Me, Marji and coaching…

I’ve been official coach of the Marji Gesick since 2018. I’m a full time endurance coach, with the best part of 3 decades experience of coaching and preparing athletes for races and challenges just like this. As an athlete (previously retired, more on this shortly) my background was primarily in mountain biking, initially in what we now know as XCO, before developing into a long distance specialist, 24 hour solo competitor, and long distance trail record breaker. I retired from racing officially in 2008 but always dabbled (addicted to races would be a good description) and many years later, after working with Todd and 906 Adventure I tried to get back to training regularly, and racing a bit more, as part of my commitment to our shared #TRAIN4LIFE philosophy. 

FTP - Functional (I'll come back to this) Threshold Power.

I love FTP. What a metric. It took us out of the labs and onto the trails and roads to do our testing. We could do it any time, at our own convenience, we could check it regularly without having to count the cost of another trip to the nearest good sports lab to find out our lactate thresholds, and no one was going to stab holes in us and take our blood while we were testing for it. 

When I first started mountain biking all I wanted to do was keep up with my mates (well, that and not puking into the bushes from trying to keep up, but that's another story...) but very soon that progressed into trying some races, broadening my competitive horisons and starting work with a coach (because we didn't use the internet back then and info on training was sparse) 

Given that 12 hour solo is my favourite distance in mountain biking I was kinda surprised to realise I’d not done one since Torchbearer back in 2017! So far my season has been a bit up and down. I’ve still been showing up to a few races, but in-between I’ve been very thin on actually training in order to get to level I might be competitive. In 12 hour though I still have a distinct advantage against a lot of much fitter racers = I know how to pace myself better than most when it comes to a mountain bike race that lasts longer than the average working day. In addition this race course offers a very weight-friendly elevation gain per lap and is technical enough that it takes a good degree skill to ride fast, so I felt relatively optimistic of my chances.