“In the grand scheme of things, it’s only three and a half hours…so yeah, it was actually all right.”
Casper von Folsach, who this week rode his road bike into the record books, with what is believed to be the fastest 100-mile effort ever recorded on a non-time trial bike, isn’t one to blow his own trumpet too loudly. So we’ll have to do it for him.
Von Folsach. a 33-year-old road and track cyclist, rode for UCI Continental teams including ColoQuick and Giant–Castelli during his professional career. He also competed at the 2012 Olympics for Denmark in the men’s team pursuit, and is now a performance coach for Uno-X Mobility.
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Now, he rides for WattShop CC. And, fittingly, Von Folsach can still crank out the watts when he wants to. On Sunday, riding on the CTT’s R100/9 course in Monmouthshire, he did just that, smashing a 100-mile ride in an extraordinary time of 3:27:08.
So, what is it really like to maintain maximum effort for ‘only’ three and a half hours?
“Even for the hour record, you shouldn’t go out at a pace that feels maximal, and that’s definitely true for three and a half hours,” he explains. “It should feel quite manageable. I deliberately wanted to try and ramp it up, rather than like dive off a cliff. It’s just a much nicer way to do it.”
“It slowly starts to creep up on you, like after an hour and a half,” Von Folsach admitted. “Then you’re like, ‘Oh, it actually isn’t as easy doing 300 watts as it was in the beginning’. With around half an hour to go, I could start to feel that if I did a sprint now, I would cramp up… [it felt] like my muscles are telling me that what I’m doing right now is not that that’s not something they’re used to.”
Even at the end of his record-setting century, the Dane feels like he could have continued powering on.
“[From] the finish you’ve got a little 11-kilometre bonus warm down to go back to the HQ, just because it’s like on a on a big dual carriageway. I just I don’t like going very slow, so I still just kept pressing on, but in a much more relaxed position. I think if I had to, I could still have another 15 minutes at the same power. It’s more the position – to hold that is really tough for that long. Actually, more so than the power band.”
The mental challenge is almost as tough as the physical strain, and staying focussed for that length of time can’t be easy. Where does he go to in his head while he’s riding along a dual carriageway, we want to know.
“You get into a bit of a flow state,” says Von Folsach. “It’s not like you’re thinking ‘oh I need to also remember to empty the dishwasher, hang up washing’. I just focus on the effort, keeping tabs on all these little things like how am I feeling? What’s my power? What’s my speed? What’s my position? Remembering to drink and eat… And seeing what the others are doing.”
While there is a well-established record for riding 100 mile distance on a TT bike, a category for road bikes doesn’t actually exist yet, so Von Folsach didn’t have anything precise to aim for.
“The closest [thing] to a target was the Spindata prediction. That that usually gives you a pretty good idea on where you land, and something to aim for. I think I was like nine seconds off that in the end. Like I was nine seconds slower, and over such a long distance, you can pretty much always find nine seconds.”
“Pending CTT introduction of road-bike specific competition records, this stands as the fastest known time for the distance” WattShop CC wrote on their social media pages this week.
In the absence of official records, verifying this comes down to tapping into people’s knowledge about what other riders have done. From what can be gleaned, it appears the standing fastest known time was set back in 1983, by Ian Cammish, who rode 100 miles in 3 hours 31 minutes on a semi-standard road bike – an astonishing time, given the advancement of bikes and clothing in the last four decades.
After Von Folsach’s ride, it’s possible official recognition of the category will follow, and interest could grow, something the Dane would welcome, even if it meant losing his record to another rider.
“It’s more a case of wanting to see the sport grow, or at least not decline,” he says. “It’s no secret that it’s been struggling with numbers, but the road category seems to have stopped the bleeding somewhat. Maybe you could you could hope for a little bit of an uptake in participation from riders finding the road bike category a bit more accessible and not having to buy a dedicated TT bike.
“So yeah, I definitely wouldn’t mind losing the record to someone. It might give motivation to get it back, if that was to happen.”
For now, Von Folsach is looking forward to the National 12-hour TT Championships next weekend. “I think the longest ride I’ve ever done is around 10 hours,” he says. “And, actually, I don’t know if there’s a road bike record for 12 hours…maybe I’ll try and figure out what that is and then we’ll see how far I get.”
