Imprecise Precision: L’Heure
Why would any sane person choose to suffer? The answer to this question is a primal one and of particular relevance to society in the current age: control. With chaos and uncertainty creeping from every corner of life, cycling provides us with control over physical suffering; to suffer at our own will provides us the control we viscerally crave. This control then provides us the courage to face uncertainty in life with the confidence that we can handle anything it can throw at us.
There is no challenge within Cycling which more comprehensively embodies this notion than The Hour Record, which represents the only event that pits the rider not against a course, but against Time itself; how far can the rider propel themselves in the span of sixty minutes while also suppressing their nausea as they turn left endlessly?
The cruelty is hard to grasp. As cyclists we suffer, but our suffering is normally proportional to it’s intensity – certainly it hurts to ride harder, but the harder we ride, the sooner the pain will subside. In the Hour, the duration of the suffering is uniform: the effort will last 60 minutes and no amount of increased suffering will shorten it, unless, of course, you believe Al Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which states that for a body moving at speed, time moves relatively slower than it does for a body at rest. According to Al, then, the rider will experience a marginally reduced Hour measured not by a clock moving with the rider, but by a clock sitting at rest at the side of the track. (While this amount of time is mathematically negligible, it does explain why intervals on the trainer feel comparatively more interminable than intervals on the road.)
Eddy Merckx himself made the following observation after setting the benchmark effort of 49,431 meters in 1972:
The pain was very, very, very significant. There is no comparison with a time trial. There you can change gear, change your cadence, relax even if it is only for a few instants’ respite. The Hour is a permanent, total, intense effort, which can’t be compared to anything else.1
Knowing that the Prophet’s bunkmate was The Man With the Hammer, the triple use of the word “very” is somewhat panic-inducing.
In recent years, the Hour Record has sadly seen a decline in interest, with the last attempt by world-class rider having been made by Chris Boardman in 2000. Boardman was at the center of the Hour’s Golden Era in the early Nineties which saw Graeme Obree kick off a frenzy of attempts to raise it ever higher by first breaking the record in his innovative tuck position as an amateur in 1993. Boardman broke it a few months later, before Obree reclaimed it in his even-more radical Super-Man position. This was a period where Boardman, Obree, Miguel Indurain, and Tony Rominger all traded the record for the better part of a decade, each going ever-farther in evermore innovative riding positions.
The UCI put a halt to the interest in this record by establishing two records, the (Athlete’s) Hour Record and The Best Human Effort. The Hour restricts the equipment to that of a standard double-triangle frame with drop bars, while the Best Human Effort has no such restriction. While the intent was to establish a more equal judgement of the athlete instead of the focus on equipment, it misses the point that advancement, evolution, and innovation are all basic elements of what it means to be Human, and by eliminating these elements from The Hour, they eliminated the appeal in what is our sport’s most primal effort. After all, there were few riders willing to go head to head with Merckx in his time, and so there are few who are willing to do so today.
Chris Boardman stands apart in this regard and indeed went after the new record, which he broke by a whopping 10 meters3. Over the course of his career, he set the record three times, which makes him possibly both the toughest and slowest-learning human currently living; even Merckx declared he would never attempt the Hour a second time, despite having fallen short of his personal goal of 50,000 meters. Boardman describes the Hour in simple, physiological terms: with every push of the pedals, you break down the fibers in your muscles such that for each subsequent revolution, you have a little less functional muscle mass available to sustain your current speed and power through to the end. In a word, devastation. It is not the sort of thing one attempts more than one needs to.
To gauge an effort of this type is perhaps the most pure description of The V; you ride not as hard as you know you can, but as hard as you hope you might. Boardman, on the Hour Record:
You have three questions going through your mind:
How far to go?
How hard am I trying?
Is the pace sustainable for that distance?
If the answer is “yes”, that means you’re not trying hard enough. If it’s no, it’s too late to do anything about it. You’re looking for the answer “maybe”.2
Despite all the training, preparation, and technical advancement that goes into any attempt on l’Heure, it remains a matter of the Human element, one of imprecise precision.
1,2 These quotes are taken from William Fotheringham‘s biography of Eddy Merckx, Merckx, Half Man, Half Bike.
3 It has been broken since by other, lower-profile riders since.
I really like that quote from Fotheringham’s Merckx book. I think it applies equally well to road cyclists in reference to climbing.
Time. In competitive cycling anyway, it’s always about the clock. Not just in TT’s, but during any race; “how long can I stay redlined”, “How long before I recover enough to attack again”, or in noncompetitive cycling, “how many hours can I keep turning the pedals”?
Climbing and TT’s have always been my favorite parts of the sport. Seeing how hard I can push, how much I can suffer is a test of myself regardless of the result.
In the 90’s, I kinda considered taking a run at the Oregon State hour record (I have no idea what it is/was). Having never ridden the track, I went with a friend, a Cat I trackie, and he showed me how to best navigate a fixie track bike on the steepest track in the US, Alpenrose. After a hour or so of practice, I realized that even as a very fit Cat II, I wasn’t worthy of even attempting a run at it. It’s unfathomable to me how the guys at the top of the sport can ride that hard, that fast with one set of gear inches. Mad respect to those that try.
This may give an idea of how steep the track is here;
Nice piece, Frank.
@VeloVita
Not so sure — on a climb or in a TT, if you can keep up a faster pace, the suffering ends sooner. The hour is an hour of suffering. There is nothing you can do to make it end sooner.
@scaler911
That’s pretty awesome! I’d say that’s steeper than Daytona?
@Nate
That’s exactly right – and that’s the diabolical difference between a traditional event and The Hour – and to @scaler911‘s – all those considerations are a matter of time, of course, but the are ultimately determined by the distance you need to travel. Go faster, it ends sooner. Get in a break away and start wondering how long you can stay away, well – that comes down to distance again – can I stay away until the finish or the top of the climb.
But in the Hour, its an hour. Period. Can you do it for 60 minutes? Because whether you are riding 45, 48, 50, or 55kmph, you will be riding for 60 minutes regardless.
It makes failure and success seem even more absolute than in a normal race as well.
@frank
Adding a fixed gear to that puts it over the top. Which is why you should totally try this on June 17.
@Nate
@frank
My point wasn’t that climbing is as intense an effort as the hour record, just that when climbing the questions you ask yourself as well as the answers are the same: how far to go?; how hard am I trying?; is this pace sustainable for the distance? If the goal is to reach the top of the climb as fast as possible, either to set a PR or to end the suffering, whether you are trying hard enough or whether the pace you are riding is sustainable for the distance is always going to be answered as ‘maybe’. Otherwise you either know you could be riding harder and therefore faster, or you already went too deeply into the red and its too late and you pop.
@VeloVita
I suppose you are right that the yes/no/maybe method of outsmarting yourself would work for climbing.
@frank
The volume of your writing blows me away. Always great to read, thanks again.
@VeloVita
Ohigotcha. I feel the same way. I think a lot of our efforts are the same. I think there’s also a slight shift in what it means to fall behind in the Record. Because its 60 minutes, there is this sense of a schedule the riders set out and try to keep to (every rider who has attempted the Hour that I’ve read about uses one) and there is a sense that you can’t ever make up for lost ground like you can on a climb. The first two questions Boardman asks are, in the context of the Hour, brutal as well becuase there isn’t anything you can do about either of them; if you’re not going hard enough, you can’t make up for the lost time. If you’re going too hard, you’ll blow.
Having never done one, it seems beyond torturous.
Merckx said “very” three times for Merckx’s Sake!
@snoov
Funny you say that; I try to keep the “volume” short so people don’t fall asleep while reading it. This is as short as I could make it. One of my favorite subjects. Sorry.
But … the l’Heure = the the hour. I make that mistake too, the main hill in my home town is known as “The Law” meaning “The Hill” but I can’t stop calling it The Law Hill or The Hill Hill.
How steep is Alpenrose? When the Vandedrome was set up in NJ, I got to race on that. I believe it was 53 degrees and 170 meters around. It felt like riding in a goldfish bowl, you were just about constantly in a turn. And the ends were so steep that if you weren’t in the stayers lane going into the turn you were actually going uphill and had to accelerate to get into the turn. Wild, fun stuff.
The point about the will and the other one about the UCI remind me of the extended riff on the hour in the Rider, and the insanity it induces, such as the guy who had a dot of light projected in front of him as a pacing mechanism in an effort to take his own will out of the equation, and the time Oskar Egg measured the track on his hands and knees to prove that a competing rider for the record didn’t ride as far as claimed.
@frank
Maybe I got the terminology wrong again, I find your articles to be a good digestible length, for me they could be a bit longer. It’s the number of new articles you come up with, and the other contributors and posters keep me coming back every day, thank you all.
@frank
It really is an interesting challenge: in racing whether its a time trial or road race you only have to dose your effort to be faster than the second fastest guy. If you don’t go all out and still win, it doesn’t matter because you did enough to win. With the hour the whole point is to see how far you can go in 60 minutes so you never really know if you could have gone just a little bit further – so on the one hand I can see the Prophet’s point about never wanting to attempt it again, yet I can also see why Boardman and Obree made multiple attempts. I suppose then, the ultimate showing of Rule V would be to attempt the hour record when you already hold the hour record…
I agree with you VeloVita. Any race is essentially how little effort can you give to accomplish a goal. Beat the second fastest person or in a tour pick up time but in the hour there’s no cheating or easing, only destruction.
@VeloVita
Which goes back to the point about the gear; I think in the 90’s there was such a movement behind the innovation in the bike itself, that it was really inspiring people to look at the hour and say, “well, I’m no where near as fast Merckx was, but on this bike, I can pretend like I am!” It was very cool.
Now that its back to the standard bike, its about the athlete and purely about the suffering. Which is also cool, but it definitely thins the herd in terms of who is willing to go for it.
And the high profile riders are not doing it, because the risk of failure is so high and how that impacts their reputation can be very detrimental.
@snoov
What a delightfully nice thing to say. Thanks. Wouldn’t be much fun if you lot weren’t coming back all the time, so thanks to you as well – all of you. None of this works without the community
Thanks Frank, this is a great subject, unlike any other sport perhaps? I could spend many hours in pub discussing this whole subject.
Many have attempted the hour and almost all get off the bike in the first 15 minutes as once you drop below the necessary pace, it’s over. You can’t recover. I believe Eddy started off too fast and had to recover and just Rule V it out. He waited until the end of the season to make his Mexico City attempt.
I’m still hoping Fabian recovers his old mojo and sets his sights on this record, he is the only rider of this generation with the motor to attempt it. Fuck it, I’d go to Europe to watch a spectacle like that.
I’m with snoov; you keep writing, I’ll keep reading.
@frank
More prose, less code!!!
Is L’Heure unique in sports? Is there another sport with something similar? I can’t think of anything. In athletics its about speed over distance or points in an event. Swimming it’s distance. Marathons – distance. B’ball, f’ball and hockey are points and goals. Only in L’Heure is the competitor facing an implacable, relentless, ruthless, invisible enemy – time.
Can you imagine if they had an hour record for runners? How about an Olympic Hour? Every four years. What an amazing event that would be!
Ultra running has 24 hr events where its the same setup. Its a different kind of intensity though. They’ll stop and rest, eat, poop, etc. I don’t think it’d be comparable of the pain/intensity of the Hour.
After reading the Fotheringham Merckx book i’ve been interested in trying an hour attempt (of sorts). I live near to the second oldest track in the world – Preston Park Velodrome. Built way back in 1877 its long (580m) and only slightly banked>
My rough plan is to train there over the winter, mainly at night and then see how far I can get in an hour sometime next spring.
I’ve given no consideration to how i’ll actually train and it’ll be on a standard road bike and kit, no aero bars etc.
At this stage I have no idea how far i’ll get and thats the most exciting thing about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqjEvDlFqdM&feature=player_detailpage
Froönk, you could have written a book and it would not be boring. The hour is the sine non qua of cycling. There is no other mark that matters because it is pure with no variables or at least ones that matter. If the UCI had let things go it would have been about the man with better machines as it has been for the last 100 years. The only thing to control was fairings and I believe they did that after Oscar Egg in about 1920 something.
I do not think there is an equivalent in any other sport because we have the most beautiful and elegant sport in the world, not to mention the hardest!
I have a strange, rather morbid fascination with the hour record, having watched the Chris Boardman documentary and Jorgensen Leth’s “The Impossible Hour” both many times whilst turbo-training late at night in the gimp cupboard*. I was hoping that Spartacus might revive the event and have a go, thus proving that he truly is the stand out cyclist of his generation, and is a deity who walks amongst us… But I fear his window of opportunity is passing. I did tweet him on it, but he hasn’t got back to me yet… Obviously thinking of a pithy, witty response.
Frank… As ever, your words capture the essence of the topic. Well done, my freakishly tall, foul-mouthed friend
* The laundry room where washing machine, tumble dryer, hot water tank and my turbo trainer reside. As the manager says, the room with all the equipment I either don’t understand or I don’t care for. For me, in “Roadslave525-world”, I am Eddie Merckx, on my rollers in my garage… Except without the good looks, the wattage, the magnificent stroke, and the god-awful medieval music
This comment belongs somewhere on the site, maybe not here.
Today’s Jen’s quote from Cycling News:”It felt like the good ol’ days with Jensie off the front, everyone chasing from behind, people hating me because I’m attacking all the time…….It was beautiful,” he said. “Like I always say: ‘It’s better to be on the giving end of pain rather than on the receiving end’.”
“You’re looking for the answer ‘maybe’.”
Pure gold. That uncertainty and, in my humble opinion, adventure in pursuit of the V is so intoxicating and addictive. This article and the commentary might help my alpine climbing friends understand my devotion to the bike that has grown to the point that my climbing jones is on extended sabbatical. Thanks for the inspiration (and explanation) guys.
@Roadslave525
Dude! It’s good to get a report from the Gimp cupboard. Have faith in Spartacus, he will get his centurion sandals on and lay waste to all. He just needs to heal up and get that pithy response figured out.
@Gianni
Um, Spartacus was a gladiator, not a centurion. The sandals might have been similar, though (but they sure as fuck weren’t Adilettes).
@Steampunk
Give that man a +1!
@frank
Are we going to see the Vour record attempt? After our session on the track on Keepers Tour, I can’t imagine even trying for a half-hour record. Our pursuits lasted, what, 4 minutes, and I was seeing stars and ready to recycle breakfast just doing that.
@Nate
@frank
@VeloVita
You could try climbing for an hour…. Seriously, The Hour stands in my mind as the Apogee of V. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, just the interminable loop and the tick tick tick. Badass.
@graham d.m.
Tried it once – the 24 hour run – damn near killed me. The best guys were using it as a meditation technique – you just zone out into a Zen state after a while.
@Gianni
I had it passed on earlier elsewhere when I was having a whine about my back. I’ve had way to much time to watch his videos and read his tweets recently. He seems like a decent bloke – clever as well as brave.
@sgt
Big climbs that take an hour do play fucking badass tricks on the mind. La Cumbre was the last I have done, actually. Are you sure Brian was real? Maybe we collectively hallucinated him. Looking for a weekend soon to do Mt. Diablo from my house — I’ve been craving that sort of suffering.
I love to yap about the HOUR. I get pukey and parachute-deploee just doing the Kilo. But to be clear, I have never done the kilo in aerobars, always in the drops.
Awesome article Frank. Pure suffering.
@Gianni
+1
Saw this earlier today, you beat me to getting it on the site…the stuff of legend. It’ll be a sad day when he retires.
@the Engine
Trying that even once is pretty freaking impressive/possibly insane! Seriously, way tougher than I am!
I like this piece very, very, very much. Good work, Frank!
I can’t imagine an Hour of suffering; the closest I’ve gotten is a half hour of suffering in a cross race, but that still is one where you can cut down on the time by working harder.
Jens. Ha, he just revels in fucking with other riders. That’s awesome.
@Steampunk
Ahhhh, FFS! Bloody Romans, what have they done for us? Yes, I stand corrected.
@Nate
I couldn’t agree more, Nate! I’d never done long, sustained serious climbing until two summers ago. I’d done short, steep stuff, but nothing like long, steep switchbacks. And, I was welcomed to the rodeo by three pals, all much more seasoned and conditioned to this type of stuff. It was a long day. On the final climb, the steepest, I was dropped and had been in the saddle for five hours already. I tossed the bike into the woods not once but twice! I do this for fun, I’m not getting paid for this I told myself. I sat sulking on the railing. Then I got it together & finished that climb.
That ride gave me serious respect for skinny little cyclists. The mind games are insane when you are going 12km an hour for an hour. Why am I doing this? I’m so slow. I hate bikes. I feel ill. It takes serious fortitude to keep at it. I can’t believe lads are able to do this in GTs for weeks and weeks on end. Impressive!
@snoov
Finally figured out what you meant, and I fixed the error. I actually know that, but my fingers insist on typing “the”. Its like that scene in Mickey Blue Eyes (did I just admit to watching that?) where the gangsters own the restaurant called “The La Tratoria”. “That means the the tratoria.” “Yes, I know.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUspGAyWqjc
@Nate
Its a good point, except that once you go down that road, you start to really thin the herd, which is good and bad. Once a block named Eddy Merckx pisses on his corner, you know there aren’t going to be a lot of guys willing to go head-to-head with him.
The evolution of the bike and position is what made this record interesting. We all already know Eddy was the best and no Hour Record or Tour de France record will change that for anyone who looks at the context around those. That is a done deal. Eddy was the most complete rider we’ll ever have. Its over. The chapter is closed. Why fuck around with the Hour Record then? The Hour is about seeing how far you can go in an hour, and the evolution is what made that interesting.
Personally, I feel the UCI really missed the mark there. I understand the motive and I respect and even appreciate it – make it about the rider. Its poetic and beautiful, but we already have the anser. Might as well ask @ChrisO to compile an analysis of why the others won’t ever match up to him.
The Hour was interesting because it gave people a chance to poke the badger and see if they could top Eddy’s number when they gave themselves a massive handicap.
If I had access to Boardman and could ask him, I bet he’d agree with me on that. Chris is one of my biggest heros, btw. Right with Obree, they demonstrate the Hour’s equivalent of Musueew or Boonen. Modern marvels.
@jonathan2263
WOW! Alpenrose is 268.43 meters around with a 16.6 meter radius and a 43 degree bank. I don’t remember exactly, but I think you have to be going 14-16MPH (sorry) to not fall to the apron on the banks. It’s really disconcerting the first few times around, especially combined with a bike you can’t coast on.
@Roadslave525
This is why I love you so.
On another note: do you have a bell in your gimp cave?
@Souleur
@Rob
@Gianni
I’m with you, and I forgot to reference your bit on this, which is much better, smarter, and well-researched. As usual. But I hadn’t forgotten. That bit your wrote really solidified my man-crush on you, so I suppose that’s something.
But yes, I really hope Faboo goes for it. Really. A bunch of dopers (I lose track of how many) have the record now. What’s the honor in that? At least when dopers held it before, they were on faster bikes so we could blame that.
But Faboo would be the first high-profile rider in 12 years to take it on. It would start a fire-storm as well. You know that German bloke who’s got the TT Bands right now would have to have a go just to prove he’s the new TT King. And then Taylor would have to have a go. And there are others. It would revitalize it.
But, he’s got too much too lose. He’s going against an amateur who has since tested positive. There is little value in the Record based on what he has to lose against such a shit rider.
@Steampunk, @brett
Right, if ΣπάÏτακος had worn Addelettes, he might have survived the battle on the banks of the Sele. (I forget which bank, but he got bitch-slapped on one of them. For not wearing cool enough sandals.)