Ken Harris broke the UCI Masters 40-45 hour record on September 23rd. Mike Green has an excellent interview with Ken on the CRCA site. We emailed a few more questions to Ken. (All photos courtesy Matt Koschara)

DS: Graeme Obree said that he prepared for his hour attempt record by – riding hard for an hour a few times a week. Was your approach this simplistic? What did you do specifically to be ready?

KH: I probably did fewer than 10 full-on hour intervals during the season. Not only is it taxing, but if you put out a wattage that’s less than you’d want, you’re left with that bad number eating at you. Hour record attempts fail more often than they succeed, so I was fairly motivated to be absolutely sure what kind of power I needed to hold, and know that I could hold the position. That meant of lot of testing on the track. Testing at Kissena and testing at T-town, and producing comparison charts, and then retesting to confirm, then testing different equipment and tweaking the position. With a track SRM, you have the problem that when you back-pedal to stop, the strain on the spider changes, and so, following the interval, you can’t confirm that the zeroing was right. Which means more testing to be able to chuck the off-lying data. No one is going to do this without being or becoming obsessive about the details.

The simple part was that I was just looking for a number: how many watts did I need to hold to break the record by a respectable distance under the worst circumstances, and then add 10% to that and do that indoors. Last year, I thought that number was going to be over 400. I managed to get myself slicker, so it was about 20 watts less. Specifically, what did I do to get an FTP of 380w? Lots of negative intervals, mainly very short, like 20/10 seconds for ten minutes, and 5/1 minute times ten in row. My heart rate tends to get in a rut, and the negative intervals help push it up and over.

DS: Did this training mean sacrificing your season on the road?

KH: Anyone who was looking would have noticed that I don’t race that well out of the Park, or Floyd Bennett, or technical crits. So the only sacrifice was racing more conservatively in order to lessen the chance of breaking something. I might have missed out on a few primes. Racing conservatively is not a lot of fun, so I guess that’s a sacrifice. I suppose I gave up the relatively easy training you get in races, and instead had to beat the crap out of myself indoors. But that’s just discipline. An ipod helps.

DS: What equipment could you use/not use in your attempt and why?

First off, USAC told me the SRM was fine, as long as I couldn’t see the readout. There wasn’t any convenient way to wire it behind the saddle, so I pulled it off and made that a non-issue. It’s pretty obvious that Jason Austin had his running during his failed attempt last January – you can see the wire hanging from his aerobars in the photos. The rules must be different for the antipodians.  No biggie – data is only useful going forward.  I ended up using 177.5’s – old campy stradas with the inner ring ledge cut off – which are the perfect length to flip 4 cm sponges at 46 kph when the BB drop is 6 cm.

I changed from my normal San Marco Regal to an Adamo split-style saddle. Nosing-up on a Regal for an hour was just too much at Kissena. I did one hour like that. Words fail to describe the pain. I spent the last 15 minutes out of the saddle on that practice run. The Adamo helps with making the 5cm setback from the bottom bracket. The saddle is just legal at 24 cm in length.

I used Oval bars and fork. I probably could have been more clever with the bars, but I never got around to it. I used the jetstream fork mainly because it had a centimeter less rake than the cervelo supplied fork. I like long stems and short rakes.

I had a zipp 808 pair with a 900 disk. I tried putting weight on the disk for a flywheel-effect – I got over 2 kilos of lead on it at the rim. It rode rather nicely, but it cost about 4-6 watts in the air, which was too much.

I got a Cervelo P3C for the attempt. It shaved 7-8 watts over the Jamis I’ve been riding all year. The problem with the Cervelo is that angles and the BB drop make it only usable for this kind of event. There might be a faster frame, but I don’t see how you could make it much faster. Maybe better integration of the aerobars into the head tube.

There are so many horror stories of commissaires declaring that this or that piece of equipment to be illegal at the line, that wanted to have everything be name-brand and standard. It’s the “at the line part” which can bug you out, so I got it all cleared ahead of time.

AS: What was your gearing and your cadence?

KH: 54×14, which worked out to about 95 rpm. If it weren’t so cold, I would have gone up to 55 in the front.  In testing, I self-select a slower cadence, but then I suffer for it in the nasty 30-40 minute part of the effort.

AS: Why’d you have to take off your SRM? Was it considered a pacing tool?

KH: No explanation. I can only guess that’s the problem. You also only get one person trackside to call out your splits.  The rules seem arbitrary. Like with my position: I can’t go higher up and stay within 80 cm from the BB.  If I put the saddle farther back, I can’t breathe.  If I go farther forward, I won’t be able hold the bars even in the lowest possible position.  There’s really not much more than 2 cm I could move fore-aft, up-down, and still ride a bike that meets measurements. 6’2″, 185, with normal limb lengths – it shouldn’t be that tight. I guess it’s worth the price to keep the world safe from funny-bikes.

AS: How’d you arrive at your position? Did you do any quantitative testing on the road or track?

KH: Quantitatively, I played with the position at Kissena and looked for the watts to drop at a given speed. Again, there’s not a lot of room for me to move with the rules as they are. I took some video once, and looked at photos, and applied what I saw. I didn’t play with moving my forearms out of horizontal. I tried that once, but I could feel the air on my face getting messy. Not a good thing. I bet if you could lean your face or chin on your wrists, that would be very fast.  Also, going off horizontal is just a another potential argument to have at the start, so I went perfectly level with my forearms.

AS: Seems the overarching takeaway from this is that this was as much a mental as a physical challenge. Obree and Boardman were also very cerebral. Is that what appealed to you? Can a dumb rider do this?

KH: As to whether a “dumb rider” could do this: sure, if they’re strong. I’m going to exploit your use of the word ‘dumb’ – my definition of a ‘dumb rider’ would be someone who does well at TT’s, but doesn’t understand when to break or bridge or begin a sprint and generally tows the field. Dumb is working on only your strengths, not your weaknesses. Dumb is not knowing where to be in the field to avoiding going down. The hour is perfect for a ‘dumb rider’ who is super-intelligent and finds the social dimension of bike races confusing. A dumb rider is the opposite of a shrewd rider. Both kinds have set hour records. It seems the unifying factors are strong riders who have a deep need to challenge themselves and are detail obsessive.

I’ve felt that I’ve almost always underperformed in time trials, which is a matter of attitude. That’s why this was a challenge. At the 2007 masters nationals, I was 6th and 9th respectively in the kilo and pursuit, and then I lapped the field in the points race against those same riders. Looking at the data, it took a little more than 3k to catch them, and if I had put out that effort two days earlier, I would have had the winning time in the pursuit. So yes, absolutely, for me it was a mental challenge not to get tangled in my own thoughts and self conceptions, because the longer I have to think, and the fewer people chasing me, the slower I seem to go. Pain hurts, and in the absence of a chase, I tend to fill it with meaning, which just gets in the way.

AS: The use of pacing aids seems so arbitrary. You can’t use an SRM, you can’t chase a laser dot around the track, but you can get splits. Can you even imagine an hour totally devoid of references?

KH: I have to guess that this comes down to precedent. If there can be a rule about some aspect of the event, I suppose they’ll make one. That’s part of the essence of a bureaucratic agency. The less sense the rule makes, the more conservatively it’s likely to be enforced.

I could see riding either A) not knowing your time remaining, or B) not knowing if you’re up or down from your schedule.  Both, no way.  You would have to pay attention to time, not just pace.  If that were the rule, I would have been training with an alarm and removed any time reference from view, in order to internalize a clock.   Regardless, the prospect seems maddening.  It would probably make for some good stories, though: riders abandoning with a minute to go, “altered states”-like transformations….

 

AS: Did you come out of the aerobars at all? I’d imagine that your neck, back, and shoulders would eventually hurt as much as your legs.

KH: I stood for about 100 meters with 10 minutes remaining. I got a little too numb.  It’s week later, and my back still hurts.  My position favors aerodynamics over power. I’ve convinced myself that I’ll eventually adapt to it.

 

AS: I’ve been almost unable to walk after 40k TT’s, and I’m pushing with much less force than you. How much pain were you in afterwards?

KH: With 15 minutes to go, I was about a lap up on the record. I couldn’t go much faster, but I wasn’t having problems holding pace. It hurt, but I just had to focus on holding pace. I didn’t get a bell, so I went an extra lap, and that was probably my fastest. Once I got out of the saddle to slow down the bike…just blinding pain. I couldn’t sit back down. I had to concentrate to get the bike stopped without crashing. It took me about five minutes to get up off the grass. All of which shows I probably could have gone farther. Perhaps I was a bit lazy. I didn’t intend to destroy the old record, just put a respectable amount on it. That said, I still hurt a week later.