 At mile 120 Pete Stetna again surged hard trying to further thin out the group, which was followed by some hard turns from Colin Strickland, but the move that finally stuck came from Lawrence Tendam, and when he finally attacked none of us would be able to follow his wheel. Last weekend was the gravel loco's 150 mile gravel race in Hyko, Texas, and despite this being its inaugural year, Fabian the race director managed to get some of the biggest names in U.S. gravel racing out to his event, including three past dirty Kansas winners, former World Tour pros, and a host of other seriously fast riders. All of this to promote a race that had no entry fee. That's right, signing up for this race was free for anybody, but if you wanted to, you could make a donation, which would go to the fire department in Hyko. And it really seemed like all of Hyko was out supporting the race. People in this town could not have been more friendly to a bunch of strangers wearing overly tight clothing, riding their bikes for hours on their local roads, which was awesome to see. Oh, come on, dude. Have you seen my quads lately? I've been drinking Hypergain Beast Mode Mask Gainer Raw Edition like it's water. Of course, people are going to be nice to me when they see me wearing tight pants. The course itself was 155 miles or 250 kilometers of rolling hills with 8,200 feet of climbing or 2,500 meters. 72% of the course was gravel and the remainder was road, which is a solid amount of gravel for a race of this length. The gravel was finally crushed and packed, meaning that it was extremely fast. Maintaining a high speed felt easy on this course. Well, at least until it started dumping rain, but I'll get into that later. Now, although the gravel itself was pretty smooth, there were still plenty of potholes and embedded rock in the gravel, meaning that a full on gravel bike with wide gravel tires was the right move. I talked to the vegan cyclist before the race and he was saying that he wish he had his road bike with him. That definitely would have been the wrong call. I was still running the Pirelli Centurados in the 45 millimeter width because that's what I plan to run at Unbound and I didn't want to change it. There were a lot of people running narrower tires and while I generally think that people run too narrow a tire for gravel racing, you could probably get away with it on this course. However, I don't think I was losing much if anything with the 45. Now let's get into the race. We started out with a fairly calm pace. The pros decided to keep it friendly for the first eight miles leading into the first river crossing and then pick up the pace after that. And this was probably a good thing because with all the rain hyco had gotten over the past couple of days, the river crossing was not rideable at all. And we essentially had to cross single file holding on to some ropes that the fire department had laid out for us. At its deepest point, the water level was easily over our knees. I would have ridden it. After this, we had a slow build up before we got to what I would consider race pace at about the one hour mark. This first hour of the race was relatively easy with a normalized power of just 198 average power of 156 and an average heart rate of 121. That's essentially easy endurance ride numbers, but it was about to get a lot harder. Around mile 20 is when the pace started to pick up. And with that came a thinning of the front group. Some of the big guns like Lawrence 10 dam and Pete Stetna took some hard pulls on the front and we quickly saw that front group start to shrink. These initial surges required a normalized power of 303 watts for about 30 minutes before settling back down again. At this point, the group had been reduced from a peloton to a lead pack. Some riders would yo-yo off the back for a while, but the main lead group that formed included eight riders. Ted King, Lawrence 10 dam, Colin Strickland, Pete Stetna, Adam Roburge, Sam Boardman, Matt Stevens and me. What really solidified this front group were the three hardest climbs in the race, which came immediately one after another 53 miles into the race. These climbs were not very long, taking only 30 to 45 seconds to climb, but they were extremely steep with grades of 17 to 18% and had some really loose gravel, meaning that you couldn't just stand up and mash up them. You had to stay seated to maintain traction. Colin Strickland was eager to lead the descent going into the first climb, almost washing out in the corner going into it, but unsurprisingly it was Pete Stetna who took charge of each of the three climbs as he usually does. He was probably the lightest rider in the lead group and obviously as an ex-world tour pro, he's incredibly strong and it showed. He had us gritting our teeth any time the road went up. These three climbs took about six and a half minutes to complete and required a normalized power of 411 watts and pushing well over 500 watts for the individual climbs themselves. After this point, we held a relatively steady pace with everybody taking pulls on the front and keeping the speed high. For the next hour and 15 minutes, we would average 22.4 miles per hour, but because of minimal surging, this only required a normalized power of 250 watts. 84 miles into the race though, there was a rise in pace again as Pete Stetna surged up a climb and then we laid on the gas to see if we could get rid of any tired riders, which required a normalized power of 311 watts for about 15 minutes. And we did manage to get rid of Matt Stevens at this point and now the front group was down to seven. For the next 45 minutes, we took it super easy with a normalized power of just 238 watts in anticipation of the attacks that we knew were coming in the last third of the race. Sure enough, at mile 107, the game started. Adam got in and out of an aid station faster than the rest of us and decided to go for a solo breakaway. But with six strong riders chasing him, it was unlikely that he was going to make it. And within a couple of miles, we had caught him again. Up until this point in the race, it had been a dry overcast day with temperatures in the mid seventies. Perfect conditions for racing. It would not stay that way, though. With 40 miles to go, it looked like we were racing into a black storm cloud. And before long, the skies opened up and it was dumping rain on us. The sand in the gravel got into our rotors and drive trains and made our bikes sound like rusty old 10 speeds that you might find in a junkyard. And the spray coming off of our rear wheels made it extremely hard to draft without getting pelted in the face with wet sand. Is it going to be muddy? Is my bike going to be destroyed afterwards? The good news is now the chance for mud is very little. It's fast. It's hard packed. It's dry. The chance for mud is almost non-existent. Before long, I noticed that two other riders had dropped off. Ted King and Sam Boardman. And now the front group was five riders strong. At mile 120, Pete Stetna again surged hard, trying to further thin out the group, which was followed by some hard turns from Colin Strickland. But the move that finally stuck came from Lawrence Tendam. And when he finally attacked, none of us would be able to follow his wheel. Considering Lawrence's caliber, it only took one attack for him to get away. And I'm sure he was thinking, eh, it was cute riding with you guys for 130 miles. But I think I'll just go on my own now. Dude, I'm looking at his list of Strava Koms right now. And I mean, it's OK, but I'm pretty sure I got more. Wait, what's that? This dude got a top 10 in the Tour de France. I dug deep to try to hold his wheel, but simply could not match his power. And before long, I found myself dropped from the chasing group containing Pete, Colin and Adam as well. This move ended the hardest hour of the race for me from when Adam made his first solo move all the way until Lawrence's final attack to get off the front solo and it required a normalized power just shy of 300 watts. And in the final surge to get on Lawrence's wheel, I hit 746 watts, an average 482 watts for just under a minute. And all of this came after six hours and 130 miles of racing. Before this race, I had thought that my max heart rate was 190 beats per minute. Well, it turns out it's a little bit higher than that, because when I tried to follow Lawrence during his final attack, I hit a max heart rate of 192 and averaged 190 for a whole minute. For me, those are bonkers, high heart rate numbers and are really telling of how deep a grave I was digging myself. Needless to say, doing this this late into a race left me absolutely fried and I had a hard time maintaining power after this. After about 15 minutes of chasing, I saw Pete Stetna on the side of the road, attending to a mechanical. And once I passed him, I found myself alone in fourth place with 20 miles to go to the finish. During these last 20 miles, I pushed as hard as I possibly could. But you wouldn't know that by looking at the numbers with a normalized power of just 252 watts and an average power of 242. 250 watts felt like 350. And I had to stop looking at my power data because it wasn't helping seeing my numbers so low. I kept looking over my shoulder expecting to see Pete. I never saw him, though, because unfortunately, he suffered a bad puncture, which required him to put a tube in. During the last hour of the race, my vision was going blurry. And whether that was from the effort or all the sand and rain in my eyes, I don't know. During the last hour, I also downed three gels to make sure that I wouldn't bonk. The low power numbers had me worried that bonking was on the horizon. But luckily, it never got to that point. Finally, after seven hours, 10 minutes and 29 seconds, I crossed the finish line to take fourth place, a little over six minutes behind the winner, Lawrence Tendam. Now that the race was over, the wave of fatigue from my efforts that day hit me as I walked around a bit delirious before flopping on the wet pavement at the finish and rolling around in pain. So you're telling me that both of the protein deficient vegan YouTubers that attended this event were being overly dramatic and rolling around on the ground after the race? Shocking. It's always a good feeling to know that you left absolutely everything you had out on the course. And the result was a top five finish against competition that rivals some of the biggest gravel races in the country. That's a result I can be proud of. All right, let's get into some stats for the race. One hundred and fifty five miles covered with an average speed of twenty one point six miles per hour or thirty four point seven kilometers per hour. A normalized power of two hundred and sixty nine watts with an average power of two hundred and twenty six average heart rate of one fifty four max heart rate of one ninety two and a training stress score of four hundred and twenty four. That normalized power is in line with what I'm usually able to do in seven hour races. And given how bad I was suffering for the last hour of this race, I was actually surprised that it was that high. My bike setup for the race was almost identical to what I ran at the last southeast gravel race, which I made a video about. The only change that I've made is that I bump front chain rings up from fifty thirty four to fifty two thirty six. This is the setup that I'll run at unbound next week. And it's feeling absolutely dialed right now. I just have some parts to replace after riding in some wet Texas sand. 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