The race packs have been collected, final bike service complete and the annual purchase of the Gillette Venus is done, it is time to pack and have faith that the training has been sufficient. The Savage men’s racing team is looking in decent shape for Saturday with one of the most balanced teams in years hoping to dip under 5 hours. We hear you asking, how do you tell the strength of all your riders if you have not raced together in weeks? Well besides the eye bleeding ascents of Suikerbosie on Thursdays and some random number on Strava or training peaks there is no perfect way to judge.

So, in Pure Savage fashion, we are going to go off on a tangent and have a look at some Strava and Racetec data. Surely the most kilometres so far in 2019 would be a good measure. Well, maybe this is not the best measure, as Brendon does not count kilometres on the Zwift as actual kilometres ridden or that he commutes 25km a day which does not really help towards going fast over 200km. We see Waldo, Ben and Klyde having put in some big kilometres this year despite weddings and trips to the ER. This also puts the runners in the group at a slight disadvantage, as they were “probably” training harder for their 2 Oceans silver than those doing coffee rides at the same time.

Our team of experts then clicked filter in excel on the distance climbed column to see if this possibly could uncover some greater insight. Well we can tell the bridge in Woodstock is helping Brendon’s climbing stats or his Garmin elevation is slightly off. It does show those that tend to find themselves mountain biking by mistake, do gain some extra climbing meters with Sean and Ben jumping up the rankings, which probably explains their recent gains in climbing. The average distance covered so far in 2019 by the team was 6 860km and 70 069m of climbing.

Maybe the experience of the route is important, so we hoped over to Racetec to see how many times each person has completed the Coronation Double Century. This seems to hold true for a few of the riders, with Will having racked up 16 Double Centuries and always bringing the goods on race day. Dan is up for his first full gas DC this year but we know he is up for the hammer. The teams getting a little more experienced with the average number of Double Centuries creeping up to 5.

We had wrapped up the article and I asked the team for comment and Waldo said that we should probably include longest ride ever as he feels this could possibly be a good indication of strength in the legs over long distance. So, we sent Klyde back to Strava to check everyone’s profiles. Strangely enough Waldo has the longest ride to date, shock horror, with 433km. Will racked up 333km ride on the same day with Waldo at the PPA 12 hour race. Brendon and Kevin rocked up a 300km end of year ride and the rest have just smashed a few Double Centuries.

We were going to add the total number of Everest’s by team member, but that would just be Kevin and Brendon having completed one and our support driver Calvin with an ascent to his name, so we thought it best to leave this out. Sort of.

Having looked at all the numbers it’s very difficult to see a strong top 6 this year, the team is very evenly balanced with an addition of a few big engines in the likes of Deano and Ben this year. We will be looking to keep it together on the climbs and make sure there are at least 10 riders to smash it on the rollers. We did try to check out the weight of all the riders in the team, but that information is even more closely guarded than FTP figures apparently! How your teams stats stack up and how comfortable are you feeling with your training done, let us know in the comments or the socials!