The Crack of Doom
One thing amateur cyclists have in common with pros is that after a certain amount of time spent above your lactate threshold, you crack.
The human body is capable of producing prodigious amounts of power, and can sustain it over surprising lengths of time. But there’s a limit, and although you can’t see it coming, when you surpass that limit, it’s like slamming straight into a brick wall.
Maybe you’re on a fast, hilly group ride and pushing yourself as hard as you can. It’s a constant mental and physical struggle to hold the wheel in front of you. Depending on how fit you are, you can get away with that for twenty, forty, ninety minutes. But at some point your body will decide to shut down. It’s done, and so are you. You’ve cracked.
The drop-off is surprisingly sudden and dramatic. One minute you’re working hard, at 100 percent but just hanging on to the other riders; the next minute, you can barely put any power into the pedals. You watch as your buddies disappear around the bend. It’s not just that you can’t hold their wheels anymore; you’re going backwards, only able to produce about half their speed.
You can try to recover, but no amount of soft-pedaling is going to bring you back across the precipice you fell from. You’ll have enough energy to drag yourself home, but only at a tepid grandma pace. You watch helplessly as you get passed by three year-olds on tricycles, butterflies, and the occasional roadside boulder.
You can see it just as dramatically in the pro peloton. They’re all in a pack, climbing huge mountains as if they were no big thing. A couple serious attacks and then *BAM*! You watch, wondering why one rider who was at the front suddenly and completely fell off the pace.
The problem for both amateurs and pros is that there are few (if any) clues that precede cracking. Every part of your body is already screaming because you’re pushing your absolute limit, but there’s no gauge showing how long you can sustain that effort; no “Check Engine” light to tell you that you’re on the verge of a blow-up.
There are only two things you can do to avoid cracking, and they’re both painful as hell. First, ride so hard that you crack often, and try to learn how to estimate when it’ll happen, so that you can hopefully back off before you’ve spent too much time at maximum output. And second, train like hell, so that your body can sustain redlining for increasingly longer times.
Suffering and cracking were the primary topic of one of my classic blogposts, a book review from twelve years ago, citing really eloquent passages from experienced riders Tim Krabbé, Lance somebody, and Paul Fournel. It’s titled “ Be sure to really suffer out there!”
As my cycling mentor Bobby Mac always said: you can go fast, or you can go long, but you can’t go fast for long.