Jean and team take a jersey at the Red Bull Timelaps

Jenny Zaremba

The Red Bull Timelaps is an epic event, held across the 25-hour period of when the clocks go back in October. The event starts at 1pm on the Saturday and finishes at 1pm on the Sunday – the goal is to ride as many laps as you can (and drafting is permitted, so teams can chain-gang but of course they are also competing against each other!) The kicker is that for the power hour of 1am until 2am (the extra hour) – laps count double!

The team event is 4 riders – you can split the timing however you want, but only one rider can be out on the course at any given time. There are also solo riders doing the whole thing on their own.

In previous years, the course has been around the Windsor Great Park. With the COVID situation, 2021 was divided between an event at the famous Goodwood racing track (lap length 3.81km) and an e-Event, with all of the timer and lap boards being run via Strava uploads.

“Success is all about coping with misery”

This quote came from the Red Bull magazine feature on the event, with sports scientist and former Olympian Greg Whyte OBE giving tips.

The challenges of the Red Bull Timelaps are classic endurance challenges:

  • Clothing choices to manage comfort though the weather and circadian rhythms of a 24-hour period of constant movement
  • Getting the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of nutrition and hydration right for your digestive system
  • Pacing choices to maximise speed across the whole duration of the event
  • Your mental approach

Jean was especially conscious that cold is her biggest enemy – she has Reynaud’s syndrome, which affects circulation and shows up with loss of feeling and function in the extremities of fingers and toes. Hence this was an element of the planning that we paid particular attention to.

It was also the first time that she had done an event that went all the way through the night. Jean plans to do overnight ultra-marathons – so this was a great event to start to learn what the impact was for her through the ‘witching hours’ of the darkest parts of the night when all of the systems in the body think that they should really be in bed sleeping rather than cycling (or running)!

Training focus

Jean’s training build-up had been very disrupted by challenges with Plantar Fasciitis. Input from clinical experts and practical observation of her pain levels led us to understand that road cycling with a high spinning cadence and wearing personalised orthotic supports inside her bike shoes was the best way to keep the pain low, and allow her to deliver her best performance.

So the build phase of the training was about training to maximise long-term power output, ensuring that Jean could maximise her aero position on the bike for the duration required, and also some fun with cadence drills to build her natural leg-spin rate. Plus strength and conditioning work to build the strength of the movement patterns and stabilisation needed, whilst releasing the areas of tightness on a regular basis.

The specific preparation was a lot around exploring what pacing choices were going to work best, as well as working through the practical aspects of:

  • What data to have on your bike computer screen (as the brain gets tired, taking in complex data gets more difficult)
  • How to manage riding in the dark, wind and rain (which were likely weather conditions for the end of October – and did indeed come to be true!)
  • Practical experimentation with different nutrition and hydration choices

A great day!

Jean loved the event – she rode 7 sessions and covered 40 laps, including getting out there for an extra session vs the plan to deliver the final laps just as the clock ran down. The team came 3rd in the Mixed Open Category and were rewarded with Red Bull jerseys as well as finishers’ medals for their excellent day out! Jean loved it so much that she is already starting to plan to do it solo next year!

Reflections and learnings

Jean said that the set-up at Goodwood had been excellent – they had been able to pull the campervan up under the covered parking and there was an endless supply of tea and coffee all of the way through.

Jean managed the cold in line with our plan – immediately after coming off each lap she would have a complete change of clothes – just dumping all of the wet ones into a box and immediately getting into multiple warm layers, hat, gloves, and dry robe. Then eating, before getting some sleep.

She said “it was not as tough mentally as I expected. I really could not see the computer very well at all, so I rode to feel. This made sense, as the weather went through different phases and there was one set of laps where I was being blown all over the track. Had I not had the experience of mountain-biking and riding in the wind in Lanzarote, I would have been overwhelmed by this – but actually, those slower laps are my proudest laps as I used my best bike-handling skills and kept getting laps on the board for the team.”

As is usual for long endurance events, Jean found that her appetite and digestion went through different phases. She stuck with savoury food almost all of the way through – finding salty snacks, rice pudding, porridge, bagels and rolls were the best for her. And that small amounts regularly, with a mixture of different foods, was the best approach. Even so, she found that it was her digestive system that was complaining the most at the end of the event and also for a good 24 to 36 hours afterwards – as life settled back into its usual rhythm.