6 Hour Ciriterion Questions

[germs]

So it sounds a bit strange, but I'll be doing this race on Monday. It's a 3km circuit for 6 hours.

My target distance is 200km. How many calories can I expect to burn during the race? I read that a century would require some 4-5k calories, however last weekend I did a 200km ride consuming about 1.5k calories during the ride plus the huge breakfast before hand.

On that ride as well, I only stopped once to refill my bottles and buy more food. Would planning to stop only once during the race be overambitious?

Other ideas and suggestions?
Thanks.

[vik]

Most people can only process 200 - 300 calories per hour regardless of how many they burn. So with that in mind you are only going to be able to take in 1200 - 1800 calories in 6hrs. The rest of the energy comes from muscle glycogen and fat reserves.

You could probably make some really concentrated liquid fuel bottles to consume on the bike and swap those out at the 3hr mark, but you also need something like 500-750ml of water an hour. If you can fit enough bottles on your bike you could minimize stops - OTOH if you can just stop to dump bottles and take on new ones it shouldn't cost you a lot of time.

Are you allowed some kind of pit crew to assist in the stops?

[germs]

Awesome, good to know. I'll load up with 3 bottles and 6 cliff bars and hope for only one quick stop at the 3 hr mark. I'm not really sure the details of the race because it's in Japan and I never really have a clue what's going on here.

Another thing I am wondering about it how to prepare in the few days before the race. I'm going to go do 80 km right now and then I have 3 days remaining. I was thinking about doing 40 km tomorrow, 30 km the day after, and nothing the day before. This is my first proper bike race (triathlons don't count) so I'm a bit in the dark.