 The race starts with a grassy climb and it's full gas right from the gun. I got away decently off the line, but then immediately Tobin Ordenblad goes down right in front of me. And looking back at this footage, I'm pretty lucky that I did not get tangled up in that. Welcome back to the channel. This video is fueled by the feed. Chequamagan, wait, no, uh, Chequamagan? Chequamagan. I'm going to be honest, I'm still not entirely certain on the correct pronunciation of this race, but everybody who you talk to at the race calls it Chequamagan and totally ignores the middle part of the word. So I guess I'll do that for the remainder of the video. Chequamagan is the fifth race of the lifetime Grand Prix, which is the premier professional off-road racing series in the US and it takes place in Cable, Wisconsin. This race is technically a mountain bike race, but the 40 mile or 64 kilometer course is mostly on cross-country ski trails, which are wide grass and gravel or forest roads with very little actual single track. And if you've been following me this season, you already know the spiel that I'm about to give to you. This isn't quite a mountain bike race or a gravel race, but it's one of those races that falls in the gray area. Therefore you need a bike that falls into that gray area. Therefore I decided to ride this horrendous looking mountain bike with drop bars on it. Yeah, I know. I've been record at this point, but it's not my fault that these race organizers keep choosing these gray area courses. Believe me. He's trying to play it cool right now, but he gets a little chubbed up every time he gets to talk about gray areas for some reason. It's honestly pretty sad. That being said, this is the 40th anniversary of this race and this is what mountain biking looked like 40 years ago. Well, I presume I wasn't actually around back then. To me, the course seems more like a longer cyclocross race. It takes around two hours for the pros and is loaded with 30 to 60 second punchy climbs. The longest climb on course, which is about two thirds of the way in is the fire tower climb and it's only around two minutes long. Despite these punchy climbs and the race being on grass, the average speed for the race can easily be close to 20 miles per hour or 32 kilometers per hour on a fast year. And this is where the decision to run drop bars comes in. At these speeds, we're talking about around a 25 watt savings going from the flat bar mountain bike position to a drop bar position. Of course, these savings are hypothetically on a flat road, so take that with a grain of salt, but it's still undeniable that there is at least some savings to be had. But Dylan, surely you'll be losing time on the technical sections of the course, says some hypothetical internet troll. And to that I say, what technical sections? Now you do need a mountain bike to handle the bumpiness of the course. There is nothing on it that is technical enough that you need mountain bike bars. Again, the course is mostly wide grass. In fact, there is only one single track section and it's about as tame as single track as you can get. Well, at least that's my opinion. No, I do not think personally that drop bars on any of these mountain bikers is the right choice. I've run through it. I built that bike with Envy. We did 18 and a half miles an hour here in the mud last year, who hasn't considered it. But what it comes down to to me is fire tower is not faster on drop bar bike. And that is where I make the decision. I just don't think you have the leverage you need to get up that climb. Yeah, I think it comes down to the fighting for position, being able to have my elbows wider and push people out of the way and just having more leverage on the bike. Now, if you know anything about the lifetime grand prix, which includes races like Unbound and Leadville, then you're probably catching onto the fact that this race seems distinctively different from the rest. It's only two hours long and it has a bunch of punchy climbs. That sounds a lot more like an XCO style mountain bike race than most of the Grand Prix races, which would probably be classified as marathon or ultra marathon depending on how you define those terms. Schwalmingen is a bit of an outlier for sure. And I'm just going to be honest, this kind of course is not usually my cup of tea. There's a reason I stopped doing XCO mountain bike races in my teens. And it's because I just found that I was better at the longer stuff that had steadier efforts. And I would say that that is probably still the case. Generally I find that the longer the race, the better I do relative to my competition. But that didn't mean I wasn't going to give this race everything I had. If you're standing on the starting line already thinking that the race is going to go poorly, it's probably going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. All right, let's talk course conditions before we get into the race breakdown. The race can change wildly depending on how wet the course is. This year, for example, was an absolute mudfest and it made it more selective, meaning that smaller groups formed. That being said, if it's a dry year, the race will likely stay together more and there will be a larger front group of riders to contend with. So what were this year's conditions like? I would say in the middle. It did rain the day before, but by race time the next day, the course was starting to dry out. However, there was still a bit of mud out there. I did bring mud tires with me to the race, but I decided not to put them on and opted for my usual Conti Race King 2.2s and I ran those at 16 psi in the front and 17 in the rear. If that pressure sounds low to you, then all I can say is you're missing out. Not only does this kind of pressure improve the comfort and handling of the bike, but it actually improves the rolling resistance on bumpy terrain. Of course, the optimal pressure is weight and tire dependent. So I recommend using something like the Silica tire pressure calculator to find your optimal pressure. In the testing that I've done, the pressure that they give you is usually shockingly close to the fastest pressure. The only other change I made to this bike from the Leadville setup is that I swapped out the 36 tooth chainring that I used for Leadville and put on a 40 tooth. Again, with average speeds this high during the race, traditional mountain bike gearing would probably leave a lot of riders under geared. All right, let's get into the race itself. I'm not going to lie, the start had me worried. When I was a junior racing cross country mountain bike races, the start was always a weak point for me. And as I learned last year, not a whole lot has changed. Last year I did not make the lead selection at the start and I was chasing for the rest of the day. I was determined not to let that happen again, but it was going to be a tall order. The race starts with a grassy climb and it's full gas right from the gun. I got away decently off the line, but then immediately Tobin Ordenblad goes down right in front of me. And looking back at this footage, I'm pretty lucky that I did not get tangled up in that. As you can see, Tobin crosses wheels with the rider in front. Had he crossed wheels on the other side, he actually would have fallen into the field and potentially ended a lot of riders days early, including my own. So you use this crash as your thumbnail to get clicks and now you're only going to talk about it for 20 seconds. Dude, next time you might as well just add the words most dangerous race ever or I barely survived this race or something like that. Come on, I thought you're a pro YouTuber. This first 30 seconds required an average power of 670 watts but the work to make the lead selection was far from done. The course trends uphill for another two to three minutes and that entire opening section required an average power of 420 watts for about three minutes. Despite this effort, I still found myself getting gapped off but I still had the lead group in sight. For the next three minutes, 371 watts was enough to get me back into the front group and once I made contact, I could finally take a bit of a breather. Of course, breather is relative. The first 15 minutes of the race required an NP of 362 watts just to stay in contact. I knew that positioning in this race would be important and I tried on multiple occasions to move up in the pack but the aggressive pace meant that I kept finding myself in the back. This wasn't a terrible place to be because there wasn't a huge yo-yo effect on this course but there was a pinch point coming up with the one and only single track section in the course about a third of the way into the race. Sure enough, the pace ramped up significantly before hitting this section and aggressive passing ensued. I found myself close to the back going into the section and that meant that when we exited onto the gravel, I had to fight hard to close a gap that had been opened up which took 340 watts for nearly six minutes. Shortly after I regained contact, Keegan Swensen got on the front and started drilling it. We got back onto the grass and the pace did not ease up for another 15 minutes and by the end of it, I was just dangling onto the back of the group begging for the pace to let up. This nearly 24 minute surge required an NP of 335 watts. When we finally slowed down, it seemed the group had shrunk a bit in size. What was a group of 40 or so riders was probably now down to 30-ish but the most decisive section of the course was still to come with the fire tower climb. Leading into fire tower, there was a bit of calming of pace with just 253 watts for five and a half minutes but when we hit the double track leading into it, all hell broke loose as riders scrambled for a good position. Again, I entered this decisive section towards the back of the pack. So far in this race, I was 0-2 for being in the right place at the right time. Things bottled up at the bottom of the climb but once I got around that, there was plenty of space to overtake and I probably passed 10 or so riders on the climb and by the time I got to the top, I had the lead group barely within sight. This massive effort required 404 watts for three minutes. When I got down the descent and back onto the gravel that followed this climb, I had a couple riders on my wheel including Brennan Wertz and Lachlan Morton but they seemed pretty cooked from the climb. Well, I'm sure Lachlan was probably cooked from having just finished the tour divide but regardless, I had to do most of the pulling. However, I did get some help from multiple time winner of this race and Midwest mountain bike legend, Brian Mottor. This chase back to the front required another huge effort of 353 watts NP for seven minutes. So in case you're counting, that's three times that I've been dropped from the front group in this race and had the claw my way back on. At the start, after the single track and after fire tower. Needless to say, I've burned a lot of matches at this point and I'm starting to feel really spent. I was far from the only one though. Every time a decisive section came or we hit a steep pitch, riders were getting shelled from the front group and at this point in the race, there were probably less than 20 riders remaining of the front group. As we entered a series of really steep punchy climbs in the last 10 miles of the course, the pace ramped up again with 330 watts NP for 10 minutes. And finally on one of these climbs, the elastic would snap for good. And the front group rode away from me with about three miles in the race remaining. At this point, I was working with Taylor Ladine who also got popped. But before long, he suffered a flat tire along with Brian Mottor and I was on my own with about two miles left in the race. The front group still contained 14 riders and it was a massive, at least by mountain bike standards, sprint finish for the win with Alexi taking it. And yes, that is the guy who at the start of the video told me that drop bars were a terrible idea for this race. Way to show us all how to ride out there, man. Then one minute behind the lead group, I came in solo to take 15th place on the day. In that last eight minutes of the race, when I was solo, I did a normalized power of 322 in one last agonizing effort to get back in contact with the front group and not get caught by riders coming up from behind. Didn't manage the former, but I did succeed in the latter. For the entire two hour race, my normalized power was 323 watts. My average power was 277, average heart rate of 169 and max heart rate, which I hit at multiple points throughout the race of 183 and an average speed of 18.7 miles per hour or 30 kilometers per hour. I'm actually extremely happy with how this race went because 15th is the highest placing that I've gotten in a lifetime Grand Prix race so far. And I was extremely close to being in that front group that contested for the win. That being said, if I could go back and do this race again, my positioning definitely needs work. Now, a lot of that had to do with the fact that for most of this race, I was pretty close to maxed out and it's hard to move up when you're already so close to your limit. However, if I could have moved up earlier, perhaps I could have prevented getting maxed out in the first place after having to chase back on so many times. As far as the bike setup goes, despite what Alexi says, I was perfectly content with the drop bars on this course. And I do think that it helped me get in a bit more aerodynamic position and save a bit of energy and not to mention chase back onto the front group on the multiple occasions that I got dropped. I think people forget that cyclocross racers race in far worse conditions than we saw that day and everybody just sees it as normal. Hey, I actually looked up what the word Schwamagen means. It says that it's a native American word for he who uses drop bars is a try hard and still won't win. Huh, very wise and surprisingly accurate. That being said, I actually don't think that this was the perfect bike setup for the course. The course was surprisingly bumpy, more bumpy than I remember it. And when you're riding in such a tight group at a high speed, you hit those bumps blindly. For this reason, I'm actually leaning towards a full suspension bike being a better call. And no, I'm not opposed to putting drop bars on a full suspension bike if it is the fastest bike for the course. In fact, that's actually what Kerry Warner did for his bike setup for this race. 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.