The Tour of Sufferlandria (ToS) is four years old. I was still 'crushing knarly trails' in 2013 and had no interest in turbo trainers or shaving my legs so skipped that Tour in favour of getting hypothermia digging downhill trials in Staffordshire. I completed the 14 & 15 tours after a change of approach to my riding due to injuries caused by being crushed by knarly trails as opposed to crushing them. The concept behind the Sufferfest is simple, take established structured training sets (the classic 3x10, 1 on 1 off intervals etc) and other equally well structured sessions to simulate road racing, cross, going mental et al, pair these workouts with excellent on screen footage and clear instructions around cadence, effort and timing, then distribute like training crack. All one needs is some sort of exercise bike or normal bike clamped into a rolling road system called a 'turbo trainer' (or treadmill for some new workouts aimed at dentists and accountants aka triathletes), a screen to watch and a masochistic sense of self hatred fueled by the need to suffer horribly for relatively short periods of time thus hopefully removing the need to regularly ride for long periods on potholes occasionally interrupted by a road surface in cold miserable weather among telephonists/text/Facebook updaters who seem to also be piloting a one tonne machine whilst carrying out the latter, primary task. Essentially the 'fest seeks to make the arduous process of riding indoors rewarding, fun and most importantly; shorter than it actually is in terms of time. Those of you who have watched a film of TV show on a turbo will appreciate that a Ronseal advert can turn into Apocalypse Now. One of those very annoying BMW You Tube ads is The Redux with extra scenes and Marlon Brando smoking a huge bong out-takes. What the turbo becomes is a time machine capable of baffling even Aristotle with it's capability to turn minutes into hours.
'The Tour' - Why it is Good, and Bad.
Firstly, it's called 'The' Tour of Sufferlandria, not 'Le Tour'. Any event not in France, Algeria, French Guinea etc which uses 'Le' and the 'The' should be assigned to Rapha like pretentious status and ignored. So well done on that one. Secondly, it comes at the end of the U.S/European winter. Not great for Aussies but they are all out on their bikes getting a tan and having barbecues at the peak of their season so would most likely shun the ToS anyway. It is also good as it raises a load of cash for The Davis Phinney Foundation: http://www.davisphinneyfoundation.org/tag/taylor-phinney/. If you are reading this, please give some dollars up. Other elements that make the ToS good are the generous 50 hour global time slots allocated to each satge and the supporting literature/social media support. Sufferlandria seems to be remarkably free of judgmental arseholes (or assholes if you are a abandon-er of the Commonwealth Queen pissing off Yankie Blue Jeans Revolutionary/American). There is only support and love in the realm, making it a nice place to be. No even Donald Trump hates Sufferlandrians!
Why it's bad? It's hard, really hard. There is something about the workouts that immerses you, makes you push very, very hard then spits you out at the other end without the hour seeming to last more than 20 minutes. Afterwards you realise it was an hour and it was really hard. I'll go into more detail on the stage breakdowns but the intensity level nine days in a row, combined with life, riding to and from work/the shops etc fitting in the three-four resistance sets (as I fear cyclists arms are not good for baby carrying) is nasty. I've ridden long hard five, six and eight days in a row in Spain, France and Italy respectively, and it was hard, but essentially 100 miles of mountains is usually 50 miles going downhill and often interjected with an ice cream and drafting a Piaggio Ape at 30mph for a while. I hit up some cat 1/2 races in Flanders a few years ago and they were really hard, more so than anything in the UK. The Belgians cheat, a lot. I saw two guys holding onto a pizza moped for a clear 2 km in one race, the same two met the same guy at the bottom of the Kwaremont and had a tow there as well. I like to think they had ordered a pizza strategically, knowing the route from the pizza place to the delivery address, timing the moped perfectly for the tow. I later learned that one of the many hundreds of sponsors plastered on their jerseys in unpronounceable Flemish lingo was a pizza place and the kid on the Honda was the brother of the winner. They still didn't win, another Belgian trio took the 1/2/3 but then all got disqualified for taking an extravagant shortcut involving someones private farm road and a pre-arranged open gate. Eventually I was bumped to third but actually came ninth. I have no idea what happened, my prize was an ashtray.
The Stages:
There are nine. Actually there are 12 but over nine days. Days two, eight and nine are double stages, much like old school grand tours where the chaps would race in the morning, time trial in the afternoon. Sadly the double days in Sufferlandria run back to back with no rest, massage, pasta party, blood transfusion or tense press conferences. There one sort of 'rest' day, taking the excellent climbs of France and Italy at a fairly leisurely pace, but it's not that leisurely and still involves grinding away on a turbo for 90 minutes.
The Arena of Pain:
The spaces chosen to suffer within are wide and varied. People from all over the globe complete the tour, some have to account for intense heat, others intense cold. Being from the UK it is never intensely hot, cold or otherwise. I use my garage/gym (a hard earned and saved for luxury after 24 years of dreaming) and one big assed fan, this seems to suffice at the around 2-8 degs I was subjected to. Regardless of how cold it is, you will need a fan... If it's hot, have two or train in a commercial fridge. Other than a fan, my prep for the tour involved a bit of love applied to my permanent turbo bike, an ebay special consisting of a 2000 USA Issue CAAD 8, 1997 Campy Veloce (the ratchet shifters etc - before they chucked in cheap internals up to Athena) with a 53/39 - 11-23 drive train to get the most out of my Cyclops Fluid Pro. The Campy is a testament to the 'Campag wears in, Shimano wear out, SRAM just breaks' mantra - after almost 16,000 miles it still shifts like a rifle bolt, the Campy one shift big gear drop - rise feature is handy for switching between efforts. All my other bike have Shimano though, and it is great, so only love for them as well. I had SRAM once, it broke. But that was 'old' SRAM...
The Stages:
I had to start 24 hours early due to some commitments on the schedules last day meaning I would have to do the final and challenging double stage at 3am or on the roof of a car traveling down the motorway. My announcement to this effect was met with only love in the Sufferlandrian Tour Community so I cracked on.
1: ISLAGIATT (it seemed like a god idea at the time)
It's two hours of the Giro, long climbs with attacks, tempo changes and lots of snow. Feeling fairly un-fresh after a misguided and unintended horrid headwind hour and a half commute home the previous night I soon spun my legs to life on the long warm up and felt pretty sweet. I like ISLAGIATT because it's what I'm better at on the bike. God/Budda/Ganesh/Allah etc did not give me many Type 2 muscle fibers but was kind with the T1's, long skinny fibrous legs hanging from a 70kg (I'm 184cm) body that drink oxygen and push out around 300watts at around 95% for hours on end. After crushing a few climbs and finding the will to go on for the last horrible dash for the finish I felt much better about the whole tour, I gave the exact efforts asked for, drank a load and celebrated with on of my 'big bastard' salads (do not be fooled into thinking these are healthy) and a lie down. As I said, I like ISLAGIATT, it's my what I'm naturally geared toward, hence all I can think about during the workout is....
2: Revolver x 2
This stage story starts at 2 a.m, the point I woke up, wide awake, aware than due to 'life' Revolver needed to be commenced at 6 a.m in order to get it done and filed in time to commence existence elsewhere for the day and avoid divorce. I then carried on waking up with death row sweats until I gave up at 5, noted a HRV score of '2', my lowest ever, ignored that and tried to force some food down. Shoes on, chamois cream on, TV on, let us revolve...
Revolver is a bitch. It is the training equivalent or being on a roller coaster that you didn't want to get on, don't want to be on and can't get off. A bit like the one I went on in Tunisia in the early 00's, a rusty car chassis welded to a rail roller with actual car seats and seat belts operated by a small boy with a big bong. And it actually sent upside down. Sadly it was an out and back; so having cheated death going forwards, I got to do so again going backwards. As the out part ended with the chassis rolling up a big ramp in order to gain momentum for the return journey I had to endure phase two without a ejector option.
Revolver is simply 1 minute on, 1 off, 16 times. Not 15 as advertised, but 16. The warm up is hard, the set is hard, doing it twice is really hard. I gave it all on every interval but my power in intervals 28-31 was similar to that of a small kitten with no legs on Ketamine. I crawled off the bike in a poor state and then had a busy day in an odd state of detached reality and fumbling around, forgetting basic matters and finding myself magnetically drawn to the granola isle in the supermarket.
3: The Best Thing in The World
It is not. It is two long and hard race simulations with attacks, leg churning climbs, sprints, threshold efforts and all of the other joyful elements of racing that make you ask 'why am I doing this'?Fortunately the Sufferfest have removed the 100km of dull rolling along that precludes these sort of efforts in a race and get straight to the juice after a testing 'warm up'. After yesterday TBITW feels like trying to drag my tattered legs through a burning pool of treacle and the muscles that operate my lungs hurt, so breathing actually hurts. It ends, I eat porridge and carry on with my day, hoping that a someone steals my turbo overnight.
Sadly today is a pre agreed calisthenics day with a friend. I bumble my way through 'The 500'; 100 reps each of pistol squats, pull ups, push ups, dips, rows all interjected isometric holds during the 'rest' period .... I am tired now....
4: To Get To The Other Side
Praise sweet Jesus, a rest day! Sort of. TGTTOS is a beautiful thing. I tested it and it was beautiful, they polished it and it is even more so. The workout takes my abused and flagellated corpse over some stunning Alpine and Italian climbs with Mike Cotty from The Col Collective. There are some efforts but they are O.K and widely spaced. It is mostly a steady state efforts that still hurt due to fatigue but not enough to really make me cry or wail. I enjoyed it, the weather outside was grotty, it was my day off and I had some rest afterwards. Apparently George Hincapie used to just ride and then just lie down and eat pizza with his legs up. This was the key to his greatness. Now we know what we do there may have been some extra toppings on the Meat Feast but I stuck to the theory and replaced pizza with sweet potatoes and fish in a big bowl.
5: The Wretched
I wake up feeling better, a bit more alert and alive than the past four days. I hit up The Wretched with vigor and enthusiasm, then blow up 3 minutes from the end of the single limb destroying single 35 minute session in a Jan Ulrich Style. After three minutes of trying to recover just enough for the last sprint I flail about like a demented witch doctor, then cool down on the tri bars, just to have a rest. The rest of the day is difficult and I eat a lot.
6: I'm too tired to finish this,,
9: I finished. hooray.
