I don’t know if it’s the Lachlan Morton/YouTube effect or a general normalisation of long-distance riding, but ultra-endurance cycling has become more accessible, popular and less daunting than ever. There’s debate about what defines “ultra-endurance” – I once read it’s anything over 100 miles, and while the ride this article documents is well over that it’s also considerably shorter than the multi-day events that also fall under the ultra umbrella. But my personal perspective on what’s achievable has shifted dramatically in the eight years I’ve been tackling these challenges. That’s due to both advancements in performance understanding and how true ultra athletes – like Morton or Lael Wilcox – are breaking down barriers in our perception of what’s possible and even normal now.
The Donegal Wild Atlantic Way Ultra is an ultra-endurance cycling race through the rugged landscapes of Donegal, Ireland, hugging the Atlantic coastline. Covering around 555 km, riders traverse challenging coastal roads with plenty of elevation and unpredictable weather conditions while experiencing the stunning scenery along the Wild Atlantic Way. It’s the best combination of endurance and the spectacular I know of, but as a Donegal native, I am biased. I’ve done the event three times previously and regretted not entering the years I missed. I wasn’t quite ready for 555 km this year, but I did get a last-minute entry into the newly added 333 km route and I was lucky enough to race to a new course record.
My approach to optimising for ultra races has changed in the eight years since my first 555. This week’s Performance Process is a once-off episode taking a closer look at my own race and ride, and why, on this occasion, those are not the best examples of the performance process mindset.
At the end of this article is a short gallery taking a closer look at the bike I used, but first I have a bit of explaining to do as to how I ended up with this build for this race.
When I first started attempting ultra-endurance rides, the question was always, “How do I ride this far?” I was focused purely on survival. Now, my mindset has shifted from “how” to “how fast” and is entirely performance-driven. This evolution parallels the rise in participation in ultra events and the growing recognition of the importance of aerodynamics in cycling. Where I once obsessed over simply finishing or calculating when to sleep, now I’m focused on optimising my aero position and reducing my CdA to shave time off the same course.
Someone had once told me ultra is about going far for those who can’t go fast … it’s now about going fast and far.
There are three distinct periods for me in my ultra cycling journey that highlight this changing landscape in ultra and the Donegal Wild Atlantic Way Ultra race bookend that transformation.
The race, first held in 2016, began as a 555 km challenge for solo riders and teams tracking the Donegal leg of the relatively new Wild Atlantic Way tourist route along Ireland’s western coast. It’s since grown to include a 333 km option and, for the first time this year, a 222 km route.
With events like the Race Across America and Race Around Ireland, to name just a couple on either side of the Atlantic, I am aware “ultra” existed long before 2016, but in a time before Morton and others brought the suffering to social media, there was very little coverage of the discipline and information resources were few and far between.
When I approached the first edition of the Donegal Ultra in 2016, my biggest concern was sleep: how much I’d need, where I’d get it, and when. The answer, of course, was that I wouldn’t need or get any sleep for an event that would take me some 19 hours that first year, but reflecting on that question highlights how little I knew.
My crew chief, Chris McElhinney, knew better, telling me “there’ll be no f*#king stopping, never mind sleeping!” He “advised” and together we drew up a plan that would see me spend most of the race on my regular road racing bike with stints on the time trial bike on the sections of long, flattish, wide-open roads that bookend the route and get the race from its central and inland start and finish location to the coastal start point at the northern end of the WAW and back again much later and further south.
There is a story in a time trial bike flying off a car roof into a field near Malin Head and, later, a combination of cable ties, a Stanley utility knife blade, and a sliced tubular tyre, but truth be told the TT bike was never going to see much action that day. I thought we were performance-focused; in truth we were all about comfort. In hindsight that was a safer bet and certainly not the wrong focus, but most notable to me is that we didn’t know any better. Sure I wore a skinsuit, knew I had to eat for a long ride, and in a Pinarello F8 I probably had one of the most aero bikes of the time, but I/we didn’t know the true importance of aero and fueling.
Fast forward to 2020, my third attempt (and win), just weeks after breaking Alberto Contador’s Everesting record. My understanding of performance had grown, yet my approach was still blocked by old mindsets. I’d planned to ride pretty much exactly the same sections on the time trial bike as planned four years earlier, with the addition of one or two more, but a TT bike was still a torture device and not something I’d trained on much. It would be reserved for short bursts on flat sections with a dedicated climbing bike for hillier sections and an aero road bike for the rest of the time.
Lo and behold, having not trained on the TT bike, I was still pretty useless on it and spent as much race time on the Boardman TTE in 2020 as I did on the Dolan TT bike that had flown into that field four years earlier.
In hindsight it was clearly another small step in my transition toward performance optimisation, but I was still blind to the bigger picture, distracted by old-school logic.
The transformation is a step closer to complete this year. Arguably, I even took it a little too far. Four years have passed since I last participated in the 555, and not quite having the prep work done for that distance this time around, I opted for the shorter 333 route this year, a new addition since I last raced the event.
The 333 follows most of the climbing and technical sections of the 555, skipping the opening 200 km loop. While this might have been an excuse to spend less time on the TT bike in previous years, my mindset had changed. Despite the tough terrain and fewer time trial-esque roads, I’d do the entire thing on a time trial bike.
Having spent countless hours on a TT bike in the four years since my last 555 – including breaking a few place-to-place records and literally riding the length of Ireland – my mindset on TT bikes had changed. A TT bike was no longer just a bike for time trials or a bike for short sharp burst on flat roads. A TT bike is now simply a “ride your fastest bike!”
But I did of course have to sense-check my logic: how much faster or slower would a more aero but heavier TT bike be over such a long distance and such varied terrain? Using my own historical data, weather data for the day, and weights and estimated CdA from both testing and calculations for both setups, I was able to work out using BestBikeSplit and MyWindSock that the time trial bike would be roughly an hour faster over the 333 km: 61 minutes to be precise, but the data input and calculations weren’t themselves precise or methodically measured. That said, given that time saving was by no means marginal, precise or not it removed any doubt as to which bike I should run.
The only question remaining was whether it might be faster to change bikes at certain points. Ultimately I can’t answer that question for several reasons. Primarily among those was that, while steep, many of the climbs on the course were quite short. The brief look I took at this suggested the time saved riding a lighter bike up such climbs measured in the single-digit seconds, but not having the time to practise and time a bike change I concluded 1) the time lost in the change probably outweighed the time saved on most climbs and 2) the potential for something to go wrong increased significantly with the number of planned bike changes (see Stanley blade note above).
Truthfully, I also simply wanted to attempt the entire ride on a TT bike, a desire only further motivated by a few suggestions from friends that it would not be possible. There was only one question mark in my mind: Glengesh Pass, a steep 2 km climb averaging 12% with pitches up to 18%. It’s the one part of the course were weight unquestionably trumps aero, even while riding alone. As such the optimal setup for that section is the polar opposite to the optimal setup for the vast majority of the other 331 km. It’s also the one part of the course where I simply didn’t know if it was possible to ride a TT bike.
With BestBikeSplits modelling predicting 54.4% of the time on course would be on gradients between -2% and +2% and another 27% between +2% and +8%, along with a predicted average speed of around 36 km/h, I was confident I had to optimise my overall setup for speed. Again, that meant a TT bike, but more specifically it meant outright aero wheels, a skinsuit, a TT helmet. Of course the position had to be sustainable for 10 hours but I should lean towards a TT position rather than a more upright road position. Basically it meant using my 10-mile time trial setup for 10 hours. Sure I’d be going slower, but with the severe headwinds forecast for the entire coastal section of the ride, I reasoned the air speed might actually be quite similar and so the aerodynamics would prove just as or even more crucial.
Crucially, though, that 10-mile time trial setup optimised for the flat and fast also included a huge 60-tooth 1X chainring. That’s where attention diverted back to Glengesh and specifically if I’d even get up that climb’s tight hairpin bends on such a mammoth gear with just a 32T sprocket on the rear. Enter a plan I’d had some two years earlier for an attempt at another place-to-place record that never happened: A Classified Powershift-equipped disc wheel.
The Classified Powershift, for those living under a rock the past few years, is a wireless, two-speed internal rear hub system that allows riders to shift between virtual front chainrings instantly and under load, without needing a physical front derailleur. The system has featured in my other optimising bike builds and our own Dave Rome reviewed it last year. I’d started enquiring about a Powershift-equipped disc wheel before they even existed when planning an attempt at a place-to-place record with a route featuring two distinct halves; a hilly opening 35-40 miles and a pan-flat second half. As luck would have it Parcours was already working on such an idea, releasing its Powershift Disc last year, and Princeton Carbon Works had a similar idea upon request from Ineos Grenadiers earlier this season.
As Murphy’s law would have it, though, just 12 or so hours before the Saturday morning start, I managed (while slightly distracted) to nip the wire connecting the wireless receiver on the Classified handlebar-mounted shifter that engages a shift in the rear hub. Cue some panicked wire splicing and desperate soldering attempts, but some two hours later there was still no life in the by-this-stage butchered shifter wire.
Luckily, there was a solution hack. The wireless receiver is designed to mount into a drop bar end, the wire I’d nipped connects that receiver to the button that mounts farther up the handlebar. As luck would have it, simply inserting the cable jack end of that wire activates a shift in the rear hub. Long story short, mounting taping that receiver to the TT extensions and inserting or removing that cable end as and when I need a hub shift should get me through the ride. I would, all going well, only require a handful of shifts.
Shifter hack well and truly bodged and with the Parcours disc already here for that attempt that never happened, the scene was set for me to ride incredibly slowly, into a block headwind, at 60 rpm, up a very steep climb on a very aero and heavy TT bike. The irony was not lost on me and Glengesh – plus the two climbs that follow in quick succession – were true low points of the ride. But they were also the most southerly points of the ride, and so as I crested the last climb out of Glencolmkille, I knew I’d have 85 km of blissful and roaring tailwind all the way to the finish line on one of the fastest bikes I’ve ever sat on.
What ensued was a mind-boggling final two hours at an average speed of 41 km/h off just 222 watts despite still having some 800 or so metres of elevation gain to tackle and being eight hours deep into a ride on a new-to-me TT bike. It wasn’t comfortable or even enjoyable at the time; in fact it was quite terrifying, especially the sustained sections at 70+km/h on a bike on which the handlebars had rattled loose just a few hours earlier … but hot damn was it fast! Fast enough to swing from some 10 minutes or so behind Mark McGinely’s previous course record at the top of Glengesh to some 11 minutes ahead at the finish line in Letterkenny.
That finishing time, and even the bike details are only a tip of the iceberg when it comes to the story of that ride and that day. I could go into plenty more detail on the other equipment used, my rationale for choosing Continental’s Aero 111 tyre for this ride, which was later somewhat validated by Parcours aero tyre testing data released a few weeks later, or why I chose a skinsuit seemingly optimised for much higher speeds. We’ll delve into some of those details in the gallery below, but we will save most for the episode of the podcast that accompanies this article.
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