B2VT 2025
A week ago, I participated in a 242 km bike ride from 
Bedford to the Harpoon Brewery in Windsor. This was an organized event with about 700 people registered to ride it. I’ve done a number of group rides in the past, but never a major event like this, so I’m going to brain-dump about it. (As a brain-dump, it is not as organized as it could be. Shrug.)
This was not a race, so there is no official timekeeping or ranking.
TL;DR: I rode 242 km in 11 hours and 8 minutes and I lived to tell the tale.
The Course
The full course was a one-way 242 km (150 mile) route with four official rest stops with things to eat and drink. The less insane riders signed up for truncated rides that followed the same route and also ended in Windsor, but skipped the beginning. There was a 182 km option that started at the first rest stop and a 108 km option that started at the second rest stop. Since I did the full ride, I’m going to ignore the shorter options.
The above link to RideWithGPS has the whole course and you can zoom around to your heart’s content, but the gist of it is:
Rest Stops, Food, Drinks
The four official rest stops were at 58 km, 132 km, 169 km, and 220 km. The route passed through a number of towns so it was possible to stop at a convenience store and buy whatever one may have needed (at least in theory).
Each rest stop was well-stocked, so I didn’t need to buy anything from any shops along the way.
There was water, Gatorade, and already-prepared Maurten’s drink mix, as well as a variety of sports nutrition “foods”. There were many Maurten gels and bars, GU gels, stroopwafels, bananas, and pickle slices with pickle juice.
Maurten was one of the sponsors, so there was a ton of their products. I tried their various items during training rides, and so I knew what I liked (their Solid 160 bars) and what I found weird (the drink mix and gels, which I describe as runny and chunky slime, respectively).
My plan was to sustain myself off the Maurten bars and some GU gels I brought along because I didn’t know they were also going to be available. I ended up eating the bars (as planned). I tried a few B2VT-provided GU gel flavors I haven’t tried before (they were fine) and a coconut-flavored stroopwafel (a heresy, IMO). I also devoured a number of bananas and enjoyed the pickles with juice. Drink-wise, I had a bottle of Gatorade and a bottle of water with electrolytes. At each stop, I topped off the Gatorade bottle with more Gatorade, and refilled the other bottle with water and added an electrolyte tablet.
The one item I wish they had at the first 3 stops: hot coffee.
With the exception of the second rest stop, I never had to wait more than 30 seconds to get whatever I needed. At the second stop, I think I just got unlucky, and I arrived at a busy time. I spent about 5 minutes in the line, but I didn’t really care. I still had plenty of time and there was John (one of the other riders that I met a few months ago during a training ride) to chat with while waiting.
In addition to the official rest stops, I stopped twice on the way to stretch and eat some of the stuff I had on me. The first extra stop was by the Winchester, NH post office or at about 111 km. The second extra stop was at the last intersection before the climb around Ascutney which conveniently was at 200 km.
Since I’m on the topic of food, the finish had real food—grilled chicken, burgers, hot dogs, etc. I didn’t have much time before my bus back to Bedford left, so I didn’t get to try the chicken. The burgers and hot dogs were a nice change of flavor from the day of consuming variously-packaged sugars and not much else.
Mechanics
Conte’s Bike Shop (also a sponsor) had a few mechanics provide support to anyone who had issues with their bikes. They’d stay at a rest stop, do their magic, and eventually drive to the next stop helping anyone along the way. They easily put in 12 hours of work that day.
Thankfully, I didn’t have any mechanical issues and didn’t need their services.
Weather
Given the time and distance involved, it is no surprise that the weather at the start and finish was quite different. The good news was that the weather steadily improved throughout the ride. The bad news was that it started rather poor—moderate rain. As a result, everyone got thoroughly soaked in the first 20 km. Rain showers and wet roads (at times it wasn’t clear if there is rain or if it’s just road spray) were pretty standard fare until the second rest stop. Between the second and third stops, the roads got progressively drier. By the 4th stop, the weather was positively nice.
None of this was a surprise. Even though the weather forecasts were uncertain about the details, my general expectation was right. As a side note, I find MeteoBlue’s multi-model and ensemble forecasts quite useful when the distilled-to-a-handful-of-numbers forecasts are uncertain. For example, I don’t care if it is going to be 13°C or 15°C when on the bike. I’ll expect it to be chilly. This is, however, a very large range for the single-number temperature forecast and so it’ll be labeled as uncertain. Similarly, I don’t care if I encounter 10 mm or 15 mm of rain in an hour. I’ll be wet either way.
I kept checking the forecasts as soon as they covered the day of the event. After a few days, I got tired of trying to load up multiple pages and correlating them. I wrote a hacky script that uses MeteoBlue’s API to fetch the hourly forecast for the day, and generate a big table with as much (relevant) information as possible.
You can see the generated table with the (now historical) forecast yourself. I generated this one at 03:32—so, about 2 hours before I started.
Each location-hour pair shows what MeteoBlue calls RainSpot, an icon with cloud cover and rain, the wind direction and speed (along with the headwind component), the temperature, and the humidity.
I was planning to better visualize the temperature and humidity and to calculate the headwind along more points along the path, but I got distracted with other preparations.
Temperature-wise, it was a similar story. Bad (chilly) in the beginning and nice (warm but not too warm) at the end.
Clothing
The weather made it extra difficult to plan what to wear. I think I ended up slightly under-dressed in the beginning, but just about right at the end (or possibly a smidge over-dressed). I wore: bib shorts, shoe covers, a short-sleeved polyester shirt, and the official B2VT short-sleeved jersey.
The shoe covers worked well, until they slid down just enough to reveal the top of the socks. At that point it was game over—the socks wicked all the water in the world right into my shoes. So, of the 242 km I had wet feet for about 220 km. Sigh. I should have packed spare socks into the extra bag that the organizers delivered to rest stop 2 (and then to the finish). They wouldn’t have dried out my shoes, but it would have provided a little more comfort at least temporarily.
For parts of the ride, I employed 2 extra items: a plastic trash bag and aluminum foil.
Between the first rest stop and the 200 km break, I wore a plastic trash bag between the jersey and the shirt. While this wasn’t perfect, it definitely helped me not freeze on the long-ish descents and stay reasonably warm at other times. I probably should have put it on before starting, but I had (unreasonably) hoped that it wouldn’t actively rain.
At the second rest stop, I lined my (well-ventilated) helmet with aluminum foil to keep my head warm. When I took it off, my head was a little bit sweaty. In other words, it worked quite well. As a side note, just before I took the foil out at the third rest stop, multiple people at the stop asked me what it was for and whether it worked.
Pacing & Time Geekery
Needless to say, it was a very long day.
My goal was to get to the finish line before it closed at 18:30. So, I came up with a pessimistic timeline that got me to the finish with 23 minutes to spare. I assumed that my average speed would decrease over time as I got progressively more tired—starting off at 26 km/h and crossing the finish line at 18 km/h. I also assumed that I’d go up the 3 major climbs at a snail’s pace of 10 km/h and that I’d spend progressively more time at the stops.
Well, I was guessing at the speeds based on previous experience. The actual plan was to stay in my power zone 2 (144–195W) no matter what the terrain was like. I was willing to go a little bit harder on occasion to stay in someone’s draft, but any sort of solo effort would be in zone 2.
I signed up for the 15 miles/hour pace group (about 24 km/h), which meant that I would start between 5:00 and 5:30 in the morning. I hoped to start at 5:00 but calculated based on 5:30 start time.
Here’s my plan (note that the fourth stop moved from 218 to 220 km few days before the event, and I didn’t bother re-adjusting the plan):
Time of Day Time
Dist In Out In Out
Start 0 N/A 05:30 N/A 00:00
Ashby climb 51 07:27 08:09 01:57 02:39
#1 58 08:09 08:24 02:39 02:54
Hinsdale climb 121 10:55 11:37 05:25 06:07
#2 132 11:37 11:57 06:07 06:27
#3 168 13:35 13:55 08:05 08:25
Ascutney climb 198 15:21 16:15 09:51 10:45
#4 218 16:25 16:50 10:55 11:20
Finish 241 18:07 N/A 12:37 N/A
To have a reference handy, I taped the rest stop distances and expected “out” times to my top-tube:
(After I started writing it, I realized that the start line was totally useless and I should have skipped it. That extra space could have been used for the expected finish time.)
So, how did I do in reality?
Well, I didn’t want to rush in the morning so I ended up starting at 5:30 instead of the planned for 5:00. Oh well.
Until the 4th stop, it felt like I was about 30 minutes ahead of (worst case) schedule, but when I got to the 4th stop I realized that I had a ton of extra time. Regardless, I didn’t delay and headed out toward the finish. I was really surprised that I managed to finish it in just over 11 hours.
Here’s a table comparing the planned (worst case) with the actual times along with deltas between the two.
Planned Actual Delta
Dist In Out In Out In Out
Start 0 N/A 00:00 N/A 00:00 N/A +0:00
Ashby climb 51 01:57 02:39 01:53 02:17 -0:04 -0:22
#1 58 02:39 02:54 02:17 02:33 -0:22 -0:21
Hinsdale climb 121 05:25 06:07 04:59 05:41 -0:26 -0:26
#2 132 06:07 06:27 05:41 06:10 -0:26 -0:17
#3 168 08:05 08:25 07:34 07:55 -0:31 -0:30
Ascutney climb 198 09:51 10:45 09:13 09:37 -0:38 -1:08
#4 218 10:55 11:20 10:08 10:20 -0:47 -1:00
Finish 241 12:37 N/A 11:08 N/A -1:29 N/A
It is interesting to see that I spent 1h18m at the rest stops (16, 29, 21, and 12 minutes), while I planned for 1h20m (15, 20, 20, and 25 minutes). If I factor in the two pauses I did on my own (3 minutes at 111 km and 9 minutes at 200 km), I spent 1h30m stopped. I knew I was ahead of schedule, and so I didn’t rush at the stops as rushing tends to lead to errors that take more time to rectify than not-rushing would have taken.
I’m also happy to see that my 10 km/h semi-arbitrary estimate for the climbs worked well enough on the first climb and was spot on for the second. The third climb wasn’t as bad, but I stuck with the same estimated speed because I assumed I’d be much more fatigued than I was.
To have a better idea about my average speed after the ride, I plotted my raw speed as well as cumulative average speed that’s reset every time I stop. (In other words, it is the average speed I’d see on the Garmin at any given point in time if I pressed the lap button every time I stopped.) The x-axis is time in minutes, and the y-axis is generally km/h (the exception being the green line which is just the orange line converted to miles per hour).
The average line is 21.7 km/h which is the distance over total elapsed time (11:08). If I ignore all the stopped time and look at only the moving time (9:43), the average speed ends up being 24.9 km/h. Nice!
Power-wise, I did reasonably well. I spent almost 2/3 of the time in zones 1 and 2. I spent a bit more time in zone 3 than I expected, but a large fraction of that is right around 200W. 200 is a number that’s a whole lot easier to remember while riding and so I treat it as the top of my zone 2.
Fatigue & Other Riders
I knew what to expect (more or less) over the first 2/3 of the ride as my longest ride before was 163 km. In many ways, it felt as I expected and in some ways it was a very different ride.
At the third rest stop (168 km), I felt a bit less drained than I expected. I’m guessing that’s because I actively tried to go very easy—to make sure I had something left in me for the last 70 km.
Sitting on the saddle felt as I expected: slowly getting less and less enjoyable but still ok. It is rather annoying that at times one has to choose between drafting and getting out of the saddle for comfort.
What was very different was the “mental progress bar”. Somehow, 160 km feels worse if you are planning to do 163 km than if you are planning to do 242 km. It’s like the mind calibrates the sensations based on the expected distance. Leaving the third rest stop felt like venturing into the unknown. Passing 200 km felt exciting—first time I’ve ever seen a three digit distance starting with anything other than a 1 and only 42 km left to the finish! Leaving the fourth rest stop felt surprisingly good because there were only 22 km left and tons of time to do it in.
In general, I was completely shameless about drafting. If you passed me anywhere except a bigger uphill, I’d hop onto your wheel and stay for as long as possible.
Between about 185–200 km, I was following one such group of riders. This is when I really noticed how tired and sore some people got by this point. One of them got out of the saddle every 30–60 seconds. I don’t blame him, but following him was extra hard since every time he’d get up, he’d ever-so-slightly slow down. That group as a whole was a little incohesive at that point. I tried to help bring a little bit of order to the chaos by taking a pull, but it didn’t help enough for my taste. So, as we got to the intersection right before the climb around Mount Ascutney, I let them go and took a break to celebrate reaching 200 km with some well-earned crackers.
After the long and steady climb from that intersection, the terrain is mostly flat. This is when I noticed another rider’s fatigue. As I passed him solo, he jumped onto my wheel. After a minute or two, he asked me if I knew how much further it is. I found this a bit peculiar—knowing how far one has gone or how much is left is something I spent hours thinking about. I gave him how far I’ve gone (216 km), how long the course is (240 km), did quick & dirty math to give him an idea what’s left, and I threw in that the rest stop is in about 3 km. Then about a minute later, I realized that he dropped while I continued at 200W.
After the mostly flat part, there was a steep but relatively short uphill to the fourth rest stop. This is when I stopped caring about being quite so religious about sticking to 200W max. Instead of spinning up it, I got out of the saddle and went at a more natural-for-me climbing pace (which isn’t sustainable long term). To my surprise, my legs felt fine! Well, it was not quite a surprise since I know that my aerobic ability is (relatively speaking) worse than my anaerobic ability, but it was nice to see that I could still do a bigger effort even after about 5000 kJ of work.
One additional observation I have about long non-solo events like this is that unless you show up with a group of people that will ride together, it is only a matter of time before everyone spreads out based on their preferred pace and you end up solo. People (perhaps correctly) place greater value on sticking to their own pace instead of pushing closer to their limit to keep up with faster people and therefore finishing sooner. I noticed this during the last B2VT training ride and saw it happen again during the real ride. This is much different from the Sunday group rides I’ve attended where people use as much effort as needed to stay with the group.
Conclusion
Overall I’m happy I tried to do this and that I finished. My previous longest-ride was 163 km, so this was 48% longer and therefore it was nice to see that I could do this if I wanted to. Which brings up the obvious question—will I do this again? At least at the moment, my answer is no. Getting ready for a long ride like that takes long rides, and long rides (even something like 5–6 hours) are harder to fit into my schedule, which includes work and plenty of other hobbies. So, at least for the foreseeable future, I’ll stick to 2–2.5 hour rides max with an occasional 100 km.
