In May the WestSide Coaching, 73 Degrees Bicycles team and some of the finest West Country athletes headed up to Bonny Scotland to qualify for the 2025 World Gravel Championships by racing the Gralloch Gravel . Let’s take a bit of a deeper dive on what the event had in store for us.
Ride with GPS is an excellent tool as it can auto highlight all the major climbs and descents, it also shows where the road and off road sections are (solid red line road, dashed red line off road)
Conditions for the day were pretty good, maybe even too good, it was above 20c for most of the day and if you were in the Female races you’d have been racing in most of the afternoon heat as they started much later.
With Gravel, as you aren’t travelling as quick as when you are riding on the road you don’t get the same amount of cooling effect from the wind and you’ll also be pressing on the pedals a lot of the time, so core body temperature build up can be a big issue. One of the athletes wore a Core body temp sensor for the event and his core temp was hovering around 38.4’c for most of the race.
For the race we have 4 power files to look at, I will add wpk data for overall times and certain timed sections throughout the course.
Rider A competed in the Senior Female category and finished 10th with a time of 4:29:38 Hrs, Qualification time 4:35:18 Hrs
Rider B competed in the Senior Men category, finishing 33rd with a time of 3:42:40 Hrs, Qualification time 3:53:43 Hrs
Rider C competed in the V40 Male category and finished 32nd with a time of 3:57:07 Hrs, Qualification time 4:06:15 Hrs
Rider D competed in the V50 category and finished 14th with a time of 3:47:61 Hrs, Qualification time 4:11:22 Hrs
We also had other riders from the team competing but we don’t have power data for their rides.
Climbs I have highlighted for stat’s
Descents I have highlighted for stats
Both ride A and C had clean runs, no crashes or mechanicals.
Rider B had an issue with the hydration pack and the chain came off once, he also had an uphill incident with another rider taking his front wheel out, all happening in the first 45 mins of the race, then no issues for the rest but due to those issues, he spent a lot of energy chasing back to the group he was with and that effort burnt some matches which the rider wanted to save for later.
Rider D also had an issue with the hydration pack throughout the whole race and a puncture which cost him approx. 3 mins to fix.
Below I have highlighted the ascent times for each rider plus their NP wpk ( Normalized power watts per kilo), what we need to be careful of is analysing NP data for shorter segments, it isn’t a great tool for efforts below 10 mins, all the stats are in the above charts if you wanted to dig deeper.
For the descents, it became tricky for those mid pack as the amount of dust that was thrown up by earlier riders made you feel like you were heading into a thick cloud and you could barely see 10m in front of you, this is where knocking off a bit of speed was sensible and using the GPS route on the cycle computer as a guide, although there may be some sharp chicane type corners that appear and the gps route looks rather straight.
What the stat’s don’t show us though is the context, a rider might be faster/slower on some sections or doing less/more watts if they were in a group or solo. In general all the riders paced the event pretty well, if you have good fitness compared to your age group, you can afford to go a little harder on the first climb to be with a good group, if you are more mid pack then this is a dangerous strategy to play. Many a rider I saw in my V45-49 age category were going very hard in the first 5 mins, and only gained 30-45 secs at the most and by the end of the race they were 5-10 mins down compared to myself. I could see this in my GoPro footage which I used to record some of the event. It is a 3:30-4:30 Hrs race if you are quick, it’s not a 20 min race.
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Each riders training was slightly different coming into the event as some of the riders are building up to CX season and generally doing low aerobic rides, whilst some of the other riders wanted to target the event and put in a quality performance. The team will be back again for next years edition, hunting top 10s. I hope by seeing some of the stat’s, it shows what kind of event the Gralloch is and what fitness is required for certain finishing times.
