Tips for Newbies Riding the Davis Double

Paul, Dave, and Bob cresting the "Top of the DC" in the 2000 Davis Double.

Tips for Getting Ready

• Submit your DC application early. In addition to saving some money-- the entrance fee jumps from $45 to $90 a few weeks out-- you'll be committed.
• Make your hotel reservations by March; Davis is a small town, and often gets completely booked.
• Talk with your spouse about how to handle your periodic "disappearances" for long training rides. His or her support is essential.
• In terms of training, remember that there are essentially four things to condition:
  1. Butt. Sitting on a bike seat for 14-16 hours offers a unique physical challenge. ;) The key metric is total cumulative time in the saddle.
  2. Legs. Conditioning the legs involves more variety in order to build speed and strength. As an unscientific goal, I try to get to the point where doing a 40 mile ride is "no big deal."
  3. Endurance. Endurance will represent either the easiest or hardest element of your training. Endurance is said to be gradually built up over years of physical activity. How much will you need to work on your endurance? It's all a function of whether you've been in good shape the last 5 or so years.
  4. Mind. The cliche is tired but true: 90% of enjoying the Davis Double is mental. As a first-time rider, a key objective of your training is to simply convince yourself that you can do it.
• If you live in an area that's cold or rainy during the winter, you'll need to devise a strategy for training through it. I recommend riding on rollers. Learning to balance on them isn't as hard as you might think. Since you can set them up in the garage or indoors, you'll be able to ride in the rain or after dark. And the workout is terrific for building a base and clocking time in the saddle. Thirty minutes on the rollers is roughly equivalent to sixty minutes on the road.
• Basic training regimen:
  1. Spend January and February trying to ride 2-4 times per week (including rollers).
  2. In March and April, do progressively longer rides each Saturday. I try to get in 4 centuries during these eight weeks. For an early April organized ride in the San Francisco area, check out the Tierra Bella Century.
  3. It's helpful to try to have at least one century in March; if nothing else it'll be a wakeup call!
  4. Try to vary your riding partners, routes, days, and approach. Keeping things interesting will make it feel less like "training," and more like "fun."
  5. Don't focus exclusively on distance and overlook hill climbing. Davis includes over 7000 feet of climbing. (In 2000, one of my friends had a bike computer with an altimeter. It indicated that the cumulative climbing for the day was actually 9500 feet. I have come to trust the altimeter more than the official elevation profile map.)
  6. Keep a workout journal and record every ride: miles, climbing, route, etc. I have kept one since 1994, and I find it very valuable to refer back to whenever I find myelf asking, "was I struggling this much last year?" ;)
  7. The last two weeks before Davis, back off the distance, and take it easy. Besides giving yourself a little rest, it's imperative that you avoid injury because from here on in, there's no time to recuperate .
  8. I'd also emphasize to first timers that you need not ever do a 200 mile training ride in order to comfortably complete the Davis Double. Just like folks training for a marathon, you need only build a progressively higher base. (The longest training ride I've ever done is 140 miles.)
• One story from the '96 Davis Double illustrates well the importance of simply building up a good base: Around mile 150, I struck up a conversation with a retired UC Davis professor. Despite his 60 years, he seemed to be riding effortlessly.

  I said, "You look like a pro! What do you do to train for this?"
  To which he replied, "Train? I don't really do any training. I just ride my bike to work."
  I asked, "How far is your commute?"
  "It's just about 10 miles each way."
  "How long have you been commuting 20 miles per day?"
  "Oh, about 20 years."

• Your bike needs to be in top shape too. Don't risk your safety or an avoidable delay with the DC mechanics by starting with loose brakes, wheels out of true, etc. If you like to give your bike to a competent bicycle shop for annual maintenance, then schedule the maintenance for a few weeks before Davis.
• Rob Hawks emailed me to suggest the following two tips for the final week leading up to the ride:

  I did the ride last year for the first time. Stronger riders from my club bonked while I felt stronger the last 50 miles than the previous 100. I think a large part of this is due to my having zealously consumed extra water *all week* long. I was already fully hydrated at the start with out having to (over) drink the morning of. Also, I never passed a rest stop without stopping to drink and of course I drank water while riding. 2000's heat was not the year to skip stops as a rookie.
  
  The second tip is to also be zealous about sleep for the whole week leading up to the ride. Shoot for an extra hour of sleep every night the week before. If you get nervous and can't sleep the night before (like I did last year) you won't already be in a sleep depleted state. I fell asleep after midnight and got up at 3:30 to start the ride at 4am. If I hadn't slept well the week before I think I would have been a wreck.

Tips for the Big Weekend

• Before leaving home, pack a Playmate-type cooler with your race-day breakfast. Because there is no food at the start, you'll need to bring whatever you need to get you to the first rest stop. I used to visit a supermarket the night before, but I'm now convinced that packing your own cooler is the way to go.
• Speaking of breakfast, if you're like me, and absolutely require a dose of caffeine to get going, you will have difficulty finding a cup of coffee at 4am on a Saturday morning. One solution is Surge, a citrus soda with double the sugar and three times the caffeine of ordinary colas. I drink exactly two cans per year, both on a Saturday early morning in the middle of May...
• Plan to arrive in Davis by late afternoon Friday.
• Sign up for the DC "pasta feed" on Friday night. It's a cheap, all you can eat pasta dinner. While the food is plain, the camraderie is not to be missed. You'll probably sit next to one guy who has done Davis 20 years in a row, and sit next to another trying it for the first time. It's a blast.
• Perform ALL your bike maintenance and set up (except inflating the tires) before going to bed. Fooling around with this stuff in the predawn darkness isn't very fun, and always takes longer than you think.
• Get to bed as early as possible. Unless you're the type who instantly falls asleep once the lights are out, you might consider waking up at 4am on Friday, so that you can go to sleep earlier on Friday night.
• If you're sharing a room with a riding buddy, don't forget to bring earplugs. This is not the night to discover that the pal you've conquered several centuries with can also imitate a bear in hibernation.

Tips for the Big Ride

• Clothing:
  1. Pack a lot of different biking clothes, and make your final decisions as to what to wear the morning of. I would tune in the local weather forecast on cable TV before leaving the motel.
  2. If the weather is at all questionable, an absolute essential is a plastic trash bag. The two biggest threats to keeping warm are water and wind. A trash bag can impede both, if loudly, by simply putting it over your head and poking holes for your head and arms. (In the '96 ride, when almost half the ride was in the rain, this saved me while others had to bow out.) If you're a good samaritan, pack two. :)
  3. Resist the temptation to skimp on clothes. IMHO it's better to be prepared for adverse conditions and complete the ride, than to shave off some ounces and try to power through it. Some riders compromise by bringing an old sweatshirt and tossing it midmorning. If you do this, make sure you leave it at a rest stop or in the trash; Davis doesn't need sweatshirts strewn on roadsides.
  4. Don't try anything for the first time. The new shorts may chafe or bind. The new energy drink may make you sick. The new sunscreen may taste bad once your sweat makes it drip. The new saddle may feel unbearable after 150 miles. You get the picture.
• Consider packing yourself some kind of "special boost." To the extent Davis is mostly a mental challenge for the first timer, think about what you could bring that's light and small and might lift your spirits during the second half of the ride. In 1999, I brought a Diamond Rio MP3 player with Rush, Genesis, Boston, U2, Lynryd Skynryd, Nirvana, Peter Gabriel, Counting Crows, etc. This turned out to be a great way to break up the monotony of the last 60 miles.
• Start as early as possible. There is no official start time, so everyone starts whenever they like. I try to get rolling by 4:00am. Rationale: finishing after dark is not fun. Until you can accurately estimate your ETA, I'd err on the side of early start/early finish.
• Don't eat lunch at the lunch stop! Instead, treat the lunch stop as you would any regular rest stop. Then take your one long break at the mile 133 rest stop. Why? One look at the course elevation makes it clear. Mile 133 is the top of the last hill, a long grinder called "Resurrection". It's literally all downhill from here. I find it much easier to keep pushing for lunch a little longer and then have it easy thereafter.
• More psychological tricks: reset your odometer at every stop. I tend to look at my bike computer constantly, playing lots of little mathematical games. YMMV, but I find it much less fatiguing to look down and always see numbers like 10 or 20 miles, than to see 140, 160, 180...
• When you see a tandem, think draft. In the Davis Double ecology, tandems represent a natural resource for bikers. Tandem riders are cheerful, helpful people who delight in leading a pace line 20 bikes long. Sucking their draft is a timed honored ritual among all but the most hard core cyclists.
• Don't overdo it early. Set a time for the first 100 miles and hit it. If you feel good and want to "make time," do it on the second century by skipping stops and/or accelerating the pace. Much better to run out of gas in the second century than the first century. :)
• Try to limit your rest stops to 5-10 minutes each. Why? With eleven rest stops, time spent resting can easily become immense. I find that unless I start my Timex chronometer when I get to the rest stop, what feels like 5-10 minutes is actually 15-20.
• More on rest stops: Rob Hawks advises that "In extreme conditions, long or frequent rest stops are a good thing to do. I started with a club member and after the 3rd stop I kind of dropped him because our pace was not equal. Every other rest stop he would show up just as I was leaving. He was able to catch up because he skipped every other stop. This was a costly choice later in the ride. He came into the stop with the wading pool looking like death, and he wasn't responding very well to questions. He spent a long time there as a result. It took me 16.5 hours to do the ride last year, with 3.5 of that spent off the bike in rest stops. I don't regret a minute of that time, especially the later stops in the heat."
• Camelback used to have a great slogan: "hydrate or die." Probably a bit of hyperbole for Davis, but dehydration is a serious risk. Drink at least one water bottle per rest stop (more in hot weather). Pay attention to your urine color to monitor whether you're drinking enough.
• Hydration department of redundancy department: When Davis heats up, you'll need to think about hydration even more. Relying on urine color won't work if you start to dehydrate and stop going to the bathroom. This happened to me in 2000, when the thermometer rose to 96 degrees in the shade. I drank 15 water bottles from mile 95 to mile 200 without going to the bathroom once. Another warning sign of dehrydation: loss of appetite. If you arrive at a rest stop, lethargic and uninterested in a fig bar or banana, then chances are you are already dehydrated. Force yourself to drink several water bottles and try to get your body cooled down.
• Speaking of urine, since the outhouses at the reststops always have a long line, I usually get "creative" about where I might make an unofficial stop on the side of the road. Obviously you should use some discretion is selecting appropriate places.
• Eat early and often-- if you bonk it's too late. I find that it's hard to eat enough at rest stops without getting bloated. Solution: Stuff some food in your jersey pockets and eat it slowly and steadily while riding. (I usually bring a big ziplock bag to put in my jersey pocket for just this purpose.)
• Dave Hale made several innovations during the 2004 DC (his fourth):
  • "Drink more, eat less": In prior years, we ate so much at each rest stop, that it took the first ten miles back on the bike just to digest. This year, we got more paranoid about dehydrating and less paranoid about bonking. Result? We let our bodies regulate food intake and avoided feeling bloated. And the deliberate, sometimes forced fluid intake kept our bodies from starting to slow down.
  • Salt bagels: Every other day of the year, your local bagel shop's salt bagels may sound unappealing, but for Davis, they're the perfect way to replace the salt steadily sweating away. Dave ate one for breakfast, and packed a second in his jersey.
  • Toothbrush: After munching fig newtons, bagels, pound cake, pretzels, potatos, and fritos all day long, your teeth can feel moss-covered. Dave packed a small travel toothbrush to make the second century much more civilized.
• Be safe. Pace lines, downhills, and narrow roads can be dangerous, particularly when riders are getting a little shaky or are crowded together. We all get used to riding in close quarters with our local riding buddies, but I try to remember to add a little extra gap between me and other folks I don't know.
• Observe the rules of the road. CHP polices the course and always gives tickets. Seriously.

Related Links

• Davis Bike Club
• Davis Double Century 2008

Would you like to contribute your DC lessons learned? Email me at bob at lisbonne.com, and I'll add them to this page.