If you’ve seen the latest RST Sport blogs, you’ll have noticed (I hope!) that I was recently blogging about James Hayden in the Transcontinental here and here. I’m still pretty amazed with James’ win. It’s a truly epic ride, which I don’t think I could even contemplate (seriously) attempting. I’m not sure I’d get through it! In terms of ultra distance cycling this is a pretty huge event, and an impressive win. I’ll certainly be discussing some finer details about the preparation and the event in some other articles.

What I can say is that I was a little ‘sniffy’ at the event when James originally asked me to coach him. I’d sort of thought of it as a glorified touring event, and not an actual race. I couldn’t have been further away from the truth. Sure, if you’re used to doing road races, or time trials etc. it may be somewhat ‘away’ from that, but if you look at some of James’ data you’ll see that his power is huge; his 25 mile TT PB is 46:56, his 10 mile TT PB is 18:55, and he’s won regular road races. Impressive stuff.

While the race was on, I fervently followed his ‘dot’ (online tracker) to see how he was going. I was genuinely surprised at how exciting this was. I was more surprised at how fast James was travelling. In the end, covering more than 4000km (yup, further than the Tour de France) including sleeping and stoppage time, and having ridden over plenty of mountains, his average speed was just shy of 19 km/hr. Moving time average was significantly more.

I’m proud to have coached James for the Transcontinental, and ecstatic that he won. It was a close battle. I think James needs some down time after the Transcontinental to repair various battered body bits. I’d love to coach him again for next years event.

On the subject of being ‘sniffy’ I’m talking a little about that in a blog post. Here’s a training article on James