Building a Gravel Racer from a Triathlon Chassis
Your author, en route
by Campfire Co-Founder Molly Balfe
The leaves are turning, the air is colder, and triathletes’ hearts are turning to…mud. Whether you’ve gotten yourself a gravel bike or rigged your road bike with some thicker, grippier tires, chances are pretty good that you have gotten off the road over the past few seasons. Gravel racing is a great way to maintain focus and fitness throughout the year, since the season extends beyond when triathletes will typically race. However, the challenges and skills required for riding on gravel are different from what we practice on our time trial bikes. As always, a little preparation goes a long way. Check out our three big tips for making the switch from a strong triathlon season to an epic gravel season. You decide if you want to make the switch back.
Hit the Gym
One of the true joys of gravel is that, as a surface, it is pretty poorly defined. What is considered a road by one rider may be little more than a trail to another, and terrain can vary from groomed dirt to sand pits to several inches of slick mud. In order to respond to the challenges you’ll encounter in a race or ride, it is crucial you spend some time getting strong. We recommend that you focus on strengthening:
Lower Body. Seems obvious, right? You’re riding a bike. But give us a minute. Gravel riding requires a lot of low cadence riding, as you mangle your bike through vague moon dust or primordial ooze. If you haven’t been doing your squats, lunges, deadlifts, and hip thrusts, you’re likely to run out of muscular oomph at some point of your event. And guess what? It’s November, which is a perfect time to start learning how to lift.
Upper Body. Maybe less obvious, but while you’re doing that aforementioned mangling, your bike will be moving around underneath you a lot. You know what manages that movement? Your trunk and torso and arms. If you want to be able to lift your arms to give your race sherpa a post-event hug, it’s time to start getting familiar with the push-up position. Some triceps work and a pull-up or two won’t hurt, either.
Core. You probably saw this coming. No endurance how-to is complete without a call to core stability. The Campfire Head Coaches like to say “You sure can shoot a cannon out of a canoe…as long as you’re fine with destroying the canoe,” and we hope the figurative language isn’t lost on you. Gravel races are long, like, Ironman long in some cases, and having a powerful core will allow you do pedal effectively for longer. We love the dying bug as our go to core movement, since it keeps your low-back stable and can be progressed easily.
Lift now or regret it later!
Technical and Handling Skills
It should come as no surprise that gravel racing will require more technical skills than spending hours in aero on smooth pavement. The specific skills that you need will be dictated by the type of terrain in your race/region, but our biggest recommendation here is to get out and practice. Being able to stay calm and relaxed is possibly the most important skill to develop, and that comes with experience. Before your big race, make sure you get out and ride on local gravel roads so you can identify what conditions you’re not so great at navigating. When you know what they are, ride them often. Here are a few tips to get you started:
If you hit a sandy or silty section, don’t try to muscle through it or hit the brakes. Shift into an easier gear and spin through anything loose and shifting. The bike will yaw around like a drunkard, but that’s fine—let it do its drunken wobble and just keep pedaling.
Assume water is much deeper than it looks. This goes for puddles as well as rivers/crossings. Bend a rim in a water-filled hole and you’ll never forget this one. The takeaway? If you can’t see the bottom, ride around it or just get off your bike for a few meters and walk.
Navigate with your body, not your handlebars. Learn how leaning the bike makes it curve, and that pointing your chest and head where you want to go is better than turning the bars, which often results in too much turning.
Go Tubeless
If you haven’t made the switch to tubeless tires yet, now is the time. The inherent unevenness of off (paved) road cycling means that your chances of hitting something and blowing a tube are pretty high. With tubeless tires on your whip, you’re unlikely to get flats of any kind. Tubeless removes the major vector for flat tires in cycling: the pinch flat, where the inner tube gets pinched between the tire and rim after hitting a big bump. When this happens in a tubeless context, the sealant in the tire rescues the rider from larger obstacles that would normally pierce a clincher tire and the tube within. If the puncture is significant enough, you may hear a short hiss and see a jet of sealant escape your tire (or feel a short spray on your calves, causing you to scan the sky for clouds on a perfectly sunny day). The sealant magically seals most holes (if you destroy your sidewall, there’s not much we can do for you), allowing you to continue your ride in peace. Tubeless tires offer such maintenance-free riding, in fact, that you may soon forget that they do require some upkeep, primarily by making sure fresh sealant flows inside the tire. Sealant dries out over time, so replacing it every month or so is a good idea. If you DO flat and the sealant doesn’t save you, you can simply install a tube the way you normally would out on the road, but this is a fairly rare occurrence in the world of gravel cycling. In a future article (our 201 article) we’ll talk about fixing your tubeless set-up on the fly, but that’s for a different day.
HAVE FUN
So that’s it for now! Get strong, practice practice practice, and install some tubeless tires on your conveyance. Triathletes make great gravel riders—you only have to get out there and try something new.