24 Hours. 628 Miles.

I bought my first set of rollers in the 90's after seeing pro's warming up on them at Fitchburg Stage race. I've ridden rollers for indoor training almost exclusively since then. Even with the transition to Zwift, I pair my power meter and ride the rollers.

When I first thought of this as an idea, I googled who had the record for the longest ride on rollers - and with rollers, the unique thing is that you can measure the actual distance traveled with a wheel sensor. I found two records both in 1975, first set by Jack Simes, a 3 time Olympian, 6 day racer, legend, and member of the Bicycling Hall of Fame at 687 miles. Later that year Len Vreeland beat that with 717 miles.

Len has since left us, but Jack is still around and I caught up with him a few times on Facebook to see how he did it and what it was like with technology and all.

The Weyless rollers Jack rode were sponsoring the attempt, and had an odometer attached to the rollers to measure distance, and aside from my garmin wheel sensor and my 3" Kreitler drums (I think the Weyless were 4") - there's really not a lot of techological difference - nothing aero, weight, shifting, brakes etc making any kind of significant difference. (Jack rode at the NY Colisseum so didn't have the advantage of the Lord of the Rings Extended Versions on TV). Jack averaged between 106 and 112rpms for his attempt - averaging 41 mph. He rode an hour on pace, and then would take a 'rolling' 5 min break for food water, etc. Every three hours he would take 15 min off the bike. By 11:30 at night he had the previous record broken, so he got off the bike, got sleep and came back at 6am to finish the ride off for the press, etc.

I'd come about my 628 miles with a little more of a struggle (A LOT MORE) than what Jack describes, and honestly, I'm no Olympian and if there's something to be learned here, is that Jack and the people that raced bikes 40-50 years ago deserve a lot of respect and you put them on a bike today in their prime, they'd kick your ass. I'm still struggling to come to grips with a 110rpm cadence for that amount of time

About a month ago, I did a trial run with my wheel sensor on my bike setup - I rode TT wheels and put a 58t chainring on (172.5/11-34 fwiw). Most of my ride was in the 12-14T cogs on the cassette. During the trial run I was hitting 32-34 mph with about 170 watts of power.

When I started yesterday, I mean Friday, (I lost a day somewhere), immediately I knew I was going to have a problem with the mileage, as the power to keep 32-35 miles and hour was much higher, and as I tried to stay in that range for as long as I could, I started to see HR creep that I knew was going to be unsustainable. I don't know if there was something fluky with the speed sensor, but it is what it is.

If you look at my ride, you'll see a good amount of time off the bike - at some point I settled into a routine of riding to the top of the hour and then stepping off for about 5 min. You do this for 24 hours and it adds up to 2 hours off the bike.

About 8-10 hours in, it started to set in that I wasn't even close to halfway and still had 14-16 hours left to ride and it was really demoralizing. I took it one hour at a time though, and eventually chiseled away at the time -it's like a 20 minute interval except hours instead of minutes.

Nutrition was a mixture of Neversecond C90 - mixed at double strength and straight unflavored maltodextrine in my second bottle. My plan was about every 4 hours to drink a high calorie recovery mix that had Carbs, Fat and Protein mixed with coconut milk and this provided another option for fuel and variety. I also wore a USWE pack for plain water.

At some point into the ride - 6-8 hours in - I realized I was overcooking the carb mix and my stomach was in trouble. My plan was to try to average about 95g of carb per hour, including the recovery drink, but I think more needs to be done figuring out what my optimal amounts for this are- I think for endurance efforts (as opposed to z4-5 race efforts) the g/hr is probably way lower than 90 for me at this point. I adjusted, got my stomach under control, and the power came back. Again, part of this journey was to dial in these aspects of these kinds of efforts.

Anyhow, I knew the math pretty well - I wasn't getting to 687, even with 12 hours to go, but was determined to put a good ride together and be solidly above 600 miles by the end.

A bunch of my Visit Pittsburgh teammates were coming over at 2pm for the last two hours of the ride, and my wife was gracious enough to host them while I was riding (in addition to continually refilling/cleaning bottles, and making sure I had everything I needed on the bike). I couldn't have done it without her support.

I had a revised mini-goal of hitting 600 miles before they showed up at 2pm, but didn't really hit that, and by the time they were here, I took a little pressure off the pedals and engaged in some chit-chat, a welcome distraction from the monotony. We counted down the last minutes and seconds that was that. 628.49 miles as registered by the wheel sensor. I cross recorded in Zwift for the fun of it - Tempus Fugit - a little over 480 miles once Zwift's air drag algorithm had its way.

That is not something I'm terribly interested in doing again anytime soon, and as I'm writing this- I would say never again. Riding outside even for longer distances is infinitely more fun.