Completed my final ‘full’ preparation training ride yesterday.
Training so far has been multiple hill reps on hills roughly between 5 and 8 minutes in length due to locally not having any really long climbs, so I wanted to go somewhere that offered a similar-ish type of terrain to that which I will face on the Dragon, where the elevation gain is spread over some longer climbs.
North Wales did the trick and I ticked off a few climbs I’ve wanted to do for some time. Managed 116 miles and 8737 feet elevation (elevation was a little less than I had aimed for but hey-ho).
The Hellfire Pass (Bwlch-Y-Groes) was REALLY tough. In fact subjectively, it felt harder than any climb of note I’ve ever attempted (Madone / Rocacorba / Puig Major / Hardknott / Wrynose / The struggle / Ffordd Pen Llech). God knows how Ed Laverack went up there in just over 12 minutes!!
I suspect this subjectivity was partly due to recency (the detail and pain of past rides fades
) but also that this climb had a perfect storm of length and consistently very high average gradient with the hardest part near the top.
Overall I was pleased with my pacing - I set out to try and hold ‘around threshold’ or just under where physically possible on all of the main climbs and for the most part (apart from when the road was so steep it couldn’t be helped) I managed to stick to it.
Average speed was up slightly to 15.3mph so pleased with that aspect too. Calorie burn (according to Strava) was over 5000, but this ride I really pushed the hourly energy consumption and stuffed over 3500 calories (MyFitnessPal scanned) over the full ride, which had 7:34 moving time and 9+ hours total time including lazy cafe stops.
This is more food / energy than I’ve ever taken in on a ride, by quite some margin, and I admit I felt a bit sick towards the end 
I felt tired but not destroyed at the end of the ride and feel like another 20 miles was comfortably still in my legs. Whether another 2700 feet of climbing was in there as well is debatable 
Was a fun day out - now a rest week, then a short break in Majorca where I will be riding shorter rides (50 miles or less) with less climbing (sub 6000 feet total) but aim to up the pace and intensity, with another week after that, to recover and taper, ahead of the Dragon GF.
Starting to get excited for the challenge on 23 June 