My guest today is Matt Spooner, who recently completed the Trans Continental Race - a 4200km non-stop bike ride from Roubaix in France, down to Istanbul in Turkey. Apart from the start & finish, there are 5 checkpoints and several compulsory sections known as parcours. There are also some roads which are banned, generally because they are unsafe for the riders. After that the route is completely open to the choices made by the riders. This event isn’t just about cycling for many days. It’s also a logistical challenge and a heaven for any one who likes planning.
This is a podcast that was recorded in 2 parts. In the first half you’ll hear me having a short (30-minute) conversation with Matt while he is actually riding his bike through Greece, about 3/4 of the way to his destination. We chat about:
- Route selection and how that's working out
- Some of the problems he has encountered along the way
- Equipment choices
- Daily nutrition on the road.
In the second half, Matt and I are speaking a few days after he has finished the event. We then reflect on his overall performance and also:
- Whether executing the plan is more satisfying than the time and position
- His decisions to stop and sleep in a hotel each night versus camping by the side of the road
- Why finishing an event like this is more about being able to eat as much as you can than having a high FTP
- More about equipment choices
- Mindset for tackling TCR
To find out more about Matt, please visit the following social media channels
Instagram - matt_still_tri_ing
Facebook - matthew.spooner.927
LinkedIn - Matthew Spooner
If you haven’t yet seen the documentary about the Transcontinental Race, I can highly recommend it:
Onboard the Transcontinental Race
Some links to topics covered in the podcast
Diet
Efficacy of Popular Diets Applied by Endurance Athletes on Sports Performance: Beneficial or Detrimental? A Narrative Review
"I recently read this paper, it's a nicely balanced review of multiple different research papers into different diets. It's a good resource for people who are interested in the best diet.”
Books
The Endurance Diet: Discover the 5 Core Habits of the World's Greatest Athletes to Look, Feel, and Perform Better - Matt Fitzgerald
I also really enjoyed
The Rise of the Ultra Runners by Adharanand Finn - I identify myself very strongly in this book."
**To get a free copy of my personal daily mobility routine, please click HERE**
To contact Beth regarding Life Coaching, please visit her website at BethanyWardLifeCoaching.uk.
Sports Nutrition questions - if you have a sports nutrition question that you would like answered on the podcast, please email it to me via
Beth@TheTriathlonCoach.com.
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Visit Simon's website for more information about his coaching programmes. Links to all of Simon's social media channels can be found here. For any questions please email Beth@TheTriathlonCoach.com.
A lot of folks welcome back and if you're a new listener a very big welcome to the show. This is the high performance human podcast and I'm your host Simon Ward and this week's podcast is age group triathlete Matt Spooner and I'll tell you a little bit more about our conversation in just a moment. You probably notice as Matt and I get chatting that he is probably the epitome of what I would call a high performance human and he gets an awful lot out of his training and his life. But race results and fitness are only a part of this. In fact I'm referring to your whole life performance. It's sleep, nutrition, exercise, relationships, mental health and you don't have to be a high level athlete to excel at any or all of these. And we appreciate that you might feel like there's still room for improvement in your life and if that's the case then we'd love to help you. I've currently got the availability to take on one or two clients and Beth, my wife who is a certified life coach, also has availability so depending on what you're looking to focus on we've got you covered and you can find the details in the showrooms. Right then back to my conversation with Matt. So this one was done in two parts. Matt recently completed the Transcontinental Cycle Ride. It's a 4,200 kilometer roughly non-stop bike ride from Rubé in France down to Istanbul in Turkey. And apart from the start and finish there are five checkpoints and several compulsory sections known as parkours. There are also some roads which are banned, generally because they are unsafe from riders. After that the route is completely open to the choices made by the riders. Now this investment isn't just about cycling for many days. It's also a logistical challenge and it's an absolute heaven for anyone who likes the task of planning. And his first part of the podcast you'll hear me having a short 30-minute conversation with Matt while he's actually riding his bike through Greece about three quarters of the way to his destination which are about topics such as his route selection and how that's working out. Some of the problems he has encountered along the way like getting knocked off his bike by another motorcyclist. We talk about equipment choices and Matt talks about his daily nutrition on the road. Then in the second part Matt and I are speaking a few days after he has finished the event and we're reflecting on his overall performance where executing the plan is more satisfying than his finish time and position, decisions to stop and sleep in a hotel each night versus camping by the side of the road. While finishing an event like this is more about being able to eat as much as you can than it is about having a high functional threshold. And we talk a little bit more about equipment choices and Matt's mindset for tackling such a huge event. So let's crack on and hear from Matt. So Matt Spooner, thank you for joining us in the middle of your ride. Where are you exactly now on your TCR adventure? Well I can't tell you exactly what I can. I'm riding next to a motorway on a short motorway, obviously not in the motorway, about 40 kilometers from the Turkish ball of Greece. So I'm in Greece approaching Turkey at the moment. And looking at the video there, I mean it looks like the UK at the moment, some fluffy clouds and plenty of blue sky and that big orange thing over your right shoulder but I guess it's a few degrees hotter there in Greece, is it? Actually it's a very pleasant day in Greece at the moment. If I look at the moment, say that, it's my bike and computer is showing 41.9 degrees. I think you're probably a climatize now rather than it'd be the pleasant day, right? I was thinking it's not that hot and then I looked at the temperature and thinking yes okay it is that hot. And obviously when you're riding, I can see you've got a little bit of a breeze there so you've got your shirt open so that does help. It will be a lot hotter if we suddenly stopped and did this call while you were stood in the sun, right? Yeah absolutely. How many people have been going in here, skipping it cooler? So you started on the Sunday night, 8pm, 10 days ago. Is that right? Are you 10 days in there? Yeah this is day 10. Okay and what's your average pace being up to this point? My average daily distance is 253 kilometres, so I said 200, 220 miles. Okay and there's been a fair bit of climbing in there, hasn't there a knot on the sort of roads we might associate with nice Swiss alpine passes? Yeah absolutely, there's been some climbing, well on averages, I've been doing about 3,500 metres of climbing per day. Some of it has been across the Alps, but then some of the climbs and if people have seen some of the pictures I've posted, the climbing up to the Olympic ski resort just outside Sarajebo was all on extremely tricky gravel. So it's not the nice alpine smooth tarmac that we're used to in Western Europe. And so when you get up there Matt and you've gone all of that gravel riding, is it rideable going up? And so that ride was I would say 70% rideable, that section, there were, one of the modifications I made to my bike for TCR is to fit a dropper post and as a result of that, I was able to ride all of the sort of the gravel descent, some of the gravel climbs I was just, it wasn't the steepness, I was just limited to rear wheel grip and big rocks in the road. So it's partially rideable. So you talk about the gravel there but you've got road tyres on haven't you for the road sections and to sort of limit your, to improve your rolling resistance. So how does that work when you're on a gravel descent, are they a bit more sketchy than if you've got a 45mm gravel tyre? So I've got 32mm road tyres, slightly more robust road tyres than normal and they don't have any treads and out of the 4200 beyond just I get a riding, I think about 3,900, maybe 4,000 is on road. So the last majority is road and it's not worth, well it's not worth 15 gravel climbs for the gravel sections because it's too much of a compromise on the road. So you need to be just a little bit careful about riding road tyres, what I do is let the pressure down to about 50 psi which makes a tremendous amount of difference. Yeah and I get, this whole event is all about making compromise choices isn't it, what's going to be best overall. But still that's going to give you several hundred kilometres of gravel riding and some of it's not smooth forest gravel and it's quite gnarly mounting gravel and so two or 300 kilometres on road tyres on those is still much more at risk of punctures and shredding the tyre aren't you? Yeah absolutely, so if you look at the final parkour which I should be doing tomorrow, which is 55 kilometres long, it's probably the toughest gravel section that TCR have ever put in place. The leaders who went through two days ago, Abdullah Zaynab who was in second place and hatching Robin Gump early destroyed his bike on the gravel and I think he ended up working for 24 hours because of mechanical issues and tyre issues, which I think can show just how tough it can be. Because I'm not racing right in the front, although I'm racing in a very competitive position, I'm going to probably walk most of that gravel section, but out of 55 kilometres, 25 are really bad gravel, but what we've walked those 25 kilometres, my strategy is to go and to spy a pair of trainers tomorrow morning probably and I might lose an hour in cycling time, but if I'm okay, the chance of me doing any damage to the bike is very low or damage to myself for that matter because on gravel you've got a much higher chance of falling off. Yeah yeah, when we talked previously, you and I, we had a conversation about your route planning and you had a few options that you weren't sure about, how's all the route planning worked out? We'd probably get chance to talk about this in more detail once you get back, Matt, but just give us a small snapshot of how the how the route planning worked out and what the route planning has worked out absolutely brilliantly, except yesterday where there was a forest fire as I was just crossed the border between North Macedonia and Greece and my route would have taken me due east, but the police told me to head south to Tesloneke, which is actually a route I'd looked at but hadn't really planned and so I was having to do a lot of route planning on the fly yesterday and let's say it wasn't the best route or the early bits wasn't the best route because I kept on being routed on to, you know, what remote thought was paved tracks, they were certainly tracks, but they were definitely not paved. So you've got to be prepared to deal with things like forest fires and, you know, other things like that, you know, derail the best late times. We've there's been a lot of talk in the last few days about athletes showing resilience, you know, the triathletes, the Olympics of, well, the men's triathlon certainly was put back twice to this morning, but, you know, the water tests were at 3.30 AM, so the athletes would have gone to bed not knowing whether they were going to race or not in the morning, which is a test for anybody's mental skills and at the outlaw at the weekend, the swimmers cancelled and it became a run-bike run because of blue-green algae and we were talking with the people who were saying, well, what choice have you got? You either adapt to it or you give up, I guess resilience is almost a given and, you know, you have to show some fortitude in adapting to those conditions, don't you, because in the middle of, in the middle of a Greek forest where you're told to go the other way and it's burning down, you haven't really got much option. Yeah, and, you know, there was acrid smoke and ash falling, shall we? I think I was quite happy to follow the police recommendation of getting away from the fire. Have you, you talked about Abdullah there, Rick in his bike, have you had any significant mechanicals or crashes or anything on your journey so far? Well, a couple of days ago, while in Northern, just off by an acute frost over from Kosovo into North Macedonia, I was going through a little village, not terribly fast, but just a single street village and there was a young lad on a motorbike coming up the street trying to impress his mates and I think he put on a little bit too much power and lost control and slammed straight into me, which there were a few expletives exchanged, but luckily, I mean, I had a small graze on my knee, so nothing significant in a bruise on my arm and I spent the hanger a little bit, which I straightened, but I've also got a spare hanger, but I haven't had to use that and I've got remote shifters when I'm in the TT bars and one of the remote shifters smashed, but as luck would have it, I lost a remote shifter a week before TCR, so I bought another pair because they come in pairs and I just brought the spare remote shifter with me, so of the few spare parts I had, a remote shifter was one of those spare parts, so yes, I was got away with that and yesterday I got my first puncher, I shouldn't really complain about that because I've been speaking to people earlier on who had 10, 12 punchers and it was just a little nail on a rubber speed bump once you get on the road, one of the bolts had come loose and had a sharp edge and it took a small slice out of the tire, but I was able to fix that with a dart system, the Stan's dart system, which it was a bit touched and go where it was going to work, but it seems to have been fine and because that was a sort of temporary fix, today I had a look at my route and found a bike shop in a town called Zanti, I don't think it's the Greek island of Zanti where party makers go, but there's a town called Zanti and I actually bought a spare tire which I'm parrying when I didn't bother fixing it and I got them to top my tires up with additional fluid at your tire sealant, so yeah, it's always good and I think when you're doing something like GCR and things happen, you have to go and do things about okay, I need to go and find a bike shop that's near my route, I need to go past it when it's open, you need to try and make sure that you're mitigating any future risks, so if I'm panting, I'm now going up a hill, you're doing a pretty good job of disguising it Matt, so you've been, you're in your tenth day, you've been averaging around 350 kilometres a day, how are the legs feeling and how's the body holding up because it's not, it's not generally fitness that gets you on these, it's dealing with the conditions and it's things like hands, feet, neck, you know, and the bit that sits on the saddle that use the start to show signs of fatigue is far in. Yeah, so actually that's a very complex question, so the first part of that is, I you know, even before TCR, I'm very fit, I'm a you know, a fit athlete, but I don't train full time like a professional athlete and I'm not at my absolute peak level of fitness at the start of the race, so what I did was to keep it a little bit easier at the beginning, there were a few days where I thought I could go on, I could do another 70 kilometres today, but I was very disciplined and saying, no, this is where I planned to stop and to stop at that time and as a result of that and that strategy, I've actually been getting fitter and fitter, so my legs are feeling better today than they did on day two, they, you know, in terms of that fitness, I'm definitely fitter, then you've got things like the, you know, the dealing with the heat and it's something that I deal with pretty well, so and I noticed that it's impacting other people a lot more, but you know, dealing with the heat is about making sure that you get plenty of fluids, I'm drinking a gigantic amount of fluid and then you're talking about the things like feet and, you know, bottom and wrists and neck and as we've discussed before, last year in TCR, I had a lot of problems with my neck, I had to say what's called Sherman's Neck where you just can't hold your head up anymore and I was riding along supporting my, with my elbow in my arm pad, TCR pad and my hand supporting my chin up so I could see where I was actually going and so I made a lot of changes to the bike to reduce vibration and I've also been very mindful of making sure that I give my neck plenty of time to recover, so not riding in the same position for a long period of time and I have to say at one point, I was concerned that my neck was beginning to sort of ache but like my legs, my neck has been getting stronger and stronger so now I have no problem at all with my neck, I made a slight error when I started, obviously I sort of packed my bike down to take on the train and folded the handlebars down and when I got up, I didn't, my handlebars were probably angled 10 degrees, sloping down maybe even 5 degrees, not massive amount but on the end of the second day my left wrist was in absolute agony because the position was just slightly different and when you're riding like so many hours, a little tiny things on the position make a difference, so I obviously changed the angle of the bars and have been very mindful of my wrist and trying to give it plenty of time to recover and my wrist is absolutely fine at the moment, my little finger is a little bit numb but not nothing too serious. I was going to say, what you do for nutrition, what you're doing for nutrition then because obviously for so long on the road there's only so many gels and bars you can carry and that you have the taste for so are you just eating real food and taking the opportunity to stop at roadside cafes when the chance presents itself? Yeah, so a bit of a mixture, I'm not eating gels or bars at all, they don't work for me or anyone actually I don't think in when you're talking about ultra riding, it's as much an eating competition as it is a riding competition, I'm burning off, well according to Garmin about 12,000 calories per day and try eating 12,000 calories a day, I'm not sure what it's possible, I mean I think polar explorers managed to do about six or seven thousand so I have a little bag which is attached to my handlebars which has lots of salted nuts, raisins, sunflower seeds, parabos, lots of parabos go in there, mentos, so like a real mixture of everything just gets dumped in that bag and I'm trying to mix as much whole food as possible with sweet food and I'm constantly dipping into that and eating things from that, then you've got the garages, there's only so many packs of jaffa cakes you can eat and pastries, not very good pastries and so then you're down to things like the roadside cafes and in Europe there are tons of the roadside cafes, buying one of the best meals I had was in Austria, there was a shop that had your spit roast chicken and got a couple of legs of chicken that had fallen off the spit that they have sold me cheap with a really nice salad, that was excellent, so you're trying to get some whole food in, trying making sure you get enough of salads and things like that in as well because you can't just live on processed food and carbs. I'm thinking now we've been on for half an hour and I want to let you get back on and concentrated with the ride, but that whole thing about it being an eating competition is something I've heard before from endurance athletes is to be able to get the huge volumes of training and competition and you have to feel that with huge numbers of calories and some people just seem to have a genetic ability to absorb those calories better than others and at the end of the day I think that that's as significant in terms of your performance on an event like this is it is your VO2 max and your functional threshold, right? Yeah I think yours I know is discussing with Christoph Strasser who is one of the best ultra cyclists and he's got his fat max is off the scale and his VO2 max is nothing particularly special, I mean he's good but it's not compared to his fat max and I think that you'll find that your people who are great is their ability to process fat that is you know there's probably the biggest differentiator rather than VO2 max, my average power today to a day is 150, 160 watts, so it's nothing particularly special, I'm not going anywhere near my VO2 max. Yeah how many, you said you think you're going to be out across into Turkey today, how many more days do you think you've got left if things go well and you keep up the same place? Well I'm I slipped at one point I took a after the last the you know the very bad parkour in the mountains out of Bosnia I took that opportunity to stop early and sort of lost about I think five hours against my plan I've now caught that I'm now last night I was about an hour behind the plan and so I'm very close to my plan and my plan should it continue would have me finishing sometime on Saturday either late afternoon early evening sort of time scale but that really is going to depend on this next parkour which is a real unknown. Well Matt, best mechanical look I hope everything continues to go as smoothly as it seems to have done and I really look forward to catching up when you've got to the finish and we can unpick the journey when in more sedate circumstances for you certainly and maybe talk about some of the big lessons that you've learned about your planning and your pacing and your eating and everything else. Yeah and I have a lot of time to internalise some of those thoughts but this has actually worked really well I've been sort of doing a nice gentle climb for the last 20 minutes or so so it's a good time to talk. All right Matt well and the wonders of modern technology. Wow yeah we would have thought that you saw I could include Southern Greece near the Turkish border and here we are on zoom recording a phone call. Beth here she wants to say I'm just going to take my headphones out. Hi. Oh hi. Yeah just a minute. Beth's got no voice at the moment. I don't know. I'm sorry about that. Talk about that. She says she's nice to see you on the camera. She's whispering good look. Yeah thank you. Okay Matt listen yeah it's safe safe pedaling. Yeah thanks thanks Simon and yeah we'll catch up after I've finished and have a try any longer conversation about although this has been reasonably long as well about yeah everything that discovered and the whole world of ultra cycling. Cool. Appreciate the call Matt thanks for taking the time and I look forward to speaking in a few days. Yeah thank you Simon. That's great. Speak you soon. Safe cycling. Well thank you to Matt there for joining me during his ride. He didn't really take time out it's because he was actually cycling as we were chatting and what you didn't see from the video was the beautiful blue sky and the quiet cycle lane that he was on out there in Greece. What I didn't get an impression of either was the extreme heat that he was cycling through but he seemed to be enjoying it. Now before we get back to part two I just want to take a couple of moments to tell you this. The show you're listening to now and all of the others that provide you with amazing real-life advice, guidance from top coaches, successful humans and athletes like Matt. Well making it takes me and them a lot of time but I feel it's worth it and I hope you do too and it's all in the name of helping you to improve your health longevity and performance. So all I ask in return is this please could you send a link for this podcast to somebody that you know who you think might enjoy it and or benefit and if you haven't already done this please could you click follow this podcast on whatever platform you're listening to right now so that you don't miss any of our future episodes. Thank you that's all. So let's get back to the show and remember this is part two and it's a few days after Matt's finished and we're reflecting on his overall enjoyment of the journey and the performance. Hello Matt. Welcome back. Thanks Aaron. It's good to be back. You look a little less disheveled today than you did last time we spoke. The listeners, I'll try and put a link to the video we did but the listeners won't necessarily know what we're talking about. You were in the middle of transcontinental race last time and now three weeks on you back at home all tidied up and shaved and everything and looking a bit recovered. How's that all been going? Yeah the recovery has been going really well and I think yes the last time we spoke I was in in Greece it was about somewhere I think it was like 42 degrees or something if I remember correctly. So yes I was probably feeling a little bit more on that day but it's now sort of three weeks since I finished and yeah I'm pretty much fully recovered and back into training for my next adventure. Let's remind the listeners about TCR so if you can give us some of the statistics how many miles or kilometers did you cover and how long did it take you? Yes so I covered just over 4200 kilometers and it took me 12 days to do that and that was an average of 342 kilometers per day and the TCR just to remind listeners is self-supported. In fact it's the biggest or most important self-supported ultra cycling race in the world. It goes this year the route is different every year. This year was from Roubaix in northern France to Istanbul via a sort of 900 kilometer circuit of Turkey on the Asian side of Turkey and yeah so and you know this route and we'll probably talk about that in a little bit but my route was slightly longer than some of the other riders it was 4200 kilometers and yeah I was pretty happy with how it went. There was a fair bit of climbing in that route can you give us an approximation of the number of meters you ascended? Yeah I ascended about 41 000 meters and if my maths is correct that's around 3200 meters per day. That'll be close enough. Yeah and so if you can imagine so I was cycling say 340 kilometers every day with 3200 meters even for me you're in isolation that's a big ride. What was your biggest day there then in terms of meters climbed? Yeah the biggest day I think in terms of meters climbed was pretty early on when I crossed the outs and I think that was around five and a half maybe 6 000 meters where I went from Munich or just just asked Munich and I cycled through to Italy just on the Slovenian border so to cross the outs from Salzburg in one day. Did you do any of the climbs that folks might be familiar with from watching the tour of the France or the sheriff? Well there's an interesting story around that so my original plan I was going to do the Großeglochner which is probably the most famous climbing in Austria it's about a 2400 meter climb and a couple of days before the the start I was looking at the weather forecast and the weather forecast on the day I was going to cross was about was going to be about two degrees and foggy at the top of Großeglochner which is not too bad climbing but is an absolutely horrendous descent when you've got conditions like that. So I decided to go with a slightly different route a slightly longer route which went to Salzburg and over two of the slightly less well known climbs which I just can't remember the name of at the moment the the first climb was was great and but what as I you hadn't I suppose planned this in as much detail as I planned the a lot of my other route the second climb which yeah it was about a thousand meters maybe a little bit less than a thousand meters I was somewhat alarmed as I came up to the climb and saw a sign saying 15 percent for the next six kilometers this is for the cars and that was a you know that was an absolutely brutal climb because climbing with a fully loaded by gone where averages at 15 percent for six kilometers was was tough. We thought I could de Großeglochner from from the south side back up to the north side last year and it started off quite warm at the bottom in the mid 20s but as we got to the top the fog came in and it was absolutely bitter and of course then we had to descend in that cold weather you're talking about so it was a matter of putting everything on you know long-fingered gloves arm warmers rain jacket and but then you get as you start going down that mountain it's such a great descent you're warming up you don't want to stop to spoil the descent but equally you feel a bit like a boil in the bag and you must have you must have had a few moments like that as you were going long because the temperatures were pretty hot throughout weren't they but I guess they did change as you went higher. Yeah so so the the temperatures and this summer the central Balkans and southern Europe were actually experiencing a pretty severe heat wave so the first couple of days actually probably until got to Slovenia they were very comfortable in the sort of like the the 20s maybe a bit cooler at the the top but the the the climbs I went over they were still in double digits of still 11 12 degrees at the top of the client but so that was the first three days but then after that the remaining it's of nine days or so every single day was over 40 degrees. Wow yeah what's the massive changes then between the base of the climb or the top or were you still at a decent temperature when you got to the summit of those? No actually the summits were were were were very pleasant so one of the the yeah so so that the first the first checkpoint was in in Slovenia which was at the top of a a very high pass and that was a lovely temperature when we got to the top there so that started off being really hot at the base of the climb and then there was probably a 15 degree temperature drop over a 1500 meter climb or so and then the second checkpoint was the highest point in Bosnia which is the Olympic ski resort in Sarajevo and Sarajevo itself was you know around 40 degrees and when we got to the the top of the Olympic ski resort that was you know something like 22 degrees was a it felt like an extremely pleasant temperature when we when we got up there just as well because we're on bikes trying to climb ski runs which are you know gravel ski runs which are obviously you know covered in snow in the winter but in the summer their gravel tracks they're used by quad bikes so you've got 4200 meters to ride it's mostly a road ride but as you've just alluded to that's not all the road ride is it what percentage of them distance do you think was gravel and off road uh too much so um the organizers set created six parkours and each of those parkours contained an element of gravel the the last three of three parkours contained a lot of gravel so i would say that the the gravel on the parkours was maybe 200 kilometers but then when you're getting into to turkey in particular but also you know certain places in the Balkans a lot of the roads even though they're sort of state roads they're actually gravel roads so i think that i did probably another 200 hundred between 150 and 200 kilometers probably on well maybe a bit less 100 kilometers on gravel state roads i think that might be a little bit of a surprise for a lot of folks who haven't necessarily ridden in the eastern part of europe is that it's not all tarmac is it i know we we were in Romania last year doing what was a gravel ride but even on some of the um not the not the super main roads but some of the side roads are still gravel roads and uh back in back in western europe would be considering them as farm tracks or accesses to people's property yeah and that's something that i learned from doing tcr last year is um the open street maps which is the the base maps that i think is used by Garmin by kamoot by google um the assumption the starting assumption is that anything that which is a state road is a tarmac road unless a user has reported it as being a gravel road so what you tend to find is in places that are where you have lots of cyclists like northern europe and you have certain places in Croatia they're pretty accurate once you get into southern europe into turkey where you have you know very few cyclists no one reports these as being gravel roads so you think that you're you've got a route that goes down a lovely tarmac piece of road and actually it's a gravel road and as you say most of the most of those roads are gravel so often if you're planning routes in common cycling places france, spain, meorca you can go to google street maps and if you aren't really familiar with that road you can get a good picture of whether it's paved or non-paved is there such a function as google street maps in eastern europe it depends it depends on which country you're in um some countries have um quite quite a good amount of google street view Croatia for example i would say has probably about 90% of the roads on google street view Bosnia has almost none turkey is probably 50-60% on google street view so it's a bit of a mixed picture and you mentioned the parkours that you have to do and you've also got roads that you're not allowed to take that the organisers have banned you from riding so apart from the start the finish and the checkpoints you are pretty much free to create your own route is that right yeah absolutely so um you get back all of the all of the planning but that's the i think part of the the skill is not just riding it's actually planning a route that avoids as much gravel as possible and avoids um as many climbs as possible without adding too much distance into your total ride so when you're planning that route obviously use google street view when it's available what do you do in those areas where um the roads and the the quality of them are a bit more sketchy yeah so there's a couple three other sources of information um using satellite images is fine because i'm pretty much the whole everywhere is covered by satellite images um if you can see road markings then you know it's tarmac um but if you can't see road markings it's actually very difficult to determine from a satellite whether it's gravel or tarmac because they they all look great so you can you can use google earth i'm on the satellite view and you can zoom in as far as you go but that granular bit where you zoom in on google earth to the point where it becomes a street view photograph you just don't have that option yeah okay okay is it are there any other things that you can do then or the other thing which i think was great was um youtube there's a a lot of motorcyclists in particular take youtube videos of their of their motorbike or their motorbike rights um and so if you know which road you're going to go on you can go and do a search for that on youtube um and then you get actually a fantastic view and so i saw youtube videos from motorcyclists youtube videos from people who've been doing wild camping um and very often in fact i would say 90% of the time if you send a message to those people they they respond and you you get an interaction and you can say you some awesome questions about what that road was like so that was another really great source and are you allowed to contact the cyclist not not that are doing the race but people who might be in cyclops around in that region is that is that something that you can do or are you sort of asked not to do that now you certainly can at least i hope you can because i i contacted that was another other than another thing was looking at the um strava heat maps and you can then see on the segments and who's written there and again send those people a message on on strava and contact them um the i did have a another contact which who was a um a policeman in north math uh no in montanidro and i was once to ask a specific question about tunnels um which you can cycle through and which you can't cycle through and uh this is an example where it's slightly less than helpful because the policeman replied to me oh yeah we know that these tunnels are banned but um when we cycle through them all the time anyway well that's fine if you're a local cyclist but when we're doing tcr we have to stick to the traffic regulations so you know it doesn't matter that if other cyclists go through those tunnels um we can't go through those tunnels if they're technically banned for cyclists okay so let's go on we move on from the route then we'll come back to how that all worked out um a bit later on let's talk about equipment because like with everything we're gonna keep coming back to this thing about everything to compromise right so let's talk about equipment and the compromises you have with your equipment versus taking the kitchen sink so you're all prepared versus how much you really want to be riding up to those 15% gradients with yeah and um yeah so what what i think i probably i actually ended up with a slightly heavier bike this year because um i had some problems with my with my neck and with my hands last year um due to the i guess the the the bike setup or the yeah the the vibrations so um i had an anti-vibration stem and i had a dropper post on my bike which added weight to my bike um but um massively improved the the quality of the ride to the point where i had absolutely no problem with you know my neck or with my with my hands at all um in terms of equipment i i reduced the amount of equipment that i took this year um i looked at everything that i'd taken last year and said what did i use and what did i not use and sort of managed to reduce the some of the equipment that i that took last year i also changed um one of my bags um i put on a uh you know rather than one of the bags that fits or a large bag that fits on the saddle i put a bag that fits on the on the rack on effectively as a rack so then i could use a dropper post um that actually proved to be an inspired choice because by having a a more stable load uh it meant that the bike handled far better on descents and the the one thing that i took and really didn't use very much was uh my sleeping system so i took a bivvy a sleeping bag a sleeping mat and a pillow um i didn't use them very much last year either but you just don't want to be caught out um in uh you know in a position where you have to sleep out at night and you don't have any sleeping system to sleep out at night so um if i do it again i'm you know i might question whether i take a pillow and a sleeping mat i might say well keeping dry and warm is the most important thing but um yeah so there's certain things that you need to take i think that um even if you're less likely to use them let's talk about tire choice then you mentioned that most of it's on tarmac but you've got something on gravel um how do you decide on what type of tires you're going to use and again what what's the best compromise so so for me um it was the widest tires that would fit on my bike which were 32 millimeter tires if i could fit 35 millimeter tires i would have put 35 millimeter tires on my bike um i use the um the uh your continental GP 5000 um ASTR which i think is the which i think used to be called the all-road or all-terray i can't remember the all-season so that's right it was the all-season so it's got a an extra layer of puncture protection um so it is a slick tire um but it is reasonably puncture proof and i only had one puncture which i fixed with a which i fixed with a plug so that took a maximum of five minutes to pick to fix that puncture so that worked out pretty well um the only thing is that um i was very lucky that i didn't have any wet gravel sections i think if i'd had some of those gravel sections in the wet then with slick tires i would have probably had much more of a much more issues um but on dry they the tires worked absolutely fine yeah so that's a bit of a risk then isn't it but i guess that's something you don't have any any control over is the weather um how how did apart from the hot temperatures that you've mentioned what are the other things that you came across on that route that were out of your control that you had to deal with yeah so i mean there there's a there's a couple of things the one which is um i guess most well known for for the Balkans and Turkey is um is dogs and how to deal with with with packs of dogs um i'm not a great dog person so that was something that i had was a little bit nervous of i was last year going through Greece i dealt with it fine so i was a little bit more confident um there were a large number of dogs particularly in in Turkey um but what i found was that um and the dogs particularly it during the day that it's too hot they you know they the dogs are not going to bother you at all um in the evening and you know in the very early morning when it's a bit cooler the dogs will chase um but i found that and so if i was going on the flat or a down here you can outrun the dogs pretty easily when they chase that's that's not a problem um but if you're sort of going uphill or on gravel as soon as you get off the bikes the dogs almost scatter and they don't give you any trouble at all so i i had absolutely no trouble with dogs um the only interesting experience i had with dogs was on the last day i came across a um a herd of goats and there was a pack of dogs who were guarding the goats there right big dog who were dogs and they've been brought up with the goats since they were since they were puppies um these 10 dogs were and and you know they protect the goats from wolves so they're not little fluffy dogs these are big vicious type dogs and they were very aggressive when i rode up um but as soon as i got off my bike they weren't interested okay but then if i got on my bike again they'll get really aggressive so i actually had to go and push my bike through this herd of goats it took me about 15 minutes because they were it was a large herd of goats no going in the same direction as me um but that was the the only thing and the other um piece that that you know you always have to worry about is um uncontrollable uh elements these other motorists and you know unfortunately i was i was actually hit by a motorbike in north Macedonia it was a young lad who was in a small village who was showing off to his mates and he was coming up towards me and just as he was about to pass you know pass me going in the opposite direction i think he opened the throttle on his motorbike and lost control and just you know smashed straight into me i had absolutely zero time to react um luckily i didn't sustain any injuries and my bike had a bent hanger which i straightens which meant that the indexing on my gears wasn't perfect for the for the rest of the ride but there was no other damage so you're very lucky i think you mentioned i think you mentioned that earlier on in this podcast but when you did your previous bit when you were doing the live recording that we did you also touched on um fire at that point i think there'd been a forest fire somewhere that caused you to divert off route and find somewhere else at the last minute yeah of course so that was the um that was as i was crossing from um north Macedonia into into Greece and uh yeah apologies i can't quite remember what i said last time but yeah the going into into Greece um there was just as i approached the the border um a whole load of fire trucks passed me um and i could see smoke in the distance and as i approached the border the smoke got thicker and thicker and then you could see flames and the flames were um upwind so they were actually blowing towards towards the towards me and towards a road um everyone was trying to get out of this this town so it was traffic chaos um and i was slightly concerned that the they were actually going to close the border and the police would divert me because yeah i'm not well that that would have been a fairly huge re-planning effort to to find another border crossing luckily i got across the border but as soon as i got across the border um the police did so that was into Greece the Greek police um did divert me they told me that i had to head um south towards Tesaloniki when my actual route um was what put my planned route was to go east towards Turkey so um i then so i had this you know you know really well planned route and suddenly i had to go off this really well planned route and uh was was having to say okay so how do i you know how do i get back onto back onto my route so i lost quite a lot of time um firstly i went to a um a town kylakis and found a nice place to go and have dinner because you you're always trying to multitask you don't want to do to have dinner on its own you want to have dinner while doing something else so i thought right i'll go and have some dinner while going or lunch while planning a new route so i went to so i i planned a new route um it you know added probably 100 kilometers 75 kilometers so and um then i followed that that new route but the problem with it was and it's coming back to these gravel roads my new route because i hadn't had the time to go on to street view and satellite images so my new route kept on trying to take me onto gravel roads so every time he was trying to take me onto gravel roads i was stopping having a look at the route trying to re-plan manually so it cost me a bit of time doing this whole re-planning effort and i think it really shows the importance of having a good plan right at the beginning because trying to re-plan on the fly is you know time time can extremely time-consuming it it it does highlight the fact that you need a fair amount of stoicism and resilience on events like this which when you compress that down into an Ironman event which would be your normal one-day event which in comparison doesn't seem like much of an endurance challenge at all does it although although of course clearly i know it is um but we all have problems on race day when we're doing our Ironman whether that's a puncture or we lose our water bottles as we go over a speed bump or there's a mechanical and folks get very frustrated because it's upsetting their plan but but i guess when you've done events like TCR you you just basically learn a mindset that helps you deal with those things on race day yeah and then say um i don't like to use the um term um there's a you know beyond resilience there's this concept of being anti-fragile and that's actually that's actually using the disruptions and the you to become actually to develop a stronger mindset so having been disrupted you actually emerge from that from that stronger and i think that that's if you take the mindset that you've got these disruptions and they've destroyed your race and you you have a very negative perspective that makes you weaker if you take the perspective that i'm dealing with these these disruptions they're not in my control but what is in my control is the ability to recover from these disruptions um for me that's actually a huge motivator and so on the day where i had to divert because the forest fires and woods you know i actually ended up on the coast road um going east from from Tesaloniki which i would never have been on um if i hadn't had this this diversion and it was one of the nicest roads that i'd been on because um i was cycling through all of these um holiday resorts with you know there was a there was actually a beautiful cycle lane because you know people like cycling along the beach um there were all of these small towns with restaurants and people having a good time and it's a real motivator when you can see people having a good time and you know people in the cars were being polite and they were waving and saying hello um and when i spoke to the people at the end um the route that i would have taken they said you know which was much much further inland they said it was one of the most boring days that they had on the whole tip you know the whole TCR because there was essentially nothing there they they had these images that they were going to be cycling through Greece and there would be these Greek restaurants and they were just cycling through some really rural areas with almost no villages no just nothing there and so yeah i i you know i probably had i might have you know lost a bit of time but i think i had a much better time that you talk about anti-fragile it's a great book isn't it i think it's nicholas naseen talib yeah anti-fragile again from disorder and i think that that book that looks being mentioned by a couple of guests before on the show um about that anti-fragility and i i certainly think if you if you're doing um if you're doing any sort of long distance event reading something like that and working on your mindset is uh is a must so let's talk about mindset because you know changing weather conditions things you can't control having periods of your day long periods of your day which are just boring and all of those other things cycling through the night as well um hours upon hours of gravel some of which you might have had to walk along you know all of these things challenge your mindset so how how do you deal with all of those things yeah it's a um that's a i think that's a that's a very good question um the first thing i think that the way that that i deal with those things is that cycling doing an event like this is actually an ability it is actually an opportunity to get away from all of the challenges that you you have in sort of your your day-to-day life and to start thinking to start clearing your mind and start thinking about other things so just you're observing you say that you know that some of it the scenery is very boring but you can actually start sort of um observing some of the the the the scenery um thinking about say your things that you don't have time to think about in your your normal day-to-day life so it's actually done this almost um almost almost like the zen state of being able to just you know clear clear your mind um and um i also found that it was really useful to start breaking the the day down so don't think about the day being i've got to cycle for 350 kilometers it was to say well i'm going to cycle for an hour and i know that i'm going to reach this town and i'm going to have breakfast in the in this town so you set this reward which is having breakfast in in in a town in yeah where however far it is um and you you've then got that sort of i guess that endorphin high of uh of reaching the of reaching the town reaching that goal having the breakfast um and then being set up for the for the next goal so it's actually about trying to break it down and suddenly you find um that your that i was you know 200 kilometers into the ride and thinking well i've only got like 140 kilometers to go that's a you know that's not far that's less than an iron man i can do do an iron man bike ride anytime so you it's uh it was very much about sort of like you're breaking it down into into manageable chunks and having a reward for each of those different subsections hmm and of course the day's changing isn't it so you you set off and you're enjoying the cooler air in the morning and then it's warming up um but then when it gets warmer you're thinking well i'm looking forward to the to the afternoon when it's cooling down again and then you're riding in the dark so there's challenges to riding in the dark but also places like the fact that it is much cooler the roads are much quieter but of course then it brings the added danger of um you know you less easy less um obvious to motorists um across 12 days of an event like that sleep is obviously a huge factor so it's always nutrition so we'll come back to nutrition in a moment but sleep is obviously a huge factor so i guess there's people in this race who just take sleep when when an opportunity prevents itself so there's somewhere they find where they can just put their head down by the side of the road or in a you know in a barn or something get a bit of shade and then you had a slightly different strategy that because i know we chatted about that in detail before you started yeah absolutely so um for me getting enough sleep is really important and you know maybe it's you know that that i'm slightly older and you know being 52 but i i you i feel that i've definitely performed far better if i've had a reasonable amount of sleep and also um at this even though i train a lot i at the start i'm not at my peak level of fitness and the only way that you can build fitness is by getting enough sleep at night so i i created a plan um a daily plan where i said you know this is how far i'm going to get every day i made sure that my plan ended in a location where i knew there were going to be hotels you're not allowed to book the hotels in advance but i knew that i would there would be uh hotels you know where i plan to stop every night and so every night um i would have dinner at about seven eight o'clock and i would then go and look on look on booking.com and try and find a hotel that would be about so three hours ahead because my aim was to stop at 11 p.m with 10 30 to 11 p.m every night um i would then sort of uh yeah pretty much i hit that plan pretty consistently would stop in a hotel um would be super efficient with getting things on charge and you know having a shower and washing my kits getting better soon as possible and set the alarm for um 5 45 and the idea was to have six hours sleep um every night and i have to say that every time i went to a hotel i was probably asleep within 30 seconds of my head hitting the pillar i didn't have any trouble getting to sleep um one interesting thing the observation that i actually spoke to um to Scott Hill about this and Scott was one of your your previous guest as well um i turned the air conditioning off in the hotels because what i've discovered pretty early on was the air conditioning was dehydrating me so i was end up well firstly you've got the noise of the fan and also was dehydrating me really badly so i was like you know incredibly thirsty through through the night and you know waking up feeling dehydrated and i found that um by turning the air conditioning off i was yeah much yeah i was much more comfortable and i think i was so tired and i was so heat adapted that it didn't matter that it was hot i was sleeping absolutely fine hmm well that's interesting then i i find that uh um again there's a compromise i can after a while i can cope with the noise of the fan or um but if i'm too hot that seems to um that seems to affect my sleep more but i guess it's different for everybody and you do get adapted to the heat as well don't you so some folks might say well if you're planning to sleep you're going to lose time on those other folks who are just riding for as long as possible and then taking power naps and what was the reality of that when you got to the finish do you feel like those planned sleeps were actually beneficial to your overall performance so absolutely um in fact my my i performed better than than i than i expected and i would probably use the one one example that that i think really highlights how important it is that one of the the top competitors uh you know an elite cyclist called Abdullah Zainab and he was fighting for first place all the way through the right of the racings like a really close fight and 36 hours before the end he had a an absolutely monumental breakdown i don't think i've ever seen a an athlete you know have such a you know a big you know collapsing in performance um he had a few mechanical issues in the in those last sort of day and a half and um he ended up walking uh you know um you know for a very long period i think decision-making started to to fall apart he then took a wrong turning on the final parkour and had to be sent back to go and you finish the parkour correctly and as a result of that he dropped from first place the fourth place i think he lost about 24 hours within the within that that last 36 hours um you know and and i think a lot of that was because he was you know he was pushing the absolute limit now that was his strategy and if the race had been 36 hours less he would have probably been you know first or second but he was pushing to the the absolute limit of of you know his ability or his endurance and i think pushed you know slightly over that that limit whereas mine um when i finished the race um i felt actually really good i would say that the last day in the second to last day i felt stronger than i did on the second day you know so i i felt as i crossed the line um i you know i felt that i was actually in pretty good shape i didn't have any injuries didn't feel any you know really sort of super fatigue um so yeah it was a strategy that worked really well for me yeah i think i mean we've talked about this before many times on the podcast and you and i have had long discussions about sleep matter the benefits of it it's uh it's one of those things where folks see me easy to compromise on sleep for performance but ultimately lack of sleep um kills you doesn't it um met it metaphorically and literally if you're not careful and this is actually one of the this is why having a plan for me why having a plan was so important um there were a couple of times there were a couple of days um early on so the first day was in um when i was in Slovenia and uh you know and i i booked my hotel you know which was exactly in the town where i planned to to stop um and when i got there at about 11 p.m i you know i was feeling i'm actually feeling really good maybe i should have written on to zagreb which was about another two three hours ride probably you know further on um and if i hadn't planned to stop at that point i probably would have pushed on to to zagreb um the other time was um when i was coming up to the second second parkour in um Sarajevo and um you know i decided to stop uh i got there at about 7.30 in the evening um again i was feeling pretty good but it was on a gravel section and that you know my plan was to get to that um that that point and stop there for the night and i could very easily have pushed on but without having any idea about where i would have stopped you know it was very tempting both those occasions to go and just like push on um but i think that if i'd done that i would have built up fatigue i would have then gone off my plan so i would have been into a whole world of uncertainty and who knows what the impact would have been at the at the end of the race it's interesting to talk about abdula you know we we i think probably most people know that your decision-making capabilities are impaired when you yeah i'm much sleep but you might also be thinking well he was a bit unlucky then with these mechanicals but i would say that there's a there's a strong link between those because there could be something going wrong on your bike that you just overlook and think well it'll sort itself out in a minute you know if you'd been sharp and you know fully in control of your senses you might have stopped to take a look at something but in a half sleepy state pushing on and not realizing that a situation was getting worse till the point where it deteriorates so much where you can't ride your bike or then to your point where you said he was walking a lot i think i think you'd said it was on one of the parkours which was a gravel stage yeah when your coordination and your proprioception goes bumping into rocks and stones that are in the path rather than taking a route through them happens it happens more often doesn't it and so then you start believing that the path is unridable and you've fallen off so much that you you think it's just easy to walk when you said that that route was actually fairly rideable yeah and and you know i'm only speculating about you know what happened to i've done it there but and as you know when we did the when we talked before when i was in Greece i was actually really concerned about that that far that parkour because i've been seeing on instagram and you know on the feet about all of these riders who were ahead of me who'd been having a you know absolute nightmares of like getting tons of punches and you know and it sounded like you know this this parkour is unridable and i i'd even hatched a plan where i was going to go and you know get a pair of trainers and go and just like walk the the parkour because i didn't want to damage my bike um i didn't pass a shot the sole trainer so i didn't get a pair of trainers but i was actually i had a good night's sleep the night before and and i got to the the the parkour and it was actually you know it was a tough parkour but it was 100% rideable i rode every single your piece of it i didn't get any punches or have any mechanical issues on the bike um and i think it was you know the the people who were ahead had just been pushing so hard that you know that you know that they really struggled with trying to pick a line or you know that it was you know it was made difficult by their fatigue as opposed to being a particularly difficult parkour okay let's talk about nutrition then so for most of us listening in our normal one day events we can take the nutrition that we need and there's usually a little bit available from the on course supplies at the feed stations not quite the same over two weeks so um and i because you're cycling for 15 or 16 hours a day you're burning thousands of calories um how did you make sure you stayed on top of your fueling needs and your hydration needs yeah so um and it was actually interesting was it coach Kate that you had on a couple of weeks ago who talked a lot about the the new oh Claire coach Claire sorry he was uh that was uh i think uh that was a really interesting podcast but and so i was um burning i guess 10,000 to 11,000 calories per day um now the the maximum that the body or science would would suggest that the maximum that you can absorb is you know around 6,000 calories 6,000,000 calories a day so i would be you know even your best case in a huge um calorie deficit um plus i didn't want to lose too much time by stuff um you know trying to sort to get food but what you what i found and what the way i described it was that it's a much an eating race or a nutrition race as it is a is a cycling race so the the aim is not to run out of food at any point um so i had a um a bag on my on my bars which was constantly filled up with dried fruit dried nut with nuts um haribos i have no idea how many packets of haribos i got through and the nuts were salted nuts as well and so every time every petrol station i'd asked where i stopped they would go and add sort of a a bag of whatever i could could get in there so that was so i was like constantly grazing on on the on food and that bag was never empty and they for the whole 12 days there was always something in there you mentioned coach claire now the point about claire's podcast was we were talking about plant-based nutrition how easy would it be to maintain your plant-based philosophy on a on a race like this particularly i know in some of those eastern european countries they don't have quite the same approach to eating vegetables as we do here in the west do they're much more of a meat-based society i think it's getting better and i might be doing them a disservice but my previous experiences were that meat was more of a staple than it might be in in the in the uk western europe and not just meat it's sort of like a highly processed meat as well that they seem to eat a lot of there were actually a couple of got a couple of people out there who were vegetarians and and i i i chatted about that and i think by and large they managed to they were managed to be reasonably successful finding finding food and i actually found i'm yeah i'm not a vegetarian but i was craving things like beans and beans stews and bean casseroles because they're actually far more digestible eating sort of you know i think chicken was was you know was a was pretty good when i could find it what i was really you know i really didn't fancy and i tried to avoid the processed meats as much as possible because i i just my body just said like you don't want these it was it was it wasn't a a choice a mental choice it was a you know my body was telling me what foods to eat and actually what you're trying to get is simple foods as much as possible simple foods which are really easily digestible i've heard it said quite often you talked about it being an eating race that actually what what dictates success in these is the people who can consume enough calories to keep going because you you probably burn as you said you're burning more calories than you can possibly consume so those folks who have have the ability within their gut to absorb that food therefore have a fuel tank that's more full they can probably go a little bit harder for a little bit longer would you feel like that's an accurate accurate sort of statement totally accurate and you you can i i would really notice it particularly with when i breakfast or ate a meal in the evening and so i'd say i would stop about seven o'clock and you'll grab something you have to have you have something proper to eat some proper food to eat and invariably about 30 minutes later i would feel absolutely amazing you could it was like a switch you could feel you know that the you know the energy levels and and that would really keep me going on until 11 o'clock and when i was stopping at 11 o'clock i wasn't feeling like i'm on my last legs i was still feeling you know pretty good so i clearly have that ability that even when you're exercising it's a yeah a reasonable intensity and if you look at my power numbers you know it was still as a reasonably high level that i was still able to digest that food so i think that yeah there is a genetic element to your ultra cycling that you need to be able to to process food as well as as well as exercising as well when you're cycling through these areas where the population is a bit more scattered what do you do for water because clearly when the temperatures are in the 30s and 40s you are sweating a lot um there's the risk and real risk of dehydration so you know you're not always going to have the opportunity of going into a service station or somebody's house to get running water and even if you do particularly if it's running water um whether it's fit to drink or not i guess in some places will be a concern so you might be a little bit surprised to hear that the place where i struggled most to find water was in Belgium and Germany in wow i am surprised in west in in sort of i guess you know what we would think is western europe um where there really aren't many fountains you know roadside fountains with water you've got to stop in a shop or a petrol station and the petrol stations are now all automated petrol stations so there's no longer somebody in a kiosk with with food so that was a that was actually a real problem once you get down into into the Balkans and into Turkey you've got water fountains everywhere and actually there were a couple of times where in the mountains in in Turkey where there were wells and you have to go and pump the water up out of the well and the water came out pretty cold so i you know i have to assume that it was and i didn't get any sort of stomach upset and and actually most of the villages a lot of those villages don't have running water to their homes or you know maybe limited running water to their homes so there's a a well or a tap in the center of the village where you can top where you can fill up with water so once i was into the into the Balkans i never once had a problem finding water and i was drinking around two liters of water per hour so i had i was carrying three liters of water on my bike so that's with four four water bottles and every so and i was trying to ride for about two hours between stopping to fill up because you don't want to try and fill up too often because you then you're losing time but every time you do stop it's actually a chance to eat and a chance to drink and a chance to fill up all of your to fill up all the water and so i yeah for the whole of the ride despite drinking two liters per hour i didn't run out of water you know at all i had no trouble finding water and you didn't need to take any sort of water purification tablets or filtration systems with absolutely i didn't take any with me and i seem to have survived pretty well without it and i think you know i did look um online i think the is that the world health organization tells you whether the the tap water is safe in these in the countries and all the countries you went through said that it had safe tap water although the majority of the water i got was from um you know gas stations and from some small shops and was um was you know generally bottled water but i filled up at plenty of fountains as well hmm yeah i guess you need fluid don't you and hydration to survive so when again there's a compromise if there's none available in a bottle you're gonna have to take the next best available thing and then just um i'm trying to think of the right words here but just chance your arm really yeah absolutely and it worked i know that a couple of the competitors did get stomach upsets that they might have got from from water but by and large it doesn't seem to have been a problem for for for most of the competitors okay i'm at so you're three weeks back now um this is the second time you've done the event in the last two years what are your key reflections from this about preparation about performance about recovery about mindset um that if we i guess we're just summarizing what you've said over the last sort of 45 minutes yeah well the most important thing is um it's the both the biggest difference was actually planning the route and um i i did a um i think that i did a pretty amazing job on planning the route i you know i i cycled a longer route than most people but i cycled far less elevation than most people i cycled on a much higher percentage of tarmac than most people and i think that and the most important thing on planning the route there was almost no roads where i came to where it was a surprise you know so if i'd chosen to ride on a gravel road it was a i knew i was gonna be riding on a gravel road and if i was chosen to ride on a tarmac road it was a it was a tarmac road so i think that that was that that was really important um then i think that the the other thing was about being just more efficiently fine so um you know at when you're stopping to to eat stopping to fill up with the water um just you're saving a few minutes every time um and um yeah and and then sort of the the strategy with staying in hotels um and again being very efficient coming into the the hotels i think you know that would that worked really well so it was um and my bike setup was also far better so i would say that it all comes into uh to to the planning and preparation i was no fitter this year than i was last year but um my results and the you you the amount of time that it took me uh it took me um i think two days less than or equivalent to two days less than it took last year so last year the leaders finished in eight days and i finished in 13 days this year the leaders finished in nine days and i finished in in 12 days so it was actually two days closer to the to the leaders and i think that you know all of the and and it really just comes down to that you know that that better planning on sort of um you know marginal improvements in in lots and lots of different areas and resulted in probably a 20% less time overall which is a pretty big chunk because we talked about whether boosting your FTP and training and or doing more miles would actually have made a difference in the long run and judging by what you've said over the course of this conversation it doesn't seem like those would have been hugely different um or hugely impactive on your on your end result yeah i i think that they would have made no difference and if you if you look at my the my bike speed when i was riding uh my bike speed was one of the fastest fastest bike speeds of all all of the riders um and certainly was right up with the the bike speed of the you know the overall winner um the um the difference was that you know the the people who were ahead of me slept you know had you know much reduced a you know downtime so i i would my downtime was about a non-riding time was 36 percent i think the winner's non-riding time was 18 percent of saying so exactly half of the the amount if i'd increase my FTP so i was already one of the fastest riders so if my FTP was higher realistically would i have been significantly faster and probably not i mean it's uh you know you what once you're up to that that's the level you can start saying okay i could be faster but the reality is it wouldn't have made any difference so here's the question then um that i'm sure other people are thinking of soliciting is if you went back again in another year would you try to cut down on the amount of sleep you had to increase your riding time so you got to the finish faster or do you think that approach wouldn't work for you i i overall i wouldn't cut my sleeping time i think what i might have done and you know i thought about this is that that i was i so i finished in 40th place i was in a group of cyclists a group of around 10 cyclists we were obviously weren't riding together but we would see we were you know in around the same sort of area pretty much the whole way through the the ride um all of the other riders in that group of 10 you know either on the very last night either rode on to the end or um rode on until sort of like the early hours and maybe had a couple of hours sleep and then then rode to the end um and so i finished about four hours after four or five hours after that group it was a conscious decision that i made to stop on the on the last night um i wanted to enjoy that last you know riding into into turkey into Istanbul um however if i did it again and was saying right i'm going to try and race for a position um and when i look at the you know the other riders i think that being maybe a little bit maybe on the very last night going through that through the the last night would have certainly lifted me up by maybe up to 10 places and i think being a little bit more efficient particularly at the beginning with some of my food stops um would also have you know would have lifted me up so um i can realistically say i could realistically believe that i could get a top 20 position um but then that's probably about as high as i would ever get because you're then up to the the people who are pretty much professional riders beyond that so i think i could probably lift myself up to be one of the the top four or five amateur riders um would be realistic uh there's a question but i think that that would have potentially also reduced the enjoyment so yeah i i don't know i mean i probably will do it again and i you know probably will try and get an improved position but i don't regret any of the choices that i made this year either um i think that i may um you know pretty much all the way through perfect decisions and and if i look at my my entire racing career doing triathlons and marathons i think that i've had two maybe three races that i've said right i've executed this race absolutely perfectly uh and i would say that tcr this year is probably the fourth race where i can say in my entire racing career that i i executed that race to the the absolute best that i could have could have executed that there you know there's very little that i could have done that i would change today but that doesn't mean that i can't see opportunities for how i can improve in the future sometimes it's not about the event being the event is it it's about the planning being the event and it's about enjoying the journey you know the other result isn't the result the result is because i've been chatted with you a few times now about this to me executing the race plan as well as you did seems to be the result not getting across the finish line in Istanbul yeah absolutely and maybe that's because my mindset is uh you know i i have a my a planning mindset is what is i what i do is my day job you know i'm i'm a i'm a planner and executing a plan to perfection is is actually really important you know i don't believe in leaving things to chance uh or as much as possible and and winging it the thing is though now you're not the first person i've talked to that that talks about how important this is i've i've spoken with elite coaches who are working with triathletes competing in the Olympics and you know the world championships in in Ironman and the thing that they are keen to emphasize is when they're talking to athletes before the event it's about the process not the outcome sometimes as we've discussed the outcome is beyond your control because events happen that you can't do anything about but you can control the process and how you respond to events in that and if you can execute those then the results will be what it will be won't it sometimes it will be in your favor sometimes it won't be but if you can have the mindset that the important thing is execution of the process you're probably always going to be really really happy with your performance and and for most people listening to this podcast that's probably going to keep them in the sport longer and give them a lifelong enjoyment of what they do yeah so i i totally agree with that um it's uh you know it's it's about and there's also another aspect which um which we need to consider is that um you know i'm not a professional athlete and that i have other sporting goals for this year and and you know i have a life to live beyond the the TCR and so i didn't want to completely destroy myself and be left with you know taking three months to recover after the race and so when i set my plan part of the way that i set my plan is to is to um to make sure that i you know didn't overextend myself and so um as i said i felt really good after after finishing TCR and i was you know pretty much straightaway back into light training um and you know slowly ramping that up and you know and i'm feeling now three weeks later um you know maybe not a hundred percent but i'm feeling 90 percent um and feeling really strong um and so yeah i think that there's a you know that that is another important part of it as well is that as a as an amateur athlete you don't want to um you know it's not like doing the Olympics where that's the most important thing and that's the the entire goal you know we have other sort of a life and other aspirations beyond that that that that goal hope that makes sense no i i think it does because um if you just reduce that down to somebody's daily training and maybe their work if you go to work you get up early go training then go to work and then go training on the way home and then you get home and you have your you have your dinner and then you're completely exhausted and you spend the rest of the evening on the couch or you go out for your long bike or your long run on a weekend and then the rest of the day you you're absolutely used this to anybody if you've got family and friends who would like a bit of your time during their life that that means that you're not dealing with that side of your life very well um i back to your point about recovery you know sometimes we're all chasing fitness goals and that fitness goal is represented by being faster and stronger but there's is another point to fitness is that the deeper your fitness it also means that you deal with these things better and you recover better so as you get fitter with your training perhaps you aren't lying on the couch dozing when your children want to go out and play football or maybe you are recovering from a huge event like tcr within two or three weeks and then able to plan the rest of your summer because you've got another iron man to come haven't you in october um where you've got aspirations of qualifying for the world championship so that that is that is an important part of um how you raced in tcr as well yeah definitely it's um you know i think it's it's about you know racing racing within yourself and uh you know i i'm not sure that actually you're breaking yourself doing what um i understand we are why um i have duller raced in the in the way that he did um but it but it was a very high risk strategy that that you know that's not something that i would want would want to do is to to push myself so close to the limit well matt it's been fascinating i've loved i loved chatting with you as you were preparing for this race and talking with you about your plans and going through over your kit lists and your group choices and everything else it was great to catch up with you during the event and and now it's been great to get some sort of post event reflection so thank you for sharing all of that with us good luck in preparations for cash guy in october and um maybe we can come back again and you can tell us exactly how recovered you really were once you got onto the start line of that iron man yeah well i've got an excuse now it's okay matt spooner thanks again for being here it's been been a pleasure as always thanks very much Simon it's been really good to talk to you thank you again to matt for being my guest on the show this week it's always a pleasure to chat with him now you might have picked up on it if i can remember whether we chatted about it or not that he was using this event to get in some big miles before his next iron man challenge in cash guy but you go so i'm hoping that in a few weeks time we can speak to him and find out how all of those big miles on tcr helped and maybe whether the lack of swimming and running during that period and during his preparation he did it please check out show notes for links to all the topics we've chatted about you can also find the links to my free daily mobility plan and contact details for me or beth if you're interested in pursuing your own high performance human journey to make sure don't miss any future episodes please go to iTunes search for high performance human triathlon podcast and then click on the subscribe button and once you've finished listening if you could share the episode with just one person that you think might enjoy it or might benefit that would be awesome and it would be doubly awesome if you have a couple more minutes where you can be a mere review on your chosen platform that's all for this week i will of course have another great guest with me in seven days time and i hope you'll be able to join me but until then happy training and enjoy the rest of you
