James Golding is no stranger to putting in work. His latest adventure took him to the USA, where he took part in Race Across the West in order to qualify for one of the world’s toughest races: Race Across America. We caught up with him to find out how it went, and how he’s preparing for the next challenge.
How will your training differ for RAAM?
“I think it’ll mostly be a case of doing much longer rides than I was able to get in this year. If you’re doing London to Paris, for example, you might think: ‘I’m doing 300 miles over three days, so I need to be able to ride 300 miles.’ No, you don’t. What you need to be able to do is to ride 40 to 50 miles without stopping, and you need to increase your recovery time. So your overall fitness needs to be good, but at the same time, you need to be able to recover quickly and maintain that 40 to 50 miles. Race Across America is quite similar in some respects, but we’re doing 3,000 miles, and we aim to do that within an eight-day period. So my rides as a whole need to increase in terms of time on the bike, my intensity needs to increase on my shorter rides and my recovery time needs to become better, so if I do take time off the bike, my heart rate continues to drop quickly.
It was important to get the crew over there so they could see what it was like. Sleep deprivation was one of the big things, and also where they were going to find food. Food is a major factor in America. In nutritional terms, some of the food is diabolical! McDonald’s becomes your friend in America, and the reason for that is consistency. When you go and buy six chicken nuggets in America, you know they’re the same as you’ll buy in France, in London, in Edinburgh, in Birmingham, so the consistency is there. When you’re doing an event like this you don’t really want to be changing too much whilst you’re there.”
