MERSEY ROADS 24HR TT

On the 22nd July 2023 I rode the Mersey Roads 24hr TT, finishing with 386.61 miles in 24 hours, below is the breakdown of my ride and training ideas.

The ride

The ride could easily be just summarised as set off too fast and faded badly, but I'll fill in the finer details.

The weather forecast was quite bleak and it rained heavily on the drive over to Farndon, but it cleared up nicely for the start. I was given rider number 19 which meant I set off at 1:19pm. I knew the starter Edwin from Audax rides, so had some banter with him before he counted me down, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 at this point I was supposed to start the Garmin, but completely forgot! After about 500m I glanced down at the Garmin and realised my mistake, Garmin now started I cracked on at a somewhat alarming pace. Within the next 10 mins I had my heart rate above 150 twice, before I got to Prees Heath(27km) I had overtaken all the riders in front of me, I had to calm down, it's a 24hr TT not a 25mile race!

I settled into a steady rhythm for the next 3 Battlefield loops, quite hilly in places but I was feeling good. The course then moved over to the Quina Brook circuit, I had a quick pitstop for food and water and continued onto the Quina Brook loops until 9:30pm. I stopped at 9:30 for front battery light, food and extra layers. It had rained heavily on the Quina Brook loops and this continued into the night loops of Battlefield, large puddles of standing water, hills and driving rain made conditions quite difficult. I backed the speed off during this period as I was concerned of hitting a pothole, with all the rain on my visor the car lights were dazzling me. At first light I stopped for food and removed the light, the rain had eased slightly so I decided to up the pace a bit, only to find the legs would not respond. We were back on Quina Brook loops now, 11 in total and they were getting a bit tedious, I had some knee and neck pain but nothing serious so just plodded on at a reduced pace. The last 4 loops of Quina Brook I had to stop each time to pee(every 45mins), even though I wasn't drinking any more than usual. This had happened to me before on LEL in 2017, someone suggested it was a Keto thing, maybe but I'm not sure. It certainly wasn't helping my average by stopping each loop though and my overall average speed had dropped from 31.8kmh to 26.4kmh, 400 miles was now looking very unlikely. I made my final stop(or so I thought) at 10am, removed some layers and headed for the finishing circuit. On arriving at the roundabout, expecting to be sent straight on to the finishing circuit, the marshalls sent me left on to Quina Brook again!! I was quite deflated, stopped for another pee and then realised I'd left my spare tube and tools in the rain jacket. I completed the loop, stopped again only to find Yvonne had locked her car, with the stuff inside and disappeared to find a toilet. I didn't want to hang around so set off again, without any means to fix a possible puncture. Luckily I dodged any punctures but was quite anxious all the way to Wrexham industrial estate. I perked up a bit on reaching the finishing circuit and upped the speed where I could, passed a time keeper with just 3 minutes to go, so had to continue to the next one. Finally finished and I was very relieved, had to ride on though to find Yvonne and Becky, who had been cheering me from the roadside. Collapsed in a chair and demolished a load of food and drink.

I'd finished with a total of 386.5 miles or 622km, chuffed I was over 600k but slightly disappointed to fall short of 400 miles, that's it though never again!

A really weird outcome was that my clubmate Ian had finished on an almost identical total of 385.2 miles and we'd hardly seen each other all ride. Very impressive total by Ian, when you consider he used his usual audax bike, with just the saddlebag removed!!

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The seed being set

During the previous audax years I'd spoken to a few riders who had ridden the Mersey roads 24, It is an historic event with links to Audax UK and it was a possible future ride for me, but i'd never committed to it. However a chance meeting during PBP 2019 changed that. I was on the long climb out of Brest, cruising along quite nicely when Rob Bullyment rides along side and says hello. I knew he'd set a massive distance on the 24hr TT so started talking to him about it. Rob had ridden it on fixed a few times, but in 2019 he really went for it, even having his own coach.

His total in 2019 was a massive 484.21 miles in 24 hours on fixed gear!

It was only a few weeks after the TT and Rob was still extremely fit, he was riding a taller gear than me(75" to my 70"), I had upped my cadence to ride at his pace and we proceded to overtake lots of riders during the 10 mins or so that we were chatting and climbing. My breathing was getting deeper and deeper, so I told Rob to crack on as he was ripping my legs off!! As Rob rode off in to the distance the seed was well and truly set, I started doing the maths as I climbed and holy shit Rob had ridden about 780km in 24 hours. Clearly I wasn't going to get anywhere near Rob's total, but could I ride 100 miles less and get 600km? Maybe that was possible, I had just ridden the 600km to Brest in 35 hours having had numerous stops and a short sleep, so I convinced myself that with some support, planning and training I could probably get to 600km, well maybe!

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The first entry

As soon as entries opened for the 2020 event, I was ready with my credit card. I decided to ride it fixed and set up an old alloy frame and purchased some cheap ebay tri bars. With a homemade jig I adjusted the tri bars to a fairly comfy position, then purchased the correct length stem and adjusted the stack height to suit. I'd never used tri bars before, so spent the next few months on the turbo trainer. Slowly I went from 10 min stints to eventually riding 30 min sessions without discomfort, of course a long way from 24 hours! But I had 6-7 months of possible training ahead of me, hadn't I? Well not according to a particular virus, within a few weeks everything was getting cancelled and I completely shelved the idea.

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Entry number two

Roll forward to 2023 and I get a message from one of our clubmates, Joseph says he's entered the 24hr TT as it's going to be the last event ever!

That was it, about 12 hours later I'd entered again and this time I was going to do it.

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The Bike build

I dug the old bike out of the shed and having a close look decided it was probably too small for me, I scoured ebay looking for a suitable frame in my size and eventually spotted a Dolan Scala TT, which had the required horizontal dropouts, so could be used fixed. Auction won in the last seconds I got it for £200. Early on I had decided a lightweight build was probably my best chance of success, all the online experts say weight gets trumped by aero, but if there's quite a lot of climbing then surely a light bike is going to help, especially over 24 hours.

The Dolan frame was not super light, but at 1200grams it was much lighter than anything else I had.

Wheels can be expensive so I rummaged around in the shed and produced Becky's Lejog wheelset, fairly light at 1500grams the pair. Another rummage in the hub drawer produced an American classic front hub(just 57grams) and a Miche rear track hub. The Miche hub was the wrong number of spoke holes(24 instead of 20) but was a large flange hub, so I machined the flanges down in the lathe and redrilled it to 20 spoke holes, to suit the rear rim. Alloy nipples and 1.5mm butted spokes were ordered. The Miche hub had quite a heavy axle setup, so I machined an aluminium axle and tapped each end to accept titanium bottom bracket bolts, an alloy shim(between axle and the front of the dropout) would take care of chain tension. I built the wheels up with very even spoke tension, ignoring any small deviations, giving them hopefully the best chance to last. A 16 tooth alloy track cog and a homemade alloy lockring finished the wheels off, with an all in weight of just under 1300grams. An ebay purchase got me a Shimano Ultegra crankset and Dura Ace bottom bracket, coupled with a 53 tooth Stronglight chainring, this gave a gear of 87 inch, which was hopefully about right. Some Continental GP 5000 tyres and latex inner tubes were purchased, to finish off the wheels.

A new tri bar jig was welded and brazed up, also adding twist to the fore aft/up down adjustment. My daughter Becky was just finishing a sports science degree, so I showed her some online pictures of tri bar setup. Together we adjusted the jig until I looked and felt ok. The cheap tri bars were not super comfy though, I spent some time online and stumbled across a Dutch company Speedbar, that make custom carbon tri bars, at an eye watering price of £3600! More online research and it turns out one of the UK's biggest composite companies, was only a few miles down the road. I've never used carbon fiber before, but how hard can it be!! Anyway I collected a square meter of carbon, resin, PVA release agent and high strength epoxy. Becky used some heat mouldable worbla to make a mould of my forearms and over the next few weeks, I hand layed up the carbon fibre, to make a custom set of aero bars. The new aero bars were much better, very comfortable, the only doubt was whether I'd made them robust enough. The full assembly of base bar and aero bars weighed in at 550 grams. After adding an aero hydration bottle and food pouch, some mandatory lights, a front brake and lever the total bike with pedals was just 7KG. Not too bad for a cheapish build.

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Training

I still needed to get plenty of practice in, especially on the aero bars. Every evening after work I would spend at least 30 mins on the turbo, this went on for 3 months. In addition to the turbo training, I would ride hard to and from work(using the heavy Pompino 18kg with a 68" gear), eventually climbing all the hills in the saddle for the last month or so.

With two months to go I started riding 200k DIY audaxes, on the Dolan, riding around some of the roads used on the race day. The first ride I only managed about four hours in the aero position, but by the last ride I was staying aero for the whole distance. I rode 6 rides altogether, trying out different things and slowly getting used to the bike fit. At the beginning of June, I had a 600km PBP qualifier to ride, so I fitted some higher aero bars to my usual audax bike. I managed to ride the whole event, using the aero bars as much as possible and I was still using them 35 hours after the start, which gave me great confidence for the race day. After the 600km ride I did a VO2 max test at Becky's university, one of the perks of doing a sports science degree. It was ok for the first 15mins, but after that it was vile, it was very uncomfortable trying to breath with a mask on, legs felt fine though! Apparently I did quite well for my age, I just know I won't be doing one again!

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Conclusion

With all the training, I was probably about as fit as I've ever been and it certainly helped. I reckon if you rode 2-3 24hr TT's, you would most likely improve your total mileage, as your body and brain got used to the demands. I just know it took me a while to get over it and i'm not prepared to go through it all again. I would certainly say have a go to anybody who fancies it, but certainly take it seriously and don't set off too fast!!!

Finally a big thank you to our support team, Becky, Harriet and Yvonne, without them it would have been twice as hard. Also a big thanks to Terry from Bury, for some great cheering as I passed by.