the way to the line. I felt like I left it all out on the road and I think the numbers show that. Speaking of which, let's get into the numbers for this race. I had a normalized power of 294 watts, an average power of 243, a max power in that final sprint of a little over 900 watts and a TSS of 337. Just for reference because I get this question every time I make a race report video talking about my power numbers, my weight in kilograms as measured the morning of the race, not the lightest I've seen in the last two years is 69 kilos. 69, nice. My average heart rate was 155 and I hit a max heart rate of that final climb of 187. And finally, an average speed of 20 miles per hour. It's funny, I had a conversation with one of the course designers, John Murphy, about how fast we thought the average speed for the race would be and I told him that I thought that the winner of the race would go under five hours and have an over 20 mile per hour average speed and he thought that there was no way. I'm telling every rider that I asked me for advice and this is gonna be the longest 100 miles you've ever done. Nevertheless, this was one of the more challenging gravel courses that I've done because of the amount of climbing per mile. Shoot, this race had significantly more climbing than the unbound 200 in half the distance. I'm also happy to say that my new gravel race bike performed flawlessly on race day. No mechanicals whatsoever, not even a drop chain. That can always be a bit dicey when you've got a brand new bike. Thanks for watching. If you wanna stay up to date on my racing including the races that I don't post about on here, be sure to follow me on Instagram. 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.