

Don’t forget to pack cycling socks, cycling cap, shoes, gloves and a rain jacket. Registered riders receive an Empire State Ride custom cycling jersey to wear on the first and last day of the weeklong ride. High visibility gear! We suggest packing a fresh pair of cycling shorts and jersey for each day. Riders have completed Empire State Ride on touring and fitness bikes with clip-in or flat-pedal shoes. Many of our riders prefer to clip into pedals with cycling shoes, which allows for power on both upstroke and downstroke. Before registering, please call us at 71 to confirm your type of e-bike and charging requirements. Owners are responsible for charging the batteries. E-bikes are charged each night at the campsite. E-bikes will need extender batteries to achieve the daily 70+ miles per day. We cannot accommodate throttle-assist e-bikes. Regardless of the make and model of your bike, we highly recommend you take your bike to a local bike shop for a fitting and tune up before setting out on this adventure.įor Empire State Ride, we allow Class 1 and Class 2, pedal-assist road or touring bikes. Some riders opt for a touring bike, which is heavier but built for long distance riding with gear. Road bikes are light weight, have a shifting system to take on distance and hills, narrow tires for pavement and precision braking systems. The bottom line is that if you follow one of the three ESR training plans and incorporate the pedaling efficiency training you will have trained as well as you can for hills in flat terrain.Ī road bike is the best type of bicycle to ride during Empire State Ride. Keep your Rate of Perceived Exertion at 6-7 and practice eliminating the dead spots in your pedal stroke. Pick a 5-10min stretch of road, start slow and gradually increase your speed until you find the right pace for you. You can practice this on flat terrain with a headwind. Shift to a lighter gear then if at some point you think you can go a little harder do it in small increments, one gear at a time, at a pace that you can sustain over the top and for the first 10 feet of the downhill on the other side. The right way to approach a hill is to keep your intensity at the same level as you were on the flats and allow the hill to slow you down. Invariably, as we ride side by side, as soon as we hit the hill they accelerate and within a few seconds are a bike length ahead of me. When I do a climbing camp with cyclists the first thing I do is to challenge them to go up a hill as slow as I do. Every hill provides a prize at the end, the fun descent!įirst rule of climbing is start easy! Biggest mistake is to start too fast, blow up halfway up and rest at the top.

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So first we have to change our mindset and see hills as an opportunity to practice our pedaling and learn how to ride them with skill. I recently moved to Florida from CO and before I chose where to live here I did a recon to find the hilliest area in the state. If you dread the hills you’re missing out on one of the most enjoyable aspects of cycling. Don’t worry about speed, keep the intensity low and focus on maintaining effective force on the pedals from 12-7 around the crank. To mimic the muscular endurance demands of climbing, ride into a headwind during your Endurance Miles with a bigger gear than you normally would choose. That will teach you how to maintain torque on the pedals. And if you want to take it to the next level, go ride in a sandy trail. Personally I like headwinds because it gives me an opportunity to work on my pedaling mechanics. Use headwinds to improve your pedaling mechanics. The good news is that this is very trainable in flat terrain. Improving your pedaling efficiency will make the hills and headwinds a whole lot easier. Unpacking this further, if you have a dead spots in your pedal stroke you will struggle when the road goes up or when there is a significant headwind. A dead spot is where pedaling power (torque) is lost when sub-optimally shifting from one movement pattern to another.

So if you have big dead spots in your pedaling cycle you are essentially accelerating during every revolution of the pedal stroke. It takes more energy to accelerate a bicycle that it does to keep it at a steady speed.
