Brian has done a great job in setting up a web site.
Lets take advantage of his efforts and utilized the resources available on the site.
I encourage other riders planning on attending the RTL to consider all aspects of the ride. There are many logistical factors to consider for and plan for the ride.
One logistical issue I’ve not heard discussed is how we all get home. That is, if we’re driving/ferrying to Yarmouth, how do we get back there (to our cars) from our end-point up in Cape Breton. Or, if we fly into Yarmouth, should we buy round-trip tix, or plan an (expensive) “open-jaw” return flight from Cape Breton.
It depicts three fictional characters and their journey on RTL.
The story was writen to illustrate the need for planning and review the logistics of what is needed to prepare for the race and what can happen during the race.
Lets see an average team’s speed should be able to do 50km in 5 to 5.5 hrs
So give 20+hrs on day one. Consider that meals are eaten by riders while riding in support vehicle.
Other team members will be riding in the support vehicle. Consider this for five days. Now consider some activity for the passengers to prevent bordum, team moral issues.
I’d suggest a laptop that plugs into lighter. This would enable movies to be played on laptop, or games. Don’t forget you’ll need to charge up other battery devices.
Also what happens if a team member becomes sick or injured on the journey. Or even worse, decides they just had enough and want to quit and go home. Some sort of ferry service between the support vehicle and home base needs to exist. I’d suggest in a pinch a cabby service or dedicated roaming support vehicle could help.
Laptop access or cell phone text messaging to convey important web page or team updates. These messages would be sent to RTL monitoring so updates would be real time.
Plan for bathroom breaks and meals. Hopefully built into route planning.
Determine how riders vehicles will be transported from starting location to finish line.
Are there a certain amount of hours per day you can be and riding? If not, id schedule it so when one rider is out, a few others could be sleeping, and end up working out a routine so you can have your team constantly riding 24/7.
Todd: This is flawed. Did you mean 50 miles in 5 hours. That’s going to be a baseline speed, with many teams much faster. So 200km = ~125 miles and that should take teams 12 hours, not 20 hours.
My average speed on my 29’er with 102 mm cranks is right around 15kph- So assuming that my teamates can keep a close average speed -it would mean that we would finish the leg in about 13.5 hours(roughly)-So many people on 36" will have no trouble completing the leg in 12 hours
16-20kph average is likely to be the cutoff kind of speed, where anyone going slower gets the same time score, ie. you need to be faster than it to compete.
Given you only have to ride 1/3 of the time, 20km/h 12mph average on the flat should be no problems for anyone who’s trained to compete, that’d be possible on a short cranked 29er.
The top teams should average 24-26km/hr. If it’s a flat stage I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 27km/hr average speed.
I think most teams will average 18-20km/hr
That’s just based on the speeds I’ve seen people ride at Unicon and at several Unitours.
On all my rides longer than 60km I have had an average speed of 18-19km/h (except for when my knee gave out). I can hold 22km/h for an hour and I don’t consider myself anywhere close to one of the top cokurs.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the faster teams would average around 25km/h.
I am pretty sure there is going to be a maximum time for each day so we are not going to be riding in the dark.
I hope to be able to sustain 25km/h for an extended period of time by race time and hope to be able to average around 21km/h for long rides.