I have several athletes a year race stage races, and at the request of athletes I put some thoughts down on paper! Pretty much all of these apply to running stage races as well, it’s just a tiny bit simpler!
The first principles of stage racing:
- Win the race to recovery – The more time you spend sitting on your ass between stages the better.
- Win the eating contest – The more you eat, before, during, and after each stage, the better.
Here are the basics:
- Logistics – All the fitness in the world doesn’t matter if you mess up the logistics. The goal here is to spend as much time on the couch or in bed as possible.
- Bike – Optimally someone else does this. You finish a stage and drop your bike at a shop and they wash it and fix anything that needs fixing, and then you get it in the morning. You shouldn’t be on your feet working on your bike.
- Food – Again, optimally someone else does this. We’ll talk more about this below, but it’s important to think a LOT about this beforehand. You shouldn’t be on your feet cooking. It’s also best to not spend time on your feet walking to a restaurant, waiting in line, etc.
- Laundry – For a three-day race you might be able to get away with just bringing three kits, but if it’s longer than that you’re going to need to wash stuff. Any guesses on my recommendation here? Get someone else to do it! Or, hopefully your lodging includes laundry.
- Racer meetings – You might not have these every day, and hopefully they just do them online, but these can be a logistical clusterfuck, causing you to lose recovery time. If you can plan around them really well, you can have an advantage.
- Lodging
- Location – Optimally it’s a 10-15 minute ride from the race start. Second best is a 10-15 minute drive from the race start.
- Amenities – Laundry and a full kitchen
- Food
- Eating during – Carbs are required for performance and also for recovery. Every day you’re eating for the watts you’re producing now, the watts you’re going to be producing later in today’s stage, and for tomorrow’s stage! A minimum is 80g of CHO/hour, and if you’ve trained for it, trying to push that up to 120g of CHO/hour is best.
- Eating around – A stage race is essentially an eating contest. You’re going to need an astounding amount of food. You should base your day around at least 12g of CHO/kg, and go higher if you can. This includes the carbs you take in during the stage. For an example of your challenge, if you’re 170lbs, that’s 870g of carbohydrates, or SIXTEEN cups of cooked rice. Say you’re able to take in 100g/hour for a three hour stage, that leaves you with just 10 cups of cooked rice! I’m not saying you should eat just cooked rice, that’s just an example.
- Transportation – Again, the best-case scenario is that you can ride your bike to the start. If you have to drive, then you need to have a shaker full of recovery drink and dry clothes in the car, so that you WIN THE RACE TO RECOVERY.
- Warmup – You need something here. For a 6-day stage race this might only need to be a 10-15 minute easy pedal, but the shorter the race the higher the pace, and the higher the pace the more you need to warm up!
- Tactics – Similarly to eating, you need to be thinking not only about later today, but also later tomorrow! That being said, it’s a race, so you should go fairly hard! Just don’t bury yourself until the last day (unless you’re training 20+ hours/week, in which case you can probably go pretty deep most days).
- Cooldown – Again, needs to be something. 10 minutes easy at a minimum.
- The Race to Recover – Everything you do after each stage is about getting enough food and getting dry and getting lying down. Every time you have to make food, go to a restaurant, wash your bike, walk to a laundromat, that is time that you’re not recovering.
