Tour De Brisbane 2024 - Race Report
THE BACKSTORY
It’s been a hot minute since I have participated in a UCI World Granfondo Championships qualifier event with any intention.The last similar event was the Bathurst qualifier back in 2020, just before Covid 19 stopped everything.
As part of the backstory, I will share that I never had any intentions of racing bikes in 2024, having being perfectly happy with my work as a tour guide last year.However, a series of traumatic personal events over the course of 2023 had left me feeling distinctly unenthused about life and training hard in general. One life lesson learned is that your vocation doesn’t insulate you from episodes of psychological rot, so towards the end of last year, I took the advice I give my own athletes when faced with these issues, and decided, that from a fitness perspective, I was only going to do the activities that brought me joy, and at a time that suited me. I will also add that I am fortunate with my job to have such flexibility.
This meant riding during what we coin, “pro hours”, when I felt like it, favouring unstructured, unplanned rides, and taking up a new sport, powerlifting. I’m highly motivated by learning new skills, and my journey learning to squat, bench and deadlift to a competition standard has been hard work. It’s challenged me to change ingrained movement patterns, learn to stop overthinking/overanalyzing and importantly, taught me the humility involved with being a beginner again.
I’ve also been a member of masters cycling racing team, Argenic Racing, for the last four years, and part of a committee that organises kit, sponsorship, social media and the like.There’s always a bit of a buzz in our discussions around the end of the year about goals for the next, and feeling buoyed by the enthusiasm within the team, decided that doing some time trialling events might work with my powerlifting goals.
I had maintained enough cycling fitness to guide at Tour Down Under for Ride International in January. I had a wonderful experience working with Pat and Grace, and by the end of ten days of big rides, I was starting to feel flickers of my “old self” finally re appearing. However, I kept the balance of the powerlifting and cycling the same, thinking that I was only going to prepare for the TDB individual time trial.
However, the entry process around the time trial appeared a little woolly in February. I did not want to commit to training for a time trial that there wasn’t an entry portal open for, and as there were no time trials to compete in before I left for Europe this year, I decided to turn my focus elsewhere.
It was great timing that one of my teammates asked me for help prepping for the road race, as then the seed was planted for me to do the event as well. My thoughts were to evaluate if I was mentally ready to commit ten weeks to a structured program, and whether the enthusiasm of my teammates would allow me to shore up the motivation I needed to see it through. So, I quietly entered the road race, assessed where I was at physiologically, and evaluated what qualities I needed to complete the race competently and with a sense of joy.
It should be noted that this is a brief analysis of what I did to prepare, as well as a brief data analysis of the race itself. The athletes I coach receive a comprehensive needs analysis, race prep plan and race review meeting.
RACE PREPARATION AND PHYSIOLOGY
Road racing requires a good FTP (Functional Threshold Power) - if you haven’t got the power to be able to push the pedals hard throughout a race, you’re certainly not going to be there for a sprint finish. Road racing is also very stochastic in nature - there can be a lot of “on/off” in how power is generated and the parcours of the Tour De Brisbane course indicated that there were a lot of corners and short pinchy hills for which strength and anaerobic capacity were going to be required. There is also Mt Coottha to climb at the end which meant training FTP, and improving both body composition and fatigue resistance were key elements to consider in this particular race prep.
STARTING STATS AND PHYSIOLOGY
FTP: 2.85w/kg (average for my age)
Training: 6-9 hours per week, mostly endurance/sub threshold intensity/unstructured training
Powerlifting: 4 x week.
Poor anaerobic capacity
Decent endurance base
FINISHING STATS AND PHYSIOLOGY
FTP: 3.35w/kg (above average for my age)
Training: 10-12 hours per week, structured, periodised program addressing strengths and weaknesses AND specific to the event.
Improved anaerobic capacity (as modelled by WKO5 dFRC)
Powerlifting: 4 x week, periodised block programming
PERIODISED STRUCTURED TRAINING
As you can see from the summary statistics above, it was evident that I needed to improve my FTP, and being a hilly course, needed to concurrently focus on improving body composition, which helped improve the watts/kg to no end. I also periodised this, ensuring that I fuelled my training properly as a priority as I was chasing performance or engaging in a lot of volume (eg Tour Down Under). During times when I was doing a little less, I adjusted my intake accordingly.
I also needed to improve anaerobic capacity and maximal aerobic power (VO) in order to become race ready and to be able to handle the surging nature of the bunch on what was a tight and twisty course, especially at the beginning of the event.
Therefore my ten weeks looked like this:
Strength endurance work
FTP development
VO and race specificity development.
Continued powerlifting 4 x week (with slight modifications during the tapering process)
TOUR DE BRISBANE - THE EVENT
I arrived at the Brisbane RNA showgrounds in perfect April weather for Brisbane. Our race wave included all women who were aged 45 and above, followed by the 60-64 year old men. In previous iterations of the event, the men caught the women which dictated in part the outcome of the race.
The start, as predicted, was hectic. I was grateful that I had carb loaded for the event the day before, because there was little opportunity to take on fuel in the first forty minutes as we wound our way through bus ways, bike paths, sharp turns and tough little pinches. I concentrated on staying close to my colleague, and coaching partner in crime, Deb, who’s one of the best in the business around positioning and a wheel that I knew was going to be good to follow.
Driven by friends (!) Nicky and Laurelea, who have both previously raced NRS, it was forty minutes of survival trying to hang onto the front group. My dFRC file, which measures anaerobic battery drain tells the story of this rush, with several matches being burnt during that time. I eventually found myself dropped just before the first pass of the Legacy Way tunnel. I completed this sector at 95% of FTP (IF - normalised power:FTP)
However, I could hear the 60-64 year old men closing in fast behind me in the tunnel, and I prepared to burn another big match jumping on their peloton. Once securely ensconced within the bunch, I decided to bide my time and conserve some energy in the hope that the group would catch the women and that I’d be again in contention.
Unfortunately that wasn’t to be, as the front running women put on a wonderfully combative display of riding and even though I could see them at points during the race, the 60-64 year old men never quite caught them. While conserving energy, I rode this sector at 73% of FTP (NP).
I had to accept that my luck there was not going to amount to anything and therefore all I had to concentrate on was riding up Mt Coottha and safely making my way back to the showgrounds via another tunnel pass. I made the effort to try and ride up the climb at an intensity as close as I could to my FTP, and achieved this.
Despite not quite being able to hang onto the front group, I was delighted to find out that I’d crossed the line 7th in our age division and had qualified for the World Granfondo Championships that are to be held in Denmark in October.
SUMMARY
Overall, I was very happy to have achieved this result with what I would coin a “perfectly imperfect” preparation.Overwhelmingly, getting ready for this event was about rekindling some joy in my riding, after experiencing dark times, in a way that honoured my belief that there has to be joy in the training process, and even when the training sessions are tough, that there is still good to be found in them.
Reverse engineering a structured plan, in combination with assessing factors such as your own physiology, and characteristics surrounding an event is an excellent way of achieving a reliable execution of a training goal. It was also the first time I had experimented with retaining a full strength and conditioning load into an event and a factor that personally enhanced performance on the day.
This prep also cemented my belief that we humans thrive when we have a purpose, that we drive positive change in ourselves when we feel like we have gained competence and mastery around our craft. Finally, the social component in navigating this prep with my teammates was just the mental boost I needed.
Looking forward to the next one!
Any questions or comments? Feel free to email me.