This is actually an annual ride that I have done for the last 6+years as some off season fun and a bit of a motivator to keep training even when the weather starts to get a bit cool! And I thought I would share some of this years details as it was quite the epic day in Hell!
This ride was originally started by Michael Barry Sr, father to Michael Barry, former Discovery Chanel rider and current T-Mobile (well soon to be new sponsor) rider. It is 140+km long mix of paved road (55%), gravel road (20%) and farm track/off road (25%) (Map) it is generally ridden with a cyclo cross bike and cyclo cross tires, but can be done on a road bike and road tires, if you are a very good bike handler (Rodney from Cervelo did it on a prototype Cervelo R2 this year with regular road tires!). And to top it all off it’s done in late fall/early winter so as to ensure some challenging conditions on top of it! A few years ago Michael Barry Sr stopped putting on the ride (insurance purposes) but Gerard Vroomen (Cervelo founder) and myself kept doing it as a low key ride with a small group of friends.
Hell 2007, Saturday Dec 2. First off Hell 2006 was nicknamed Hell light as it was 13C on the day and not really in keeping with the tradition, but we got pay back in 2007. The ride day started off at -13C and 8 starters (which was down from 12+ who had committed to riding but got ride morning jitters from the cold!), Brandon, Count, Andrew H and Krys in the early group and Cary, Andrew S, Rodney and myself in the second group. In the end we had 4 finishers (all the second group) but full credit to all who started! The temperature at the start was -13C, it dropped to -15C by the 3hour mark and never got above -10C the whole ride, there was snow on the paved roads to start, and the gravel roads had packed snow with a light dusting on top and the off road sections had 10+cm of crusty hard snow with a few more cm’s of fluffy stuff on top of that! It took the first group 5.5hours to get to the top of the course, or 70km, so it was slow!!
This is a really long, hard, cold ride! I have ridden it for the last 5 years with my power tap, (and haven’t lost a second of data in that time, despite the hub being covered in snow for the majority of the ride and it was so cold at the start that the computer screen was frozen and would hardly respond but I lost no data in the download). So the stats from my ride are as follows:
Ride Time: 7hours (closer to 7:30 total time, with walking sections and stops)
Average Power: 192 watts
Normalized Power: 226 watts
Average HR: 154 (mid Z3)
Average Speed: 21kph!!!
The numbers here are a bit deceiving as there are numerous walking sections that bring the average down and slipper off road sections that you can’t pedal properly through, and hiking sections that the bike is on my shoulder and not recording anything There is a section at the top end of the course that is referred to as the Hell of the North, and it’s an old railway bed, covered in snow, driven over by ATV’s and snowmobiles so that’s its hard and slippery and then a light dusting of snow to finish it all off, this section took me 54min, not including stops (ie 3 crashes!!) for 11km!!!
To put the power numbers in perspective in 2006 I road IMC at a normalized power of 230 watts for a 4:56 split, in Hell I averaged 21kph for NP=226 watts and it took 7hours and I wouldn’t have even made the Ironman bike cut off!!
This ride is not for the faint of heart, you need to have great endurance, be a very good bike handler and able to survive some pretty cold conditions!!!
This is what I do for fun in the off season, and here is a link to photos to prove it!! And thanks to Fiona for some incredible shots!
Nigel