How I KOM'd Paris X

This past Saturday I showed up to Paris X, an event put on by Tim Thome, Hincapie Ambassador, where riders are challenged to ascend Paris Mountain ten times. It is quite the challenge! I did not know when I arrived that Tim and Jay Baker would challenge me to attempt taking the KOM set by Jeff Michenfelder the day before. I asked what Jeff's time was and was told it was 2 hours and 54 minutes or 174 minutes. I did some quick calculating in my head and realized I'd have to ascend and descend the mountain around 17 minutes per lap, a pace that is relatively quick. This was going to be a difficult task with a lot of other riders on the mountain and traffic on a Saturday morning. I happened to have a bag with bottles and ride food at the bottom of the mountain, so I figured I'd at least give the challenge a try.

I knew the total ascent time was going to be around 2 hours, so I knew I could hold tempo (around 80%-85% of my functional threshold power) without cracking. Whenever you start a long effort like this you want to go out that a pace that is relatively easy for you. If you do your first efforts too hard you will remove all the glycogen from your muscles, so the effort will become very painful very early, and you risk cracking. There will also be a mental toll on you where you know you have to complete a lot more efforts when you are already sore. That makes it even easier to give up! As I did my first few efforts I was always one to three minutes behind my pacing strategy, but I did not panic and kept on my pacing.

After I finished the first four efforts I knew I had about an hour and 15 minutes left of ascending. My legs did not hurt at this point, so I decided to increase my effort to around 90% of my functional threshold power (FTP). I stopped at the bottom after my fifth effort for my only stop to take on two more bottles and two brownies. When you do an effort like this you want to keep stopping to a minimum because the clock never stops ticking. With my fuel onboard I kept the sixth effort to around 90% of my FTP. After the sixth effort I still felt ok, so I increased the pace a little more for the next two efforts. I still felt good for the final two efforts, so I increased the pace to close to my FTP. I finally got on track with my pacing goal at the start of my final effort. By using this pacing strategy my legs didn't really hurt too much until the final 4-5 minutes of my ninth effort, and they hurt roughly the entire tenth effort. I ended up beating the previous KOM by about six minutes, which I do not consider too much for a roughly three hour duration.

You can see from laps 2-10 that as the effort goes on I increase my pace

You can use a similar pacing strategy for yourself so you can hurt the least and achieve your best performance for a long effort. You just need to know your FTP and be able to ride a lot of tempo! Here is a link to my activity on Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/1902405495