Jason McLaughlin Competes in Haute Route Alps!

Jason McLaughlin Completes and Competes, Haute Route Alps! with Bill Gros, Peaks Coaching Group Elite/Master Level Coach

The Haute Route series of organized events take place throughout the world as essentially as a Gran Fondo conducted much like a stage race. Each stage consists of timed sections throughout the par course and presents as very challenging day-to-day stages. Haute Route 2022 consisted of 7 consecutive stages from August 21^st through August 27th.

 Jay came to me in February with this event as his singular goal for 2022. Not only to complete the event but to go there and compete. Jay relocated to Brooklyn, New York shortly after his coaching program began, and this certainly presented some challenges to preparing for the daily grind of this event. Limitations included only one hour of training, four of the five workdays with a 90minute allotment on Wednesday. Then the challenge of getting outside, through Brooklyn, into Manhattan for Central Park loops, or across to the east side of New Jersey on a bike-friendly pathway along the Hudson river. It was Central Park loops for shorter sharper intensity, and along the Hudson for the longer days of endurance work typically on Sundays. 

The other challenge was climbing. Where to climb? Fortunately, Jay's friend Nick has a car and was also training for the Haute Route. They would travel over to Bear Mountain New York and, you guessed it, do many repeats of Bear Mountain which is, for Jay, roughly 22-25minutes of climbing on this 5% grade.

We managed to get Jay to a peak CTL of 97 and on event day at 88, which is incredible with the time limitations, and an FTP of 310. We were ready to go! We discussed stage pacing, fueling, and recovery to reinforce everything needed to tackle these hard days.

Hard days indeed, as 3 of the first 4 stages featured over 10,000' of climbing and stage three was "only" 9500. Stage 5 was a 10km uphill time trial gaining 2671' at an average of 8%. Since stage 5 was only 60minutes of riding, albeit intense, it was essentially a recovery day. Stage 6 at 11500' and Stage 7 at 7400' finished out the 7-day block.

Our conservative approach had Jay losing a bit too much time on Stages 1 and 2 as he learned how the Gran Fondo timed section "game" was played. We started to learn the process by Stage 3 as Jay started to feel better and better, and stronger! as the stages went on. He managed to place 27^th overall in the stage 5-time trial and 16^th in the 40-49 men's category and despite the fatigue in the legs and the altitude, threw down a 305watt average for the 43-minute effort. His daily placings were: 91, 62, 46, 42, 27, 34, and 41. His overall final standing was 50^th of 302 finishers and 16^th of the 85 male 40-49 competitors.

Jay is a very dedicated athlete with a Time Trialist phenotype that is closer to an All-Arounder with an 1100watt 5-second sprint. He plans to go back to the Alps next year with more resolve to finish higher in the overall standings as well as compete in some Gran Fondo's here stateside. Since coming back he's taken his 110CTL and pushed his FTP to....335watts and unfortunately, we have no local events reasonably close to Brooklyn to show this off!

Here are the results of Haute Route Alps 2022: https://timing4you.com/resultats/G-Live-HR-9.1/g-live.reel.html?f=../2022/HRA/HauteRouteAlps_2022.clax

Congratulations to Jason McLaughlin, completing and competing at Haute Route Alps! That folks is hard stuff!