Badlands: How Do You Prepare for an 800-Kilometer Race?

Words and Photography by Chris Mehlman

Imagine being 700-kilometers into an 800-kilometer race. It’s difficult to fathom what that would feel like. Most humans enjoy the familiar: home, routine, and certainty. For this reason, entering into an event as long as Badlands is daunting, and one’s natural inclination is to try to create that familiarity so you go in with confidence. In most races such as XCO or road, you want to know what the course is like, practice lines, prepare for the intensity through intervals, and visualize how you will feel at any given point in the race.

For Badlands, this is not how I prepare. Part of the fun is the unknown elements of the experience, and practically, rehearsing a race that long is not physically or mentally beneficial or even possible. Many cyclists like to think of their in-race energy as a box of matches. You only have so many to use before your legs give in. In ultra racing, I like to think of the season as a box of matches. Your body and mind only have so many long efforts in them before they give out. Using up some of those matches to perform a practice run of a race the length of Badlands would physically wreck you and prevent you from doing the consistent training needed to progress, and would mentally drain the precious energy you need to battle through the tough moments of the actual race. Sometimes, it’s better to not know.

Because of this, my preparation looks rather standard. Here’s how I’ve gotten my body and mind ready.

Badlands: The Physical Side

Training for an event like Badlands does require a lot of volume, but I’ve not done anything I would not normally do. I typically ride 20-25 hours per week with 2-3 interval days (more on this later), and my longest rides are usually 6 hours. Beyond a certain point, there are diminishing returns on your physical investment. You just get tired and don’t create much extra training stimulus. 

My intervals have looked rather like those of any other athlete because I have not only been training for this event. I’ve been doing threshold, tempo, torque efforts, and VO2. On paper, Badlands is an endurance effort just below your LT1 if you pace it well. You should never be touching anything above your LT2 (roughly what some call your FTP). What this means is you likely could just ride a lot of endurance and be fine. At the end of the day, consistency is what matters in training. The worst approach is to jump from one fad to another or train so intensely one week that it prevents you from consistently progressing the next. The concept of progressive overload is key: you overload your body just enough, let it recover to adapt, then bump up the load a bit so you continue to slightly overload it. 

I’ll be honest that training for this sort of event is my favorite. I don’t enjoy VO2 intervals. I love long rides and long sustained intervals. Coincidence? I think not.

Long events like Badlands are as much about fueling as they are about fitness, and training your gut to handle a high fuel load over a long effort like that is like training a muscle. I’m lucky that this adaptation work is naturally embedded in more normal riding and racing. I consume 150 grams of carbohydrates per hour in shorter races (3 Carbs Fuel gels) and a lot of solid food on endurance rides to get my body used to absorbing different forms of sustenance while pedaling hard. If I were coming from zero experience with fueling, I’d take the same approach to training my legs and lungs: steady progression. On easy days, I’d increase my intake just up to what I can sustain, practice for a few days as I increase intensity, and then once I’m adapted to that, push up the intake a bit more. It’s also important in ultra races like this to be flexible. I won’t have stores stocked with energy gels along the way, so I need to be used to eating bars, candy, sandwiches, and whatever else I can find.

Badlands: The Mental Side

Just as Badlands is as much a fueling competition as it is a fitness one, it’s also a 40+ hour battle with your mind. Badlands does not allow drafting, so at best, your only company is what’s in your headphones. I do not normally race with headphones, so my company will be me, myself, and I. I work with Enso Mental Performance on how to handle the dark moments of ultra racing. One of the unique challenges of races this long is that riders experience waves of positive and negative mental states. One moment, you might be on top of the world and feeling as though you can ride forever, and less than five minutes later, you can be crawling, wishing you were anywhere but there. In most races, this plunge can be a sign of low glycogen stores (the dreaded bonk), which is hard to come back from, but in ultra racing, you can be as well-fueled as possible and still feel a level of emptiness that is as much mental as it is physical. The bad news is that the mental aspect of this feeling means you can easily continue down that negative spiral. The good news is that you can and likely will come out of it at some point.

Over the course of long events, you have to learn that there will be dark moments that come and go, but you must have confidence that you will come out from the depths, and maintaining a positive mental state as much as possible will help make the darkness fleeting. Over the course of the race, your average mental state will drop. Unlike short races, where the intensity and pain come fast, ultra racing starts off easy, but in the back of your mind, you know that the effort will start to take hold, slowly wrapping its tentacles around you and squeezing. The diagram below is the best way I can illustrate this feeling. The microcycles will occur throughout, but the general trend–physically and mentally–is downward.

The key to slowing this decline, beyond fueling and pacing, is entirely mental. Sports psychologists often say “focus on what you can control,” which can sound like a rather token statement. The beauty of ultra racing, however, is that the aspect of the race you do have control over–the mental side–is even more important than in shorter events.

One Key Thing

At the end of the day, races like this are impossible to perfectly prepare for. There’s no way to predict what’s going to happen over 800 kilometers, but almost certainly, something will not go smoothly. If there are a few things more important than anything else, they are staying calm, remaining positive, and using your problem-solving skills. Fitness alone doesn’t win these races, and if I had to pick, I’d take a strong mindset over a perfectly-fit body.