Yorkshire Gravy, Lincolnshire Flat, and Eight Per Cent More Than Advertised

A Drop Bar Diaries dispatch in which the bike, the legs, the head, the gravy, and eight months of AI coaching all turn up on the day.

As you may know as the regular reader you are, about eight months ago, after a stretch of complacency about my riding fitness that culminated in a comprehensive bonk on Sa Batalla in Mallorca, I sat down with AI and told it to sort me out. I had also announced I was aiming to ride a hundred miles in May. The AI, to its credit, did not flinch. It asked me a series of sensible questions, did a sensible amount of arithmetic, and then quietly started ruining all my favourite excuses.

This is the story of what happened on the day.

Friday: Pies, Gravy, and a Lesson in Pub Beverage Specificity

I drove up to York on the Friday afternoon and got to the Airbnb a little ahead of Alan. The owner, Emma, met me at the door and, in the way that conversations sometimes do, we quickly found common ground. Emma is a physiotherapist and a sports masseuse, and had just got back from working on an organised cycling tour in Italy. So I'd booked an Airbnb the night before the biggest ride of my year so far, and ended up checking in with someone who spends her working life with cyclists. The cycling world is, as ever, smaller than it has any right to be.

Once Alan had arrived and we had unpacked the cars, we wandered out for dinner. Steak and ale pie, both of us, with the thickest Yorkshire gravy I have ever encountered. You know, the sort of gravy that holds the shape of the spoon for a second after you lift it. Definitely, most definitely not jus (Doonicans reference). Magnificent. We allowed ourselves one pint each, and then, with the discipline of two men who have learnt the hard way that ride-day hangovers are no longer survivable, we ordered what we believed was an orange juice and lemonade.

It turned out to be an orange squash and lemonade. Which is not the same drink. It is, in fact, two different drinks in the same glass, the second of which has been thoroughly defeated by the first. We drank it anyway, because the alternative was complaining in a pub in Yorkshire, which is poor form. And potentially dangerous.

Back at the Airbnb, we went through the Lincoln 161 checklist I had printed out. Kit laid out. Bottles in the fridge. A pep talk about ignoring each other's chimps. Alarms set. In bed by half past ten. Textbook pre-race behaviour from a pair of men who have, between them, attended quite a few pubs.

Saturday Morning: Bargain Hunt, Reimagined

The start was at the York Auction Centre, which I had imagined, perhaps optimistically, as a sort of Bargain Hunt set. I pictured polished wood, walls lined with antique display cabinets, maybe Christine Trevanion appraising a piece of art deco. The reality was a livestock auction yard. A vast tarmac apron, ringed with pens, with a route to the toilets that took you straight through the bidding ring itself. Standing in the ring at a quarter to seven on a Saturday morning, in cycling kit, where many a heifer has earned its keep, was a fitting opening to a day that was about to test a lot of things.

The starter was a young chap. The son, by all appearances, of one of the Velo 29 organisers, who had clearly been handed the task as a Saturday morning treat and was discharging the responsibility with the importance of a court official. No microphone, no loud hailer, just his shrill prepubescent voice. Every group rolled up. He counted them down, three, two, one, off you go. With every group, this routine.

Except us. By the time Alan and I were on the line, the novelty had worn off entirely. He glanced at us, shrugged, and said "go." We did not, because we were expecting the full countdown that everyone before us had been treated to. There was a moment of mutual confusion, after which we good-naturedly asked for the proper send-off. He sighed, gave us a deeply unenthusiastic three-two-one, and we rolled out into the morning at exactly half past seven, briefly the most underwhelmed two riders in Yorkshire.

The First Half: Faster Than Planned, Calmer Than Expected

The plan, lovingly built by my AI coach (side note … we never did give him or her a name) over the previous fortnight, was four segments of roughly 25 miles each, joined by feed stations, with heart rate targets for each segment and a fuelling timeline measured in actual kilometres. Why we decided to mix miles and kilometres up I don't know. The opening segment was to be ridden at 130 to 140 beats per minute. The mantra, which I had been told to repeat to myself whenever I felt tempted to chase, was "patience, young padawan, the day is long."

The day was indeed long. The chimp, ever reliable, spent the first half hour telling me we were going too slowly. The legs, on the other hand, felt absolutely fine, and the bike was rolling at just under 17 miles per hour with very little effort going through it. Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire, it turns out, really are as flat as advertised. What feels like a climb is a one per cent drag. What looks like a descent is the same drag in reverse. There is nothing for gravity to bite into. For a 110kg cyclist, this is an unfamiliar and slightly suspicious form of paradise.

Alan and I worked steadily into a very gentle headwind, taking turns at the front, settling into the kind of rhythm that long rides reward. We rolled into the first feed station at 26 miles in roughly an hour and forty, which was bang on the plan. Bottles refilled, a banana eaten, a polite queue for the toilets, a slightly longer stop than the five minutes I had optimistically planned. Back on the road. Shortly after, we latched onto the back of a small group of riders going at exactly the pace we wanted, and tucked in for a couple of miles of slightly faster, slightly easier wheel-following, which is one of the great gifts a sportive can give you when the wind is in your face.

The Middle: A Friend with a Back

Somewhere between mile 30 and mile 50, Alan's back started to complain. By the time we reached the turnaround at mile 52, the most important feed stop of the day in my pre-ride planning, his back had become a niggling concern. Twenty-four minutes of stop, much of it spent stretching, which was longer than the AI would have liked but exactly what Alan needed and I was more than willing to let him have.

We rolled out of the turnaround and into the second half with the wind now nudging us home and a slightly amended set of priorities. The rotation at the front was less important now. The stops to let Alan get his back into shape were. Every ten or fifteen miles, we'd stop, he'd unfold himself off the bike, do a couple of minutes of bending and twisting, and then we'd carry on. Not what we had planned. But you do not abandon a plan because of a complication. You modify it.

The most useful thing about training for a ride like this with someone you have ridden with for years is that the unspoken conversation works. We did not need to discuss the change of approach. We just rode it. I ate when I was supposed to. I drank when I was supposed to. The bike's thermometer was now showing 28 degrees and climbing, which was not what the forecast had told me to expect, but the body was handling it. The fuelling, for once in my life, was going right. The ghost of Sa Batalla was slowly fading.

The Home Stretch: A Quietly Triggered Afterburner

In the final twenty miles we caught up with a husband and wife team riding at almost exactly our pace. The four of us settled into a small rolling convoy, them at the front, the two of us hanging off the back. Not exactly wheel sucking, but riding at a respectful distance. Alan was nursing the back and, as it turned out later, an ankle that had decided to chip in as well. It was the kind of comfortable, communal rhythm that you find at the end of long rides, where nobody is racing anybody and everyone is just trying to get home.

Until the last couple of miles.

I do not remember exactly who suggested it, or whether anyone suggested it at all. Alan and I, by some unspoken signal that I think we both gave at the same time, decided we were going to finish strongly. The afterburners, as we have decided in retrospect to hyperbolically call them, were ignited. We pulled out, went past the husband and wife with what I hope was a friendly nod rather than a smug grin, and rode the last bit of road harder than we had ridden anything all day. We were not racing them. We were just doing the cyclist's equivalent of stretching our legs at the end of a long flight. It felt very good.

Six hours and forty-one minutes of moving time, seven hours and fifty-six minutes elapsed, and 108 miles on the GPS for what had been advertised as a 100-mile ride. The Lincoln 161, in the small print, turned out to be the Lincoln 175. I cannot pretend I was surprised. The route gives, and the route also takes a small additional fee. We also got lost a couple of times having missed the signposting whilst chatting. These detours in themselves didn't add that much to the overall total, and were more embarrassing annoyances than any additional, unnecessary exertion.

The Numbers Behind the Numbers

For the data-curious among you, the headline statistics tell a story that broadly matches what the day felt like. Average heart rate of 144 while moving. A maximum of 168, which I think was a little section up and over a relatively steep road bridge. And by "relatively steep" I mean a 3% gradient. The raised heart rate I suspect was probably more to do with the excitement and novelty of a change in the parcours. Three quarters of the moving time spent in low Z3, the comfortable rhythm I've now learnt I can hold for hours. Almost no time in the red. The peak temperature reading from the bike's thermometer was 32 degrees, against a forecast top of 22, which is the sort of cheerful inaccuracy you come to expect from British weather apps.

But the number I'm particularly encouraged by is this one. The average heart rate for the first half of the ride was 144.8 beats per minute. The average heart rate for the second half was 142.8. Across nearly seven hours of riding, in conditions ten degrees hotter than I had been planning for, my heart rate at the same effort actually went down. Cardiac drift, I've learnt, is the metric that tells you whether your aerobic engine is durable. Mine had drifted the wrong way, which in this case is the right way. The legs were in fairly decent shape at the end, which is exactly what you want, and exactly what eight months of patient base building is supposed to deliver.

I rolled across the line, collected a medal, sat down in the shade with Alan and a sausage sandwich, and downed what the organisers obviously thought was the most suitable recovery drink, a non-alcoholic Erdinger wheat beer. My more conventional protein shake followed in the car on the way back to Alan and Claire's house, nestled in the glorious Yorkshire Dales.

A Lasagne, a Drive, a Plane, and Some Reflections

Claire had prepared an amazing lasagne the size and density of a small piece of moorland. I ate, drank tea, fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, woke up in the night with my legs muttering vague complaints, slept again, woke up surprisingly well, drove three and a half hours home the next day, and was on a plane to Copenhagen the day after for two days of filming in Malmo. None of which I had factored into the recovery plan, because the recovery plan was, frankly, a luxury for someone whose calendar that week looked less like a normal life.

In a strange way, the rest of that week became its own enforced taper out of the event. No riding. Lots of walking and carrying cameras. Long hours in airports and behind the wheel. By the time I got home and laced my cycling shoes back up four days later, the legs felt absolutely fresh. The body had simply got on with the work of repairing itself while I was looking at the inside of a Boeing.

So, Did the AI Coaching Actually Work?

Yes. Quietly, undramatically, and without ever doing anything particularly clever. It worked.

For eight months I have been coached by AI. First by ChatGPT, then by Claude. I have fed it ride data, told it what I had to eat, complained about my heart rate strap, sent it endless CSV files converted from Strava FIT files. It has, in return, sent me back into the garage when I would rather have been somewhere else, told me to rest when I would rather have been training, and told me to train when I would rather have been resting. It has, more than anything, taught me to be patient.

The fitness for an event like Lincoln is not built in the final fortnight. It is built in the five months before, in the dull middle stretch where nothing dramatic is happening and nothing dramatic is supposed to happen. The AI coach's gift was that it understood this and kept saying so, even when I did not want to hear it. It also understood, when life served up a week filming at Real World, a lads' weekend in Berlin, and the small matter of helping my son move into a flat up three flights of stairs with no lift in 34-degree heat five days before the event, that the right response was not panic but adjustment. The plan does not exist to be served. The plan exists to serve you.

The one thing the AI coaching cannot do, and never will, is the bit where you actually have to put the kit on and turn up. That part remains stubbornly, reassuringly human. But everything around it, the structure, the patience, the maths, the small reassurances at the right moments, all of that worked. The proof is six hours and forty-one minutes of riding, a negative cardiac drift, and a finish line approached with petrol still in the tank.

The funny thing, though, is that the structure, the gentle encouragement, and the sense that yes, I was getting fitter, made it easier to haul myself off the sofa and enjoy getting back on the bike again. It restored the habit, and that, combined with my growing strength in the saddle, made me feel like the old me, who sees himself as a capable cyclist rather than a stereotypical MAMIL with no right to even think about riding 175km.

I will write more about all of this when there is more to compare. For now, an experiment that began as a curiosity has, a few blogs and one sportive later, become something more like a working relationship.

Next?

The bike is in the garage. The legs are nearly back. The quite-nice-actually Erdinger is, alas, all gone.

The next objective is already in the diary. October, in Mallorca, where Sa Batalla is waiting for me with the patience of something that has been there for longer than I have been alive. The 2022 personal record of 39 minutes is, as you may recall, still on the books. I am not promising anything. But the AI coach and I are about to start work on the climbing engine, on the diet, and on the slightly delicate art of asking a 55-year-old, 110kg endurance rider to find a few more watts per kilogram between now and the autumn.

Whether we get anywhere near it or not, you'll hear about it here.

See you on the climb!