And just like that, we’re right back into the heart of the season!

In particular, our family made the trip to California (separately, as it turned out), where Levi’s Gran Fondo and Sea Otter are on back-to-back weekends, then with no rest for the weary, I fly straight to Portugal for our unique spin on the N2 trip followed by the Traka in Spain.

The logistics are what keeps me on my toes for this lengthy trip — specifically five bikes, or six if you include Hazel’s, going every which direction. If you don’t have enough podcasts in your life, I suggest checking out our newest episode of Gravel Kings, where we break down some of those clerical work and luggage musical chairs to make this a reality. Hitting the subscribe button on the podcast is hopefully well worth the click of the mouse button, too.

Before long, this whole trip will be a thing of the past. It’s so many things, so much travel, so many events right on top of each other, that it’s hard to step back and think too much in the moment. For better or worse, it’s therefore also hard to get myself worked up about any particular part of it. “Oh, I haven’t touched my mountain bike since last October? And I have a 65 mile mountain bike race against the country’s top mountain bikers in four days? Ha, I guess that’ll be something to behold.”

But I also don’t want to pass up each of these events once they’ve happened, because I have put so much of myself into being prepared for these races in the 2024 season. Once an event occurs, I don’t want it to just be a simple checkmark on the calendar. Without a doubt, I’ve put more time, energy, intervals by a factor of 1,000, and dedication into the past six months than I have into the past nine years. Moreover, if I had put this kind of energy into my preparation for races when I first started in this gravel world in 2016, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think I would have lost a race in the first five years of this journey.

But hypotheticals and what-ifs aren’t what I’m chasing here. I’m pursuing tangible results. I’ve tallied a handful of respectable finishes so far this year just inside and just outside the top-10. That’s what I call adequate, although not anything that’ll earn headlines in cycling media. I wanted to look into the progress and see how this year compares to others.

Quick couple of bullet points from this most recent weekend:

• Total time: 7:14

• Distance: 138 miles

• Elevation: 13,566 feet

• Average power: 284w

• Normalized power: 328w

• Weather: temperature hovered around 42F with a combination of totally dry and dousing rain showers, decently windy

The ride itself, which you can see the profile up and to the right, anecdotally goes like this: it’s three big climbs. King Ridge is the first, which starts steep and then stair-steps to the top. The second is Skaggs and is the longest, consisting of four climbs — one long one a hair under five miles, then three shorter ones. The final climb is called Geysers, which is a long false flat into the proper climb itself. When the climb starts it’s ferociously steep for around a mile and a half, then drags another two miles to the top, at which point you descend into another final steep, short climb.

When taking a quick look at my power data over time, I’m very happy to see each of the past three races (Levi’s, MidSouth, and Valley of Tears) supercede annual power records in lots of different ways. For example, the darker line that you see in the above graph is Levi’s GF, is greater than all of 2022 in the above graph around 18-20 minutes, 2-3 hours, and pretty much everything beyond 4 hours. Similarly, I can scroll back over lots of previous years, 2023, 2022, 2021, and see the same exact thing. It inspires confidence in me that I’m making positive steps in working with my coach to be better now than anytime over the past half dozen years. That’s something that I’d never think possible beginning in 2015, having figured that my final World Tour race was the fittest I’d ever be at that point in life and fitness would be on a downward trajectory in perpetuity.

Skaggs, the second climb of the day, was my undoing over this past weekend. I was staying with the lead group when I maintained greater than 450w, but that’s not a place I could comfortably stay. I’ve blown up sky high over the past few years by trying to go deeper than I’m capable and then it takes me an hour to dig myself out of the red. It’s a catch-22 to be happy with how I metered my effort over the climb, to have not dug myself into a hole during a 20 minute climb, but of course not being happy to have dropped from the front group. I also look at the course and know it never suited me to the T. I am 6'3” and 180lbs so keeping pace with the 130 pound whippersnappers isn’t going to be simple on this kind of terrain. That’s not an excuse, it’s a very powerful reason for me to keep on the gas.

I know this trip, and frankly this entire season will be over before I know it. I’m enjoying the process, the means, and then the end by being in the races themselves. Onward. Upward. Faster. Better.