Alberto Contador has been taken off the top of the Everest Charts by an Irishman.
Ronan McLaughlin showed what's possible when someone focuses on a target with singular focus. We deep dive into his preparation, training and bike setup.
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I think with Contador being at the top of the list, it probably did put a lot of people off. And as we were saying earlier, but with me at the top of the list, there's probably to be someone who's thinking, I can go and break that. More part of them. Like I'm excited to see who goes next for the thing going to break it and they do six and a half hours and I'm never doing it again. The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our long chances? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Welcome back Roadman, it's Wednesday. It means one thing, it's time for our long form Roadman Podcast. I've been alternating some weeks doing interviews, in fact most weeks doing interviews, but if I had a subject that was close to my heart, a subject that I felt I needed a soapbox for, was my real soapbox opportunity. Last Wednesday was such a soapbox moment where I felt I needed to stand there and I needed to make a stand about how the group ride is just falling apart and I love the group ride so don't let it fall apart. If you haven't listened to that episode yet I suggest you go back, listen to it and then share it with teammates, share it with friends and use it to be the start of a dialogue as to how we fix the beautiful group ride. This week, I'm really excited about this week's guest. This week's guest is a cycling coach with Panash coaching, his own coaching company he founded. He's exed on post-gen reactions rider, I think he was there for about six years. He's a current team mate of mine at Dan Morrissey, Pacthimo, McCarthy Insurance. He's a good friend. He's a name that you may or may not know, but after this podcast, I promise you it's a name that will be etched in your memory for a long time to come because he has the distinction which not many people in the world have of detrouting Alberto Contador at the top step of the Everest Summit Challenge. I welcome to the podcast Mr. Ronan McLachlan. Ronan McLachlan, welcome to the Real Man Podcast. Thank you, Hando. Glad to be here. As follows for everyone listening, it's a bit of context myself and Ronan, our teammates as Pac-Timo Dan Morrissey, McCarthy Insurance, that's a mouthful to say. That's what happens when you have as many sponsors as we do, isn't it? So you might seem like it's just too lads chatting in the pub and that's because obviously me and Ron have known each other a long time so I'll be able to ask some questions about things that happened on his stag party and things like that that you probably wouldn't get from another host. No, I'm just going to hang up here now. Yeah, that's one conversation we can't have. Ron, I suppose the thing that's very topical at the moment, we're going to bounce around and talk a little bit about your backstory as well because I know one of the big things with this Everest record when people see that it's getting smashed is, oh my God, Compton our hat, this record, who's this Ron and my Glocklin last? Now obviously, as a teammate, Ron, for the last, I don't know, we've four years or so, I can vouch around is a beast and this is a very genuine record. But a lot of listeners, especially overseas, won't have heard from you. So is that something you've heard already people going? How is this legit? Yeah, it definitely isn't. To be honest, it's kind of been one of the negative side effects of it all, I suppose. First of all, I didn't really anticipate breaking the word record and then I really didn't anticipate the sort of attention that we get even after I've broken the word record and I made the mistake of starting to read some comments online and stuff. I got that really started to get to me about there on Friday evening and Saturday and then I just had to make a decision that I wasn't going to read many of them anymore. There's a few because the vast majority of people are leaving nice comments and I want to try and reply to the inbox. That's like everything in the modern world, isn't it? There's a small percentage that something negative to say about everything. Well, welcome to the boy world, Ronan. Anytime I put out any podcast, you get 90% of people think it's amazing. There's probably 1% that are just complete keyboard warrior living in their mass basement bottom feeders who just want to rip other people's achievements down. And I hadn't chat to you about this offer, but I just knew there was going to be some keyboard warrior looking to pull your achievements down to make themselves feel a little better. To me, there's sort of muscle in the real positive aspect of this as well, is that F-contrad or his name is certainly at the top of that list. It's probably going to put a lot of people off because he is the writer that he is and he's no one from being the climber that he is. But when there's some randomer from Muff, you know, certainly at the top of the list that nobody knows or very few people know, and he's done seven hours and four minutes. I'm sure there's quite a few people who got up in Freddie Martin and went, well, if he can do that, then I can do 6 hours, 59. where does it stop then? I'm really excited to see where it goes from there. But to give it a bit of backstory for people listening, obviously Ronan has a lot of profile here in Ireland, but he's not really some randomer from Muff. You wrote for our post-chain reactions for how many years? Six years, believe it or not?
Which is best known for the World Championships, best known for San Bennett's lead-out, man? Yeah, both of those were the things that I look back on quite fondly. definitely and probably best known for a risk that I lost in the Ross but you know I suppose that has to come up with some states doesn't it? Go on give us that story briefly. Basically yeah there's a stage of the Ross and Renee I suppose is known Irish listeners or anybody doesn't know that that is it's you know basically the tour of Ireland and there was a stage and sort of my home region in 2012 and happened to spend, I think, more than half of a stage off the front on my own and ended up getting caught less than 100 meters from the funniest lane. Where I got caught, actually, was exactly where my parents were standing. So they got to experience that disappointment as well. And yeah, I think it was so close to the funniest that, you know, obviously when I got caught, there's nothing left. If there had been something left, I would have to give it to try and get to the lane. But there was, I think there was still only like seven or eight riders in the bunch sprint that actually got past me. It was so cool to the finance line. So it was almost my best result, but it was definitely in terms of, you know, it was a top 10 and the UCI risk, but it wasn't the nicest of top 10s. It's probably the worst kind of top 10 you could possibly get. I didn't even know you then. And I think I was just like every other Irish person. I was stuck in a shitty apartment for, I was running for a French team that year. And I was just like, you could get an internet in one room in this apartment in the corner, and you're like scabbing it off the bakery downstairs or something. I was just refresh on Twitter, refresh on Twitter, I'm like, five k to go, we still have, that's the time I got four k to go. It was heartbreaking. Yeah, it's the only time, including both Everstans in recent weeks, it's the only time that I give it so much that I was actually not only cramping with eggs, that's fairly standard for anybody that does reason, but my arms were actually cramping, trying to get to the line. But yeah, it didn't happen. Ultimately, the same year I went on and and rode the World Championships for Ireland with Nicholas Roots and Dan Martin himself, making up a three-man team. There's not many people get that opportunity there, so it's every negative there's an opportunity to make a positive, but they can work better. I think that puts you in the context a little bit when Ronan said some random lad from Muff, both the keyboard warriors assumed that you aren't taking the time to look into your background at all, and they're just doing the end and going, so my amateur broke the record. Yeah, and I suppose even if they did dive in, they probably see quite a few DNFs as well, but that's what happens when you race quite a bit in Belgium. So, yeah, I've spent 15 or so years racing at a very well at an international level. So I've got the benefit of, I think I said, somewhere recently, the benefit of doing 20,000 quammers a year for over a decade. That's a slight exaggeration, but you know, there's certainly years that done 20,000 or more kilometers and you know that's helped with With building that sort of aerobic engine that was kind of vital for the whole ever something You were talking about the in effing a lot of races in Belgium I made the mistake of checking myself on pro cycling stats to today and never did that man. I'm a sprinter It says Anthony Walsh was a cyclist between 2010 and 2019 Well, if it's any consolation, I met my wife in 2013 on my retirement party with Philip Dignan and Marcus Krusty, who was just the three of us at the time, at my retirement party, but just as well, there wasn't more people there because I'm still going at this stage. This wasn't the night Marcus got all the boyagras, or is that story for a different day? Actually, I met my wife twice for the first time. The first retirement party I couldn't remember the next day, and then a few nights later that was the whole market since it may happen to bump into each other again that night. It was a week full of stories. Ronan, let's move on to this Everest challenge. So I don't, as listeners of this podcast, come to expect total research before the podcast. Ronan texted me like 20 minutes ago, get into the podcast now. I was like, all right, let's do it now. I was looking to it. I'm not sure even if you know this background, the Everest challenge was set up by George Mallory, who is the grandson of the famous Everest, George Mallory, and he actually invented it as a cross train and for when he was trying to get ready for his own Everest summit. Yeah, in 1994, apparently. And yeah, as you said, he's a grandson of the famous George Mallory, who tragically lost his life on Everest. And then the grandson George was invited on an expedition, sort of, and they were made up of his grandfather. And he was loving in Melbourne, was trying to figure out how can he train for climbing my Everest in Melbourne and came up with this idea. But I've since heard that the first guy I'd ever do it was a Frenchman in something like 1983, 1984. I'm not sure how good the GPS signal or the Strava segments were back then, but apparently he did the same thing. He cycled up and down the same road until he reached the height of Everest and he had no Everest expedition to the train for.
I'm not sure what his reason was, but he we get it on the way in. So the rules of it are quite simple, more understanding, maybe you have a more complex understanding, I haven't looked into it a bit more, it's you got to climb to cumulative height of Everest on one hill in a 24-hour period. Yeah, without, I'm not sure if the 24-hour period part is in there, but definitely without sleeping. If you want to do double or triple a sense, then you can have two orders of sleep or something, which just seems ridiculous but I think it's 24 because I know I'm coaching a guy at the moment and he's in his mid-70s and he's worried about the 24-hour part. Yeah so he was pushing that obviously he weren't too worried about the 24-hour part. I stand corrected on that one but yeah you know it's as the everson.cc website says it's overly simple, simplistic the idea but it's brutally hard or something of that effect. And that you pick one road and you work out how many times you have to go up and down that road without Earth to reach the cumulative height of Everest. What's eight thousand eight hundred and forty eight meters? That's it. Yeah, so then you do a couple extra just to be sure. Oh Okay, so the straava GPS isn't lining up with yeah So I think a lot of the Martin or luck on Martin that get caught out with nothing Thanks, I think but yeah the most fortunate of doing an Everest thing and then and figuring out a couple of days that are when somebody had, you know, really deep diet and the details that he hadn't done enough and it was a couple of meter short. And of course, if you're a couple of meters short of an Everest thing, it's not that you have a worst time or whatever, you just haven't done it. So you could be two meters short and basically what you've done is a base camp attempt, what they call, which is half the height of Everest. So for both my attempts, I made sure to do at least two extra laps. I suppose the old climb and adage is when you ask somebody what are climbing about and they say, because it's there, do you have any reason why you attempted this one? The idea always sort of interested me. I heard, I'm not sure when it first heard a bit, but I know it always interested me. And then, as soon as lockdown came about this year, I had done the biggest winter that I've done since my own post days. I was in really good shape. I even had the first training camp since my own post days in Spain, and had got two races on the start of the season. and all of a sudden everything's canceled. So I thought, well, I may as well put this good condition to you somehow. And it was going to do in ever some in March. And then I started thinking maybe it's highly irresponsible to be going out and right. And for what I thought would be 10 hours on the bike at the height of the pandemic and lockdown and everything that was going on then. So I scratched the idea then, then I tried to do a virtual everything on Zwiftum guitar, which when it broke in the very first sense, that was called off. And then that was sort of of a blessing in the skies because it can give me time to actually look at this properly and sort of work out the specifics of what it would take to do quite well at it and yeah, I think I've done well enough now. Talk to me about the specifics in this round because I love the detail on it. What line did you choose and how did you choose that line? I chose Mumur Gap which is sort of famous again from the Ross, from the old tour of Ireland, Kelly, if it famously went up in the 42-18 or something. When they won the tour of Ireland back in the 70s, which is just unthinkable. But yeah, I did look at countless other claims beforehand and wrote a good few claims to see how they would work and I ended up deciding on one more gap. First of all for the reason that it meant so much to me and that when I started cycling I I literally couldn't get up my more gap without walking. And I used to cycle over every Saturday to try and get up at just once without having to get off and walk. Eventually I did that. It was just a nice idea of sort of common full circle with the vehicle back and do it. 64 times the first time in the day, in the second time, because I used a shorter segment, I had to do it 80 times. What length segment is Gio's and what was the percentage of? The first time the, I think the total length of the segment was two and a half kilometers of them, they got included in the decent and it was an average of percent, 11 percent claim. And then the second time when I knew, because the first time I didn't actually know, is it possible to cycle up no more gap 64 times? And I'm trying to mind the steepest pitches at the top are 24 percent. So I didn't know if that was possible. So I kept the flatter parts at the top and bottom just to give myself a chance to recover. second time I cut out those flatter parts, it made the segment or made the total ride 35 kilometers shorter and but it did mean that I had to do more laps which dropped me back to not knowing if it was possible or not and the average gradient went from 11% to 14 so yeah the second one sorry to answer your question a bit more quickly it was the second segment was 1.6 kilometers with an average of 14.3% on the claim.
What makes a good line forever? Is it the steepest or better? To a certain extent, yeah, I'm sure if you want to like some of these, you know, crazy steep claims and in Spain or something, maybe I can go too steep. But from all the research I did, everybody seemed to be suggesting that the perfect claim would be about a kilometer long and would be is something around about 13%. The more gap is 800 meters long and it's 14.2. So for all intense purposes, as far as I'm concerned, it's the best claim in Ireland for dinners and possibly one of the best on the planet because there's also the fact that the descent is almost perfectly straight. There's no requirement for breaking on the descent. Did you shortlist climbs? Are the GJosts soon as you say more? You said no, it's not. I shortlisted and rode all the claims that I had started, whether I had shortlisted, I think there was about five or six. There was probably six or seven segments on the short list, but, you know, across three or four different claims, shorter or longer versions of the same claim. And, you know, I ended up rolling them out. One was eight and a half percent, and, you know, I would end up doing a crazy amount of kilometers. And there's no prizes for gaining distance here. Like the whole challenge is just about elevation gain. And so again, the steeper it is, the more of your energy is going into just gaining the elevation that you need. So, and the end up, there was one or more claim nearby that might have suited and that was ground-use gap, but the road service and others were very bumpy. And it would have caused quite a bit of energy on the descent just from the vibrations and all that. Did you think about a human aspect down in Kerry? I didn't know and probably would be a good one but again it's from what I can remember it's it's got at least one 90 degree corner on the descent near the top and I think there's two sides is there just a one twisty side and there's the one sort of steep straight side that we came down in the Ross in 2014 and we were doing like 150 kilometers in our band at the Bevan. That was one of the fastest descents of all time, I think. Which was faster the descent of the tank is the finish afterwards. What factors go into choosing what day you go on this? Do you look at whether, do you look at humidity, do you look at temperature, obviously warmer is faster? You're looking at, rather than sitting, I'm going to do this on Saturday, or are you looking at, I'm going to do this between the 10th and the 20th? That's actually one of the difficulties, because as you know as a coach, if you're trying to pick for something, you need to know what date you're picking for. Both times I started to take a chance four or five days out that it was going to work out. Obviously four or five days isn't enough to pick, but it took a chance four or five days out and sort of tapered off when we trained in that the day I was going to do it on World Workout. times it did. But you know, everything plays a factor from temperature as you says to, you know, if it's too hot and you're in the glare and so on, you're obviously gonna be baking on the claim as well. Pressure comes into it. When, obviously, you're not gonna wait for a head one. So, and then, you know, Thursday was, it's about random doing it on a Thursday, but Thursday, in terms of forecast for Thursday on the more gap. It looked fairly perfect to me. It was going to be raining until about one o'clock. If you look at all the other devastating attempts, I think even in the top 20 or so, they've all started at 6 or 7 in the morning, including my first one. This is the only one that started afternoon. I think correlation isn't causation. I think that's just coincidence. But I was waiting until the rain stopped. But even that the rain lasted longer and the forecast suggests the first two hours I think we're in the rain which, you know, when you're making a dead turn at the bottom of a 85 kilometer in our descent, it does affect your break in distance. So probably also a little bit of time there that it could, you know, that otherwise could have been could have been better. But and in terms of the rest of the day, it was as close to perfect as I could have got. Did you go full on velodrome the measuring stuff like humidity, temperature, pressure? I did to the point where on both attempts I said, you know, at the end of the day you can measure all those things but you can control. And I kind of decided that, you know, the first time I've been talking about it and thinking about it and training about it for so long, it was just a case of let's just go and get it done. It's going to be a half decent day if nothing else. And then the second time it was like, right, well, if the forecast is right, it's going to be as close to perfect as day as I'm ever going to get. It is absolutely poor in all morning but I could sit here in the afternoon, some could be sharing and I'll be kicking myself or I can go and put my phone away on the start line and start it and see what happens and that's sort of what it is. That makes such a, like for listeners, you might think it's some trivia board. I'm not sure how much you've written the village around and board. Temperature, air density, these things are the difference between top 10 and in the medals?
Yeah, for the best example I ever heard of it was for Bradley Wagon's Dessert Record. The pressure that day was 1,030 millibars, he had to do it in London because sponsor reasons and that's it's all that to stadium. But in terms of the day that he got, he couldn't pack his day, he had to go on a certain day. it turned out to be the worst day of the year in London. He couldn't have picked a worst day. Had he picked the day before or a couple days after, he probably would have went up to a kilometer further. But that's the chance that he didn't have the luck that I could pick whatever day I wanted. Ron, if you're on coaching company, Panash coaching? Did you self-culture in the run-up to this? I did, yeah, and I use the... So I do self-coach, I don't believe in self-coaching, but I do self-coach just because of all the other commitments I've got going on at the moment. The culture I was working with previously, I just felt I was kind of wasting his time not being able to commit to the training where I wanted to. So For that reason only I self-coach. But I did also, I noticed my A1 coaching is also doing the inside testing. And I use that quite a bit. I don't know. I don't know today as well. Have you enjoyed the test protocol on it? It's savage. Yeah, I've done both testing protocols. I wouldn't be as cruel as to prescribe the full PPD protocol in one day to an athlete, but I did it myself in one day. And I think it took five or six travel segments in the same time. Did you do it outdoors? I haven't done it outdoors yet. I did it outdoors yet. It just knew that all my training was going to be outdoors. So I just, you know, again, better match to what are we going to be training on? So it didn't mean to have to outdoors. Yeah, I definitely feel like I lost water in the indoors. I went on the 22nd, 3 minutes, 6 minutes and 10 minutes. one and indoors like fuck it's like a coker at the end like 10 minutes once like someone has your head on a portal and there's not that on your neck. It's horrific. Yeah, it's not it's not the easiest test in the world to do but the the pardon upon but the insight that comes out of it is it's just second and omega and what I what I took away from that was obviously my my you know, accurate and rubic threshold rather than a guest limit FTP. But more importantly, even was my VLA Max, and the whole focus on the training was just decreasing that VLA Max as much as it could. And, yeah, it obviously worked out. So what's the run up to? So for anyone listening, we're going to get into run had two attempts at this. The fourth attempt landed you at top five. Was it fifth place of all time? Actually, nobody has offered me any condolences on the fact that my first-best time in the world has now been dropped down to six. Yeah. I've only got myself to blame for that. What's the four weeks in the run-up to this one look like? What was I doing four weeks ago? I started off by working on my VO2 system, because I wanted to sort of get those high-end intensity work rates out of the way well in advance so that they wouldn't be increasing my VLA max if I over-pushed them. And then after that, I went into a lot of sort the Temple Zone 3 sweet spot work. And I never ruled for more than, I think it had one or two, five or spends just by, they weren't actually planning to just got the opportunity to do them and did them. But that was the longest I read outside of the two ever-sneaking attempts. But a lot of time it sustained, say, Temple level with low cadence combined in there. And I didn't want to be going right in the open time, no more gap kind of the times. It seemed to me that it was already going to be mentally stressful and awful without doing it loads of times in advance. One day when I was at test equipment, I did 15 reps. But the sort of, to get around that, the theory I sort of right there wrong, we came up with was, if I can do four hours at Temple with three, that will downtime then doing seven hours at tempo with five minutes on one minute off is gonna be much more sustainable and more better. I suppose your story is a lot more relatable for people than content or story and people like this because Ron and the young child, you're freshly married in the last couple of years and you're balancing so you can learn and committee positions, your own coaching company and a job so you're busy that. How far could you push the limits of your fitness score or how much attention do you pay to metrics like chronic strain and load? For myself, none, to be honest. I just go off feeling. Obviously I can't feel what athletes I'm coaching are feeling. So I have to use those metrics to some extent, but for myself, I have the experience of, as I said before, 15 years of racing. And I know when I'm pushing too far, when I'm just getting it right. So yes, I look at them from time to time, but more just out of interest as to what it's saying. The thing about those as you know is that if you're a full-time athlete and you're doing 20 hours a week and the other hours that you're awake for the week, you've pretty much got your feet up. Then there are reliable information, but if you're someone who's got 45 minutes and you're choosing 30 to even in the train and two hours in a Saturday, it's only.
You know, you're a CTL and ATL, you're never going to get them, you know, open the high numbers that if you read the wrong books will tell you you have to achieve to be in good condition like so. And you know from coaching lads and on yourself as well, the difference between reading it in the book and real life, like you could have a positive training stress balance and it's telling you you're on peak because you've taken two rest days. But those two rest days could have been full on work. They've even been working on a building site for two days, pulling 15-hour days to get a house ready. And you're trying to stress guard telling you yeah, you're peaked and it's time to go. It's not real life. Exactly. I think a lot of the time that we can get sucked into now looking at what is the TSS score for a certain training session, and either thinking that session is really valuable, or thinking it's completely unvaluable, because of what the TSS score says, and really that for the vast majority of us in the real world, it's not quite that symbolic. But isn't it false, Erica, because I was out riding with a client last week, and I crashed last week, and I broke my bike to has my parameter on it. So I was out on my missus bike, and I was now a parameter on it. And I was doing so for efforts, but you know, when you've used a parameter for so long, you know exactly what's on four fields like, but this lad who hadn't used a parameter before, it's almost like you need to go on a journey of not having it, having it, understanding what it's like, and then you can go back to not having it because you understand your body. Exactly, and you know, there's a lot to be said for that feeling of just knowing that, without even looking at the screen, I very rarely looked at the screen in the Everson thing, but I just knew I was doing 320, 330 or whatever on the claims. I certainly knew it was freewheeling on the descent, and having that feel for it is so important. I think that more and more so nowadays has been lost for athletes, especially young athletes coming up, and that they're losing that ability to pace their efforts because they're just reliant on a number. And depending on if you're on a good day or a bad day, maybe you could have done far more than the number you had set or maybe the number you had set is just on a table on a certain day and that's why you know being able to feel it is much more important than what the Garmin screen says or the Wahoo screen says. So talk to me about pacing. When I'm pacing I always try to break things into four quarters. I love whether it's a kilo on the track or a pursuit on the track or a TT, I always think it's nice to negative split the four quarters. there's no worse feeling than just three quarters the way in and trying to hang on for dear life. How much of this was segmented and in your head to get through the day? In terms of pacing, rather than pacing it, I sort of had a limiters on it. So, for the most of the climb, I didn't want to go above anaerobic threshold. I didn't want to get to the top and see 175 heart rate on my screen. I didn't want the perceived effort to be above seven or so on the climb. So in terms of pacing, I used those metrics, heart rate and RPE more so than watts really. As I started to fade towards the end, I started to use the watts then as a motivator to, you know, keep it up, keep it up, do one more lap at 320 or do one more lap at whatever. and so used it in that way but what I did do along the same short lines is what you're talking about there. I broke every lap so 80 laps, I broke them all into three or four segments with a job to do in each one so you know when I started at the bottom the job was open the helmet fence, arms up the wrist so that I could breathe and ventilate better on the claim. When I got to where the guys were feeding me at the top, take a drink, hand the bottle back, take a bar off and eat it, whatever. Swing around, close the vent and we'll step up the skin suit. On the descent there are two really bad bumps that if you hit them hard enough you can get air. So just make sure it doesn't crash in the descent. And then again when I turned to the bottom, hitting the lap button on the garment and seeing how the lap time compared to the others. So when I was giving myself that many jobs to do every lap and hitting them lap after lap after lap, it really helped with, there times I was able to zone out and you know 10 laps ago passed without even thinking about it. Did you look at your VAM? I did. Yeah VAM on the on the on the on the screen both lap and or both current VAM and average VAM. The only thing I found about it was that on the on the Garmin screen that you see when you're on the bike the average VAM doesn't include the sounding time. It seems to only include you know claiming time so the average VAM was seem to be elevated compared to what I actually achieved with the course of the seven hours. But yeah, I did use value. Talk to me about case bike modifications, because I know you tricked out your specialized bike for this. And that's sort of the opportunity to get that bike came up in May. And everything was in my mind when I was selecting that frame.
And then I am just, you know, a traditionalist or whatever you want to call it, but I love Campac Nulo. And I believe all groups have to do the exact same thing that is, they do, they change gears. Fabulous, great. Change well. I was going to say they all change gears, per the compared to the Campac 10-speed record that we had about 12 years ago. But, you know, they're all too light and they're all too narrow. I was only having this debate here today, like that generation, like, oh, it's always Shimano man, but around then Shimano at your ace nine speed like that was the concord they started going backwards in Sasso. Yeah like but I am a campag man I just love how it looks and I love the whole panache and put it or whatever you want to call it so I have campag EPS on it and and you know I just I looked at the bike and for the first attempt again I didn't know if we did or not so everything was airing on the side of caution I had a focus set on there, I had bar tape on there, I didn't change my hammer bars, I just wanted to be able to complete the challenge, I didn't want something to happen that resulted in me having the style or whatever. But for the second attempt I just said, right, I've got a good time, unbelievably I have the best time in the world, that's through caution to one and see what is possible and that went half, not even half, I only left three sprockets on the cassette, I took off the front chain ring, I put on different handlebars and then cut the half of it was handlebars off. Basically, anything that wasn't going to be required had to go. The thing about it is when you start doing that path, you have to go to the point where anything that can go has to go because where do you start thinking in your head? Every time I finally swivel, I leave the bottom half of these handlebars on, you know, even if it's only 10 seconds, I'll be forever saying to myself, it could have been 10 seconds quicker. And the nightmare scenario is you do seven or, yeah, seven or is 59 minutes 59 seconds. And then you, or sorry, eight or zero minutes and two seconds. And then you're thinking forever, well, if I cut off half of those handlebars, it could have been two or eight hours. I have done Bingham is going for the world error record, the hope what boy, writer, and some payment of podcasts a week after he's gone for the world error record. So he'll definitely be loving all this tricked out shit you went with. You'd be loving the fact that I used an Oseo Connect as well just to sort of work out my CDA and even for optimized entire pressure and stuff like that I used an Oseo as well so that's really good piece of kit. Sure is. What tire is did you go by? I went with Vittoria Corsis B2.0s. Chubeless version the first time because I was running alloy clinchers from a gala landoff from a friend here in the AR and LS and put the second time Philip Leignon that made a set of Jura AC 35 carbon tubs to the second time the same tire and put the Chubeless version and it it hurt as much as everything hurt to far grade I think it was over 200 pounds total for four tires. Taurus making insane difference though. Did you look at research on different Taurus before, Jules and those ones? I did yeah and as you said it's such a huge difference. It's the only part of your bike that is contact with the road. Like it's just you know there's nothing that bugs me more than seeing somebody rolling around in a 10-ground bike and you know it's come to replace the tires and they put on a set of you know whatever the first thing they find in the shop was... Gator skins. Gator skins, yeah. I'm talking about gator skins. Yeah, so they serve a purpose. The purpose, I believe, is if a water pro wants to go out and train with a slower grip journey, one journey puts on gator skins and is trying to go as slow as he can for the same effort. Also, you can't go around corners with them because he just sloughed out. Everybody talks about how puncture press they are, but I you can't puncture because you can't actually pedal for all the crashes you've had. Not absolutely shocking. Did you, I know it's getting very fashionable, especially in track stuff to start getting your chain and torn it into almost like a dessert where you're taking it off, baking it in the oven and doing all sorts of beautiful seasonings on it. The cat tried to look at it one stage when it was drying. What did you do with your chain? Yeah, I took it off. I've sort of, well, first of all, I had a chain that I was going to use for everything. I got that chain about six weeks in advance. I put a hundred and something miles on it and then I took it off and completely deep cleaned it. Like, I mean, think of the chain as clean as you've ever seen it. And then I got twice as much dirt out of it again. When they come from the factory, they've got a lubon that is to prevent them roasting. It's the slowest thing in the world. So got all of that off and then soaked it in wax. And the night before, everything then took it out of the wax, let that dry off and flooded it to the bike. So it was worn and it was, you know, the efficiency should have been optimized in terms of the wax being able to get in around every new cranny on the chain. On what's going on with skin suit helmet shoes?
I've started the top of work done because I always made it forget helmet. I ran a cask in front of the day because it's got the open and closing events talked about earlier. Obviously closed for the dyno should have been more out of the way. I kind of wonder would only more modern invented aero helmets be faster than the infinity but yeah take a look at the arrow head or something like that. Yeah I didn't have the chance to test it so I don't know but I sort of went with the that I had. Then for the closing, I, despite everybody I spoke to tell me, do not wear a skin suit. This is a 7, 8, well 8, 9, 10 are right, we're thinking it's too uncomfortable. The Ascent or the Pac-Tima Ascent flight suits that we use in the team, like you'll be able to tell me how comfortable they are. They're as comfortable as a pair of jerseys and shorts. And they're pockets on the back. Exactly. And they're much more aerodynamic than pockets the back. So the first time I was able to carry a spare GPS in case the garment crashed, jail in case I had a panic moment on one of the ascents and be phoned for some music through the headphones. And the other benefit of it that most people hadn't thought about was that because it is a wrist, it's not a skin set, so it's like a jersey in charge, one piece. And you have access to be able to leak on the descents. I don't ever wear jersey and shorts and races, I only wear that. That's it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's sort of, you could say the trend nowadays, but certainly clothing has a huge impact on your aerodynamics. And when you're descending at 90 kilometers in a year, the drag forces are absolutely massive and I worked out that there was two, I started with overshoot last Thursday because it was raining, there was two descents where I had to take off the overshoot bond descent at a time, one overshoot per descent two descents in a row and on those descents when I wasn't you know getting under the super top position thinking as aerodynamically as I could I actually lost over 10 seconds per lap. I wasn't breaking, I wasn't going any slower. I wasn't trying to go slower to get the overshoot off. I was taking the chance that I wouldn't crash when I took the overshoot off at going at 60 kilometers an hour, but I still lost over 10 seconds on each of those descents. Now if you work that back and go well if I hadn't been aerodynamic for every descent, then I did 80 descents, that's 800 seconds. It's over 10 minutes, I could have lost just from the descending element of the head or something. So should you go with no shoot covers the sun? No, this was the second the first time I went with no shoe covers. I actually went with one who was I don't know what to call but they came with the specialized sub-six lace-up shoes where it's a weak cover that only covers the vocal part. That's quite aero actually, I tested them in the velo-jum. They are in combination with chop socks, you know they're probably more aero but the second time was it been raining? I went for a pair of sort of trip or aero overshoes just to keep the rain in my feet. I didn't want to be in wet shoes for seven hours. So I did where they overshoot the problem then being that I did start to overheat. But it wasn't that big a day because I was able to get them off, you know, across two descents. And even though they're obviously nowhere near as tight as velotos, but it was a case of I had to take my shoe off to get the overshoot off. But I still had time to do that. Like velotos, you can't even get them on sitting in the car anyway. So trying to take them off under the scent. I broke my nose on that one. If it had been velocities I would have been in the option of being a pair of scissors or whatever. Which we did have to do because it was so cold when I was starting. I had no choice but to wear a light base there. But it did heat up so the base there had to come off. So I tried to rub it which didn't work. So then the scissors came out and without stopping the bike the scissors caught the base there off. Isn't there some sort of saying kids are told and they're young about not running with scissors? Should that make you a ploy for the center of the 89 hour scissors? Sean McFadden who runs the Donigold Ultra 555 race, he came running at me with the scissors where I came cycling and had him on a bike and the one thing I said to him was don't cut my heart I need that. What would you have done different if you don't do this again in terms of equipment? I won the battle beforehand and been able to spend as much as I wanted and you know... Completely tricked it out. Yeah, like at the end of the day, I did as much as I could. But certainly if you want to replace some group sets, and I still would have been with Campaik, but going from mechanical version, there was a I run the specialized par arc pro saddle, which is our minion rails. I'm not sure what the body of it's made up of, but it's heavier than the same version in the S-Works model, which I wanted to go for, but it couldn't just expand that much more. But it turns out that when I weighed what I cut off the handlebars afterwards, it was actually the exact same weight that I would have saved by going to the carbon saddle. I identically the same.
I think it was both 69, you're both 79 grams. So would you go at it again if there's a big sponsor listening to the podcast that says blank check, Rona, let's go with this and as we can say, stick down one that stands to test the time. The only thing about that is I didn't stand to test the time. I know, it was a good quality. No, I had said I never would again, but I think two things depend on that. First of all, I genuinely believe there is at least five minutes in me to get onto that seven-hour mark. I'm not too hung up on being the first person that breaks seven hours, but if the opportunity came up, it wouldn't have to be a sponsor. It would just have to be the opportunity to use the equipment that I would want to use. If that opportunity came up, it would be hard for me to turn it down. But then the second thing is it probably depends on who breaks my record and when they break it. I think with Contour being at the top of the list, it probably did put a lot of people off. As we were saying earlier, but with me at the top of the list, there's probably going to be someone who's thinking, I can go and break that. More part of them, like I'm excited to see who goes next for the thing going to break it, and they do six and a half hours, and I'm never doing it again. It's a nice little segue, you knocked off one of the probably my favourite Royal Royal of the last decade. Definitely to watch I never met him two times, sort of Ranswen, won everything in Boycraze and a legend Alberto Contador sits in second and Ronald McLaughlin sits number one. How does that feel? Like a lot of people have been asking me what if you'd like to take it off with two-time Tour de France winner and well this is an Irish segment podcast to some extent you know for those in Irish segments probably I don't know what I mean it's probably worth asking Contador what's it like to have the last rebecca to someone who won the chiali twice. Like it's probably more important for us here in Ireland and the chiali memorial is like so, you know, obviously it's incredibly, it's just unbelievable to have my name in the same sentence as concertors but then for it to be no award rebecca, you know, genuinely, I don't even think I need to say generally, think I need to say generally, most people never think that they're going to break a world record. So to think that that's happened, don't think it's really settled on your set on yet. So where does Everest go from here? Because it is getting media attention. And with that, to go for a circle on the podcast, it starts attracting the sort of unwanted attention you were getting during the week. Is it getting to the point now where it's almost like going for the Euro record? Like a Strava foil won't do me for the Euro records. I need to have UCI conversations, testers on the day equipment verifies. Are we moving towards that? Well, actually, for the first ever thing I did, I followed the same process as everybody, does everything. And you submit your travel file through the everson.cc website. And then they analyze it and get back to you and ratify your time, or for those who are unfortunate enough that they haven't done enough for whatever reason. It's not ratified, then I suppose that can happen to, but my first one was ratified fairly straightforward process. But then for the second one, because it looked like it was going to be a world record-breaking right, there was much more detail I had to want to, so I had to provide, obviously just to have to provide the segment that I was going to do it on. All the sort of research that I had done beforehand around the elevation of the gain of of the segments I had to provide my parameter file through my training peaks file. I had to also, I didn't, well I had, just in case the Garmin would cry again or something, I had the person who was helping me at the bottom of the descent, you know, helping me with the turnaround and traffic and that and just warning people that there's a lunatic comment down the hell on their kilometres and error. He, every time I came down the descent, he took picture of me and that picture on his phone obviously had a timestamp and basically just anything that I had to prove that this was a genuine attempt and you know so there it's not just a stratified when you're in the pointy end of the the timings and and you know the the house 500 group who sort of manage the whole everything concept now. They started to get back to me and they said, look, thanks for sending all that through. We have quite a bit of extra work that we need to go to on our end as well to ratify award record and there's a few extra, we didn't, they were all too, it was or anything, but this is a few extra people who get to analyze the files and stuff. So yeah, there's quite a lot of attention that already presented. I don't think the UCI is ever going to be sending commissaries. It's not a UCI event, kind of might as never happened. But if your record is broken by a cat one rider out of Canada tomorrow, like, because we all assume it's going to be a big name, what if you just wake up in the morning and it's a cat one rider that's, you know, he's a few results, but he's not a beast. Will you be suspicious or will you be like, you know, you win so many little some? I think it would be wrong for me to be suspicious because I hope the controversy is suspicious of me.
I don't know if he is or not. He certainly wasn't aware of me beforehand and I don't know where to put it that way. A big part of my motivation for this was, especially from the first time to the second time, was I heard a quote from Chris Boardman in the documentary about his record attempt when he was trying to beat Eddie Merck's R record using the Merck's rules as their known. And he sort of said something along the lines. I can't remember the exact rule, but he said something along the lines that he understands that, you know, as amazing as Chris Boardman is, we would all give anything to be Chris Boardman. It's amazing that he isn't Eddie Merck's or wasn't Eddie Merck's. But, you know, if you find the thing that you're good that and you apply yourself right and you know you train right and prepare right and do the background work that I spent months doing then anybody can be world class or the best in the world on their day like so I wouldn't be suspicious I became to know how you did big me but I wouldn't be suspicious that anything you know on the world was or whatever. we dived a lot into the hell you donut, why you donut hasn't been talked about. There was a charitable cause behind all this. Do you want to sell us a small bit of that? Yeah, it's the community rescue service based in Northern Ireland. They're a search and rescue group who search for Muslim people. Unfortunately, my family had the misfortune of experience in their work first time a few years ago. And I say that because although Although they are fantastic at what they do, they're not a group that you particularly want to be having to work with because they are searching for Muslim people and their wife's uncle went Muslim four years ago in November and they were there night and day searching for them up and down the country. There was very few of them who were based locally, so they were traveling great distances on a daily basis to give up their free time, to walk and search through fields, mountains, rivers, lakes, everything in November, at the height of an Irish winter, was freezing temperatures in poor and rain. And they never asked for anything more than a making point basically. So ever since I wanted to do something for them, and this seemed like a good idea. So what's the best way to donate to them? Or do you want to send me a link and I can stick in the show notes? I'll send you a link. You can send it to the show notes here. It's also on my Instagram account, just Ronin on the score with on the score to Nash. And it's on my Twitter and it's on my Facebook. And that's I think at the stage bizarrely, it's if you type in Ronin Mac, Mac, L, A, U, on Google, that comes up Ronin MacGalkon, everything. And I'm pretty sure any page that you find on that have a link to the GoFundMe page as well. So it's on GoFundMe. Everything on my more gap is the name of the fundraiser. And yeah, my dream now is that the fund razor can get to £8,148 or the equivalent height of Everest and pounds, so that makes sense. Oh, so there you go. Don't worry about my fucking Patreon account this week, go and and give to an actual decent cause and I'll stick around and link down below. Rownen, it's been an eye-opening experience and I think it's challenged what a lot of people think they can do when balancing a young family, a job and many other outside interests out of cycling and it's removed a lot of people's excuses. So, for that, good job and thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to the Rownman podcast, folks. It was another whopper interview really enjoyed catching up with Ronin What an epic record what an epic challenge and I just hope that the person that beats it is one of the big hitters I hope someone goes for it and we see someone push that mark down towards seven hours It's insane. I know I'm gonna get mess just saying well I had to go up myself someday Most probably not but you never know will real love now Thanks for listening to the podcast Take one second if you're one of the people who's about to DM me this week and ask what wheel should I get? What harder should I get? What indoor training equipment do I need? I've put together a free resource section for you on that It's called roadman resources. You can check it out at roadmanresources.com I've actually added in a review kill section indoor training section in that like pimp it out the best indoor training So it's best bang for the buck in doortrain and setup that you can have. So the maths that I recommend, the fun that I recommend, the turbo trainer I recommend, the tables I recommend, it's all in there. I'm going to add to that roadman resources every week. I have it in this week and I'm the human cream as well. The link is in there if you don't know what that is. It's a boy carbonic cream that you rub into your muscles to prevent the onset of lactate acid. Absolutely classed off and that's the sort of stuff that I'm researching and bringing those recommendations to you. We're all in roadman resources. Check it out, share it with a friend. Thanks for listening folks. I'm going to be back again tomorrow for another short form of roadman books.
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