In the first of an occasional series, we ask Liam Maybank to tell us all about his best ride ever… and the worst!

 

Best Ride

“My best ride is an easy choice, it was also my closing race of this season in the end.

“2024 became the season I have been aiming to produce for a long time. It started with quite a lot of inconsistency still present but finally tying down some dietary issues with both gluten and oats allowed some correction of the problems I’ve been having in recent years (and to some degree always).

“My form had been improving steadily through the year with a wobble around the National 50 due to a false negative all clear on gluten. With that eliminated again, progress became more linear and I got to the end of August with a very strong ride at the National Closed Circuit Championships where if anything I rode too conservatively in the second half and should have let the power of the first couple of laps continue to flow.

“Having ridden an 18:30 PB on the E2/10 in harsh conditions where James Jenkins and Paul Burton both did usual power and were close to me while a long way from their own PBs, I knew that in decent conditions on there I could ride a 17:xx off 355W. I also now had a lot more power than that available if I trusted myself to hold together.

“On the other hand I had waited all year for decent conditions and got an awful lot of wind on fast courses so time was running out. The days leading up to the E2/10 on 7 September showed almost perfect conditions forecast, warm and still though the day before and after were both as windy as usual.

“The forecast did hold and driving out of a very wintry Surrey to the last bit of summer North of London was very welcome. Warm up went smoothly and on the line Mark Jones said something along the lines of a 17 is on the cards for you today, I mumbled something in reply while thinking I’m aiming at taking a lump out of the 41-year-old age record of 17:47.

The start, I rolled off the line keeping power nicely under control and then got into the effort on the main road. Good power was coming smoothly with the average ticking through 370, 375, 380 and 383 into the turn. This is where things got a bit unreal, checked average speed and saw 34.7mph. Then started to think about whether I’d just had a tailwind when it should have been slight crosswind.

“Coming back onto the A11 from the turn is a drag where a bit of pressure is needed to get back up to speed. However adrenaline was really flowing now and I did over a minute at 440W which could have been very damaging if I wasn’t having a really good day.

“After that error I held on to 370W until the fast ninth mile where I recovered a little at 355W before finding nearly 370W again into the finish and stopping the Garmin at 17:2x. The first half was as good as I could have ridden it, the second was very wild but it worked.

“Of my current PBs it is the only one where power is close to my best power over the distance and my aero setup is the best and most consistent it has ever been.

 

Worst Ride

“There are way too many poor rides in recent years to pick one out!

“I’ve had four or five years with a very poor ability to retain glycogen in muscles. This has caused a lot of DNFs and DNSs because when it happened racing was just not possible. The initial stage of this becoming a major problem was quite erratic form and best exemplified by the E2/100 in June 2017.

“It was my target race for the year after a 3:25 in 2016. Aiming to get under 3:20 was the goal and conditions were fantastic, if a bit hot. I’d had quite a few good results that year and was looking forwards to the race with aero working well and training feeling good.

“I don’t do much of a warm-up for a 100 and the start is a good trek from the HQ on that course so that was the warm-up. I didn’t feel too lively but put that down to a bit of nerves and the 6am start time.

“The start is a couple of hundred metres from the A11 and heads north from there. 200m into the race and on the slip road out of the saddle coming onto the dual carriageway and my legs are empty. “This isn’t good” or something shorter was a very clear thought.

“The course is three laps and in 2016 I aimed for 320W, having to hold back to this on the first lap and dropping to 310 and then 300 on the following laps. This time holding 310W was a fight that didn’t last long. I held 300W until Colin Ward came past, who really shouldn’t have on a good day and shortly after that arrived the realisation that my saddle was doing damage a lot more quickly than usual in a 100.

“I don’t have good relationships with saddles in 100s, needing to sit very still, at lower power and having quite soft skin is not a good recipe. Then add in a poor saddle choice, made in search of a non-painful 100 saddle (these don’t exist for me) and the suffering was ramped up further from a very bad day in a long race.

“By the end of the first lap something else was clear: it was a very fast day. Despite the lower power I was faster than 2016 so opting out at the end of the first lap wasn’t really a choice. Maybe everyone else was having a shocker in the heat.

“After Colin came past this was obviously not true so the choice at the end of the second lap was harder but again I was still going faster than my PB so I made various promises to myself to never have to ride another 100 and kept going.

“Second lap was 290W and last lap coming apart at the seams was 275W. Overall 20W lower than 2016 but two minutes faster. The power drop losing four minutes and costing the sub 3:20 on the first day it was done by Adam Duggleby.

“Plenty of damage was done by the saddle and I needed three days off the bike then one training day, rest day and openers before the National 50 where power came easily and I did what is still my best 50 power of 338W and very little understanding why.

“I worked that out this year, I’m almost certainly coeliac, but this was masked and partially treated by a high training load.

“I still haven’t completed another 100 though I did start the Hounslow 100 and get to 50 miles before the inevitable (at that time) glycogen fail won again.

“It is definitely a target to replace my PBs done with poor power in freak conditions with rides done at good power (hopefully also in ideal conditions, but that is secondary).

“My PBs up to this year were F11/10 (freak wind conditions, awful power), P884/15 (heart arrythmia, electrolyte problems), E2/25 (pleuritic chest pain), old E2/30 (good power but 2013 before I worked out the aero side and 1:03ish), E2/50 (2016, foaming at the mouth, salt deficit, 300W, followed by a drug test with a 2.5 hour rehydration delay and a ride to Cambridge for the train) and that horrific E2/100.

“The first two of these have been fixed this year which is a start, now just need La Niña to bring us a good summer again and to avoid finding any dietary potholes.”

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