This Is Why You Can't Ride Further ｜ The Road To Leadville

I'm training for the biggest mountain bike race of my life, but I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. For years, I raced downhill and enduro mountain bikes, but in just 20 weeks, I'm going to be switching that up for the Leadville 100, a 100-mile cross-country race situated in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Not only is this race the furthest that I'll ever have ridden, but it starts at a whopping 10,000 feet. That thin air combined with my current lack of fitness does not bode well for my chances. To give myself the best possible chance of success and hit my time target of sub-nine hours, winning myself the illustrious big buckle, I'm pulling out all the stops. I have taken the plunge into the world of endurance mountain biking, a far cry from my usual antics and a true challenge with the Leadville 100. I started this journey with testing at the University of Bath and a rather revealing Dexter's Can in Birmingham, swiftly followed by Alex confirming my worst fears by taking me on one of his training gravel rides. If you like suffering, check this episode out over on the channel homepage. It feels like a bit of an anticlimax, given all that. In today's video, I'm going to be meeting up with Olympic XC racer Oli Beckinsale along with the guys at Precision Fuel and Hydration. Between them, they're going to teach me how to train for longer rides along with how to fuel and hydrate myself during them. The best part is you guys are going to come along with me. Oli, you have got me out not only in Lycra but also- Check this out. I know, look at it, and on a cross-country bike for the first time. What's the plan for today? What are we going to do? We're going to just see what you've got under the tank. You've done the lab testing in Bath. We've got all the geeky numbers, but we just want to see. You're going to kick my ass going downhill. That's a given. We're not testing that. We know you're good at that stuff. We're just going to ride some hills, see where you're at. We haven't got too long to do an endurance ride today. We're going to save that for another day. I'm just going to ride some hills. Let's get a sense as well of where that threshold point is. You're going from riding efficiently to inefficiently. We're going to do a couple of climbs to get you breathing a bit. I have a feeling we're going to find that threshold very, very fast. Let's get on it. Cool. Nice. Okay, straight out of the saddle. Is this a tactic? I'm just going to crush you mentally. Oh, I don't know. Today, it's only a little minute punch. That's enough for me. Just get that feeling of the breathing going from controlled to forced and out of control. That's that point in a cross-country short track. You can ride there. You can just hold it. At that limit. The endurance event, you always want to be able to have a conversation. Right, last push. Okay, squeeze it now. All the way to the top. It's all about short questions and long answers. Tell me about your cycling career. Goodness me. Are you good? Yes. I can't even think properly. You're amazing. Right, it's time to push up a climb here. Right, this is about a rocket. It's a punchy one. This is modern exceed and endurance. This is where you'll probably have me. It's all about the horsepower up here. I don't know about that. I got horsepower for about four seconds. Right now, I'm getting left with dust. Here we go. Oh, my goodness. Good effort, mate. Straight out of the climb. I know I've got the good man for the job, for the training, for sure. Ollie, given that that is a very small climb compared to what I'm going to have to do in Leadville, what would be your number one style of training that you would say I'm going to be doing over the next couple of months? I think you've got a busy schedule coming up. I think it's about the quality. We talked before about building the engine, aerobic fitness. Some long blocks of hard tempo. Quite often, people call it a sweet spot effort. When you've had your testing done, you've got a threshold power, an FTP. It's working at about 85%, 90% of that for big blocks. You've got an indoor trainer. You hooked up with Zwift on that one, so there's some good climbs you can do. You're not going to find a climb nearly is going to take you 50, 60 minutes to do, but we've got a trainer that will do that. You can sit on the trainer, warm up, put some tunes on, and sit there at this hard tempo. That's the pace you're going to be doing in the event. In the event, you're probably going to be climbing at about 80%, 85%. If you go more than that, the lights are going to go out pretty sharpish. Things are going to go very well. It's getting used to the pacing and sitting there putting the pressure through the pedals for long periods of time. I think if you're short on time, that hard tempo sweet spot work will be gold. Yes, I think that's something that I'm going to really struggle to adapt to, and something that is going to take time, is getting used to being in a race for nine plus hours and it's still being a race. It's like pushing but not pushing at the same time. You need to not treat it like a race. This is going to be difficult. You're a competitive guy. You've been competing all your career. You're going to have to put that competitive alpha male bit, take it out, put it in a box, and you are going to complete it. The other people around you are not racers. They're not racing with you. They're people that are doing the same challenge as you. If you try and race the guys out the block, it will end in tears. It's about the long game. You're going to have to start steady, lock into your pace with the fitness you've got, and grind it out for the period of time. If you do it right, people will fly off at the start and you'll fly past them at the finish. It's finishing it, not being a hero in the first hour. Towards us, not the hair. 100%. Should we finish off this ride and then go get a coffee or something? We're done. Right, let's do it. That was wicked. Awesome, mate. So good to get out on the cross-country bike. I am liking these bikes more and more, but I have got my work cut out. It's going to be a test. We're starting early. We've got the support. Get the work done. You'll be cool. Now that I'd had a chance to show the three-time Olympian and four-time national champion XC racer what I am indeed not made of, I decided to head for a coffee to see what his thoughts were on how he planned on getting me through this crazy race. Leadville is a monster event. Given a completely blank canvas and unlimited time, how many hours a week would you say would be optimal to train for? If you had all the time in the world, no job, nice cushy family life, you'd probably be doing 15 hours a week would be optimal. You'd be doing a couple of long rides, four to five hours, and some gym and some mountain bike efforts. That would make a really cool week, but for most people and for yourself, that's not going to be achievable. Big thing is consistency. You're going to try and do three things on your bike a week. Then to achieve that, so I can prescribe the training, what I'm going to do is do more of a menu. I'm going to give you six or seven things each week on training peaks, and you're then going to pick from those to suit the time you've got. There'll be a mixture of you might have a cushy week and it's a three-hour mountain bike enduro ride. Perfect. It could be some mountain bike efforts before or after a shoot or in your own time. It could be some stuff on the indoor trainer. If you're short on time, three sessions on the trainer a week, massive bang for your buck. It just means that you can go and pick the ones to suit around your life and the week. It's no use having a week where you go, I'm going to take on the world, bang out eight or nine hours, and then the following week you do zero. What we need to do is have a consistent routine and a structure you get into working around the trips abroad that you've got and trying to just build your fitness from now all the way through to the event and not having a bad week. It's all about having consistently good weeks. Think of it as two things. Think of your fitness and your endurance. Split them into two. Your fitness is how quick can you ride up a decent length hill. Very slowly. We're going to get you quicker at riding up a hill. That's your engine. Above that one, you're then into your turbo, which is your sprints. We don't need your turbo. Forget about that. All we need to do is make your engine as big as possible. You can do that in three short sessions a week. That's your fitness. Your endurance, that's how long can you ride at a steady pace for. That's going to be key. We can do that one in a longer ride. You're not going to be able to do that every week due to time constraints. What you can do if you've got a really busy week, focus on fitness. Your short sessions, get that up, and then you add the endurance when you've got the time available. It means as well you've always got something to work on. In terms of the altitude, obviously, that is something a lot of people have spoken about. I've done a few races in my life where I've been at altitude, but I've not ever done an endurance race at altitude. Obviously, it is super high from the beginning. Do we need to change my training plan to match that, or is it a case of just dealing with it when I get there? I'd rather do an endurance event at altitude than I would do an enduro. Altitude really affects you when you go into the red, into more of an anaerobic effort, which you need to do in a stage for an enduro. 10 to 20-minute stage, absolutely flat out, that's at altitude going to put far greater demands on you. When you're doing an endurance steady-state ride, it's actually we're not going near the red. You're going to be sitting there riding like super conservative all day trying not to try too hard. The altitude side is less of a concern for you. It's a thing, but actually the distance and the climbing is probably something to focus on a bit more. With Ollie onside and a clear plan of attack on how I was going to train over the coming months, I was feeling slightly more at ease, but what about fueling this race? Well, to find out more, I headed over to Precision Fuel and Hydration. The Leadville 100 is not only my first ever endurance event, but it is also my longest. I have absolutely no idea when it comes to fueling and hydrating myself. That's why I've come here to Precision Fuel and Hydration to get very sweaty and find out exactly how I'm going to get through this mad event. We are here at the Precision Performance Lab. I'm joined by Chris Harris, the sports scientist here at Precision, and you're going to run me through a sweat test right now. Is that correct? The sweat test that we're going to do to start with today is going to be at rest where we're going to measure your sweat electrolyte concentration. The most abundant electrolyte found in sweat is sodium. That's the focus of this test is going to be measuring how much sodium you lose. It's a relative concentration, so we're measuring milligrams of sodium per liter of sweat. It doesn't tend to change too much across most of your life. What we'll get today is a relatively stable concentration of electrolytes that is being produced in your sweat, and therefore, you should aim to replace when you're hydrating. There are two parts to the test. We use an inducer to put a small electric current into a chemical disk called pylocarpine, which sits on the inside of your forearm. That will trigger the sweat glands to start producing sweat at a near-maximal rate, so similar to high-intensity exercise. That takes about five minutes, and then we take those off and put a small collector over that patch of skin, which will carry on sweating for about 20 minutes or half an hour. Then it'll fill up a little collector, and then we run it straight through the little benchtop analyzer that we've got here, and that'll tell us how salty you are. Lovely. Well, I'm hopefully not too salty a guy, but I try to be happy. Cool. It looks like we've got enough sweat in there now. I will pop this one off, and you'll see in a second this blue fluid that's all the way up here. This is your sweat. Your sweat's not blue. We just put a little bit of dye on the underside so we can see it. Otherwise, it's completely clear, and we wouldn't be able to see the sweat filling up. Then we run it straight through the analyzer here, which will tell us how salty you are. Hopefully, not too salty. Well, being an athlete, it's always competitive, but there is no good or bad saltiness of sweat. It's just individual. As long as you know your individual concentration, then you know what you need to do. It's those that don't know and don't have a picture that they're throwing darts at a dartboard with a blindfold on. This represents our sliding scale of saltiness with the lowest test we've ever seen at 200 milligrams per liter. For context, what that unit of measurements basically means is if you picture a liter bottle of water, for every liter of sweat you lose, some people only lose 200 milligrams, so 0.2 of a gram, really, really not very much sodium. Some people lose 2,300, so 2.3 grams of sodium in every liter. It's the same volume of sweat. You've just got more or less sodium in there. You are towards the upper end of the bell curve, 1,333, so it makes you a relatively salty sweater. Not crazy excessive. Alex, from memory, he was just about 1,500 milligrams per liter. In actual fact, from an electrolyte standpoint, your strategy might be quite similar. What this doesn't tell us is the full picture, which this formula here dictates, where the concentration is, as I said, relatively stable throughout most of your training and most of your life, in fact, because it's relatively genetically determined. The number of liters, however, that you lose is going to change all the time. As we said, temperature and the intensity of the riding is going to change that. You sweat more, the milligrams per liter doesn't change, but you might lose half a liter per hour in cool conditions and you might lose two liters an hour in the chamber, for example, when it's hot. What will be important is that what goes in your bottles is a concentration that's similar to what we now know that you lose in your sweat and then the number of bottles you drink is going to depend on the temperature and the intensity. Will that change with altitude? Your sweat physiology isn't going to change massively unless you do some form of heat training beforehand and or altitude training, in which case you're training your body to adapt from a cardiovascular point of view in order to deliver energy to the muscles better. From a hydration perspective, it would be really handy to measure your sweat rate closer to the event. If you're staying in an Airbnb or a hotel that's got some bathroom scales, you can go out and do a couple of rides, come back in, weigh yourself, and it'll give you a good idea of your fluid loss because that might change based on, as I said, the air temperature and the humidity in altitude is different from at sea level. That might change the volume of sweat you lose. In terms of saltiness of sweat, we don't tend to see a change based on altitude because, as I said, it's mostly genetic and so it's what's going on in the sweat gland and it doesn't seem to be affected too much by acute altitude exposure. Mainly just the heat, which it is in peak summer as well, the event, so definitely going to be, I think, hot. Well, it's only hotter than the UK right now, so I'm going to need to adapt for that for sure. Yes, it could be a warm one. As I said, I went a couple of years ago and it was pretty toasty during the middle part of the day, but yes, at least you're riding the bike rather than spare a thought for those guys that are running the 100-mile course. Yes, I can't even imagine trying to run the event. It's hard enough trying to cycle it, but to run it would be a whole another level really. Tough one, but what this does mean is we can get you dialed from an electrolyte perspective. We'll get you in the chamber and we'll start working on the fluid. Oh my goodness. Oh, it's so hot. What? Chris, what is the plan while we're in this sauna right here? What's the plan for today? You're going to be riding for about an hour. We'll start with a relatively steep warm-up, so we'll get you up close to threshold within the first five or six minutes. We want to get your heart rate up, get your core temperature starting to move, and then we'll lock in a heart rate cap that's around 70% to 75% of your max heart rate. It might be that by the end you're not pushing very much power at all, but you'll be getting hot. The goal is to get your core temperature up and hold you there. We use heart rate to do that. About an hour of riding. I'm already feeling pretty hot as it is. You guys won't be able to obviously feel this, but this thing is so hot. I'm sweating already. I haven't even started doing any exercise yet. It's crazy. We'll see if we make it to the end of the hour, I guess. Yes, let's go. You'll be fine. Wicked. Cool. Well, I guess we should begin. Cool. Three, two, one, off we go. I don't think I'm ever going to the desert on my mountain bike. That's what this is going to be like. We're measuring his heart rate in the middle of the screen and his core temperature, as well as the power output. I'll be monitoring this every five or 10 minutes to make sure that his heart rate's not getting too high and accordingly dropping the power to keep him in the right zone whilst bringing his core temperature up and watching him suffer. I mean, adapt. What we'll do is we'll pretend that where I'm pointing now is really, really easy. One out of 10? Wow. Yes, exactly. Reality, yes. Around there. 13? Yes. Cool. And what about the temperature? How hot would you say you're feeling at the moment? Getting probably three to four. I wouldn't want to be- If you were to pick one? Three. Cool. We're starting to sweat now. Still three. Still three, yes. Three? Cool. We're not very hot yet. Excellent. I've never drunk so much water in my life, but it is very hot in here. Very, very hot. Alex fed me these on our little Leadville training ride and they were a bit of a lifesaver. Down the hatchet, as they say. How many grams of carbs is in that? I didn't look at the packet. You've got 30 grams, so each chew is 15. For the race, you're probably wanting to hit somewhere between seven to five and 90. Per hour? Per hour. Per hour. Okay. Yes. We'll probably talk about a strategy that involves a mixture of chews, gels, drinks, just to make sure you don't get bored of anything, any flavor fatigue. I think that's definitely something I want to incorporate into my training pretty early because I think that's going to give me access to some extra miles, which is just going to help get used to that distance. At the moment, I'm sitting around three to four hours is a decent amount of time and I got to do double that at altitude in a race. Yes. We want to try and make sure that we're facilitating that harder work by giving it enough energy, basically. Yes, 100%. It will help with your training as well. We always talk about race day, but you said it yourself, it'll help extend those training rides and help you recover quicker. It's a self-fulfilling cycle of fueling helpful areas. I think we're a four. We're a solid four now, whereas I was a three and a four. We're like a hot madras verging on a vindaloo. How long? 12 and a half minutes. That's not ideal. I was hoping it was going to be more like five. Alex, I'm coming for you. I'm doing all of this just so when we go on our next ride, I'll be having you on some of those climbs. You better watch out. I'm about what? It's all about level. You are done. Well done, sir. How quickly can we get out of here? Immediately. Thank goodness for that. Stay steady on your feet. You might feel a little bit wobbly, so just be careful on the step there as well. Fresh air. Oh, my goodness. Come on. I'm getting out of here. Oh, wow. Like I say, it wasn't that my legs were really burning. It's just- Take your skin off. Yes. Your brain just starts to slow down. Yes. Sorry about your wall. I guess I am a pretty salty guy. There's my bum cheeks right here. We're going to call it muscle, but it's probably a little bit of fat there as well. I think that's maybe that's where my issue is. It's all in there. That's where all the weight is, just in the center of the back. Now, I've managed to cool myself down. I've had a shower. Can we go through some of the results? What are they saying? Absolutely, yes. Well, confirming what you thought beforehand is that you don't actually sweat huge amounts. We found out before the test that you're quite a salty sweater, losing 1,300 milligrams per liter of sweat. In an average temperature of 39 degrees Celsius today for an hour, you sweat 1.4 liters of fluid. Not a huge amount, but probably more than you're used to on cold days out on the mountain bike. What will be important is that you rehydrate after this one. We can certainly sort you out with a beverage that'll help with that. What we saw during the test itself was actually quite a big decoupling from your power and your heart rate. We brought you up to around your threshold within the first five or six minutes, and we saw your heart rate come up to top of zone two, which is good. Definitely felt that, yes. Where we wanted to hold you. Then the power reduced to about 75% of what we thought was your threshold, which was just over 200 watts, which is what we were holding. What we saw was that you were able to hold that for five or 10 minutes. Then gradually, we reduced the power throughout. In the last five minutes, you were cruising along at 130 watts for a steady heart rate of 158 beats per minute. It definitely catches up with you. I'm needing to, yes, that's something I'm definitely going to have to improve on because if we do that over nine hours, I'll be doing about 30 watts by the time I get to the finish line. Today, you managed to drink just over nearly a liter of fluid today, so about 980 ml. You did quite a good job of getting fluids down you today, probably because you knew that this is going to be hot. You had a bottle there and you're in this environment where you know you're going to get dehydrated. One thing for sure is that you still finished the session 0.4 of a kilo lighter than you started and you drank nearly a liter of fluid. It goes to show that cumulatively, if you're behind every hour on how much you're losing, it can really catch up with you. Lead builder temperatures won't be as hot as they were in the lab. They've had a freak year if it is, but also you're at altitude. Typically, we see your sweat evaporation is usually better. It means that it cools you more effectively so it can transfer that heat away from you, which means your drive to sweat goes down. The temperature and the intensity that you're riding at are the two things that are going to have the biggest impact on your sweat loss. Just try and simulate what's going to happen in Leadville. Best case is to be in the environment and do the riding itself, but even one step back from that is to do it in similar temperatures in the UK and ride at similar power output that you're trying to hold and see what your sweat losses are. We can all tolerate some dehydration without it affecting us at all, but the goal is to avoid losing more than 2% to 3% of your body weight, which probably is going to be about a liter and a half for someone like yourself. If at any point you're one and a half kilos lighter, then you basically want to work out how much you're likely to lose in the whole race and work backwards to make sure that you never cross that one and a half kilo threshold, essentially. Awesome. Thank you so much for all of your help. I look forward to going through the results and trying to alter my training for the better. I've got 20 weeks now until the race. I'm sure I'll be back in contact asking you guys for a plan for the race. We can go through that as well. Plenty of time. Happy to help. Awesome. Thank you very much. Cheers, bro. Cheers. Just like that, we are back in the woods and, of course, back on my lovely XC steed behind me. I've learned so much over the past couple of days from both Oli and the guys at Precision Fuel and Hydration, but of course, it is now time to put all of that to the test. That brings us to today. Oli has very kindly sent me a one and a half hour cross-country ride along with some high-intensity efforts to go with it. This is going to be great for me to practice recovering from those efforts while still maintaining a consistent power. Along with that, I'm going to practice fueling myself. I've brought some of my lovely Chews from Precision Fuel and Hydration along with their new 1500 electrolyte tablets. This is going to really help with that extra salty sweat that I have. I'm going to get on my bike and we're going to get amongst it. Over the past couple of months, I've been working really hard on my sustained efforts out on the bike. I think the biggest difference between enduro and cross-country, other than the distance, is the lack of recovery. Consistently spinning my legs was what got me on my ride with Alex, but as Oli said, with limited time, trying to get loads of longer rides in is difficult, so these shorter, more intense efforts are the way to go. One of my biggest concerns when it came to training for Leadville, of course, was having fun. It's really hard when you have such a long period of time that you have to train for to keep things fun. It's easy for things to get monotonous and boring. Luckily for me, I have this XC Steed right here, the Orbea Oiz. It's a super fun bike. I'm not an XC guy, but it has made both the climbs and the descents so much more fun and enjoyable, which has made my training rides that much easier. My focus for the next coming months is to put as much time in on this bike as possible. I'm even going to get a bike fit and things like that, which hopefully will help me train and help me ride that much faster and further come the race day. There we have it, training ride complete. That was a tough one, only for an hour and a half. My legs are definitely burning now. Can't say a massive thanks enough to Oli Beck himself for all of his help and taking me under his wing when it comes to training for Leadville. It's going to be a massive challenge for myself, but also for him having to deal with basically just my inadequacy. Yes, thank you very much to him. Of course, a massive thank you to the guys at Precision Fuel and Hydration as well. I had no idea I was one such a salty guy, but also that there were different types of sweat that people can have. I just thought I wasn't a very sweaty person, so learned loads there. Of course, I've learned how to fuel not only my training rides, but also how I'm then going to fuel and I'm also going to hydrate myself throughout my race. That's really, really helpful. I have actually taken a little bit of advice from Alex as well. I have my camelback with me this time too. Yes, definitely looking forward to the next couple of months of training and hopefully my fitness is just going to keep going up and up and up because that's the goal. Let us know down in the comments below what you guys have thought of the episode, if you guys have learned anything from it. Of course, if you guys have at home any top tips and tricks, I've loved reading all your comments about Leadville, about your own personal experiences. Let us know if you have any 2026 challenges as well. Of course, don't forget to like and subscribe and I'll catch you guys in the next episode.