Alex Howes will be racing at home this weekend. Home for Alex is the high mountains of Colorado. On Saturday, he will ride the Leadville 100, the iconic 100-mile (160-km) mountain bike race that climbs above 3700 meters in the backcountry of the Rocky Mountains. Then, he will wake up Sunday and take to the start of SBT GRVL, a a 144-mile (228-km) race over unpaved roads through the forests and fields surrounding Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Finishing both races in one weekend is a challenge in itself. It’s called Leadboat. Alex wants to win.
To prepare, he has done many back-to-back hard days in the mountains, switching between his mountain bike and his road bike, which he has fitted with wider tires, and setting off into the alpine on trails or unpaved roads. The adventurousness of it appeals to him.
“The training can get pretty real, pretty fast,” he says. “You spend a lot of time out there, pretty exposed. Training for Leadboat, I have spent a lot of time riding and training really high, way up above treeline and stuff, and when storms come in up there, it is no joke. It can be, I don’t want to say life or death, but you can get in real trouble real fast. You have got to pay attention.”
If he had been training for a Grand Tour, Alex would have spent more time on the road, doing specific intervals, but he thinks that he will have made up for the extra percent or two of sheer fitness that he might be missing by bettering his bike-handling skills and maintaining his motivation.
“I would say I probably should have ridden my mountain bike a lot less if we’re just talking about how to make watts, but I think it has really benefited me. I have spent a lot of time on the mountain bike since the pandemic started. That was kind of a conscious thing, but mostly it is just a lot of fun and I live in a great place to do it,” he says.
Alex lives in Nederland, a small town 2,500 meters up in the backwoods of Colorado. He has made it his goal to be able to ride anything located within 20 minutes of his house. That’s no small feat.
“I’ve definitely done some drops that are probably way too rowdy for a 100mm suspension bike and maybe voided the factory warranty a couple of times,” Alex says. “But it has definitely paid off in that I feel like my mountain bike skills are, maybe not top-notch, but definitely up to snuff, certainly for Leadville.”
He’s well-prepared for the elevation too. Just living at home is an altitude camp.
“Alex doesn’t have to do a lot in terms of altitude preparation, just because he lives up there,” EF Education-NIPPO Head of Medicine Kevin Sprouse says.
Still, racing up to 3,700 meters is a unique challenge. It won’t just be a test of high-elevation fitness. Fueling and hydration will be key. At high altitude, your body relies on carbohydrates much more for fuel and you lose a lot more moisture to evaporation in the thin, dry air. It’s easy to bonk or become dehydrated.
“If you don’t hydrate well and stay on top of it, you just dry out and die,” Alex says. ”And being that sugar dependent, as soon as you run out of sugars in your body, you’re done. You really can’t come back from it. So really staying on top of eating, really staying on top of drinking is so important. You almost can’t even emphasise how important it is up there.”
During all of his long alpine rides, Alex has got to know his body inside out. He knows exactly how to pace himself for Leadville. It’s a matter of maintaining a hard, steady effort for around six hours and not blowing up by going into the red.
SBT GRVL will be a different matter. Although the course is unpaved, it will be a lot more like a road race. Alex is hoping that his legs will have recovered enough to match the violent accelerations that might come from fresh riders in the first hour or two. Really, he is hoping he might get to hide in the wheels for the first while, but there is not much chance of that.
“We’ll see. Maybe they will just stick it to us right from the gun,” Alex says. “But it’s also a very long effort and because we’ll probably have 10-15 riders that are really at that higher level, versus like 180 in the WorldTour, that just by nature smooths out the effort a little bit, so you are not going to have these super hard sprints and stuff. It will probably be a lot more really high tempo threshold stuff throughout the day.”
And then, the front group will get to the finale and he’ll see what he has left in his legs to go for the win.
No matter what happens, it will be one heck of a weekend. Preparing for it has made Alex a better bike racer.
“I think the old mindset that if you want to be good on the road, you have to just get on the road and stay on the road, that’s kind of going away,” he says. “We are really seeing the value of doing other things and pulling and learning from other aspects of the sport.”