Feature: Road to Bolivian National Cycling Champs 2024

Floren Scrafton describes her unconventional preparatory lead-up or ‘road to’ Bolivia’s National Cycling Championships in Santa Cruz, (3rd – 5th May )2024, a challenging pursuit and test of patience and optimism. 

Feature: Road to Bolivian National Cycling Champs 2024
Click here to read the previous feature from Floren

Completing the mission, making it to the startline (which feels like a finish lane) aka Level 5 of 5. Photo: “Jeremy J-Dog Allenn”

Floren Scrafton describes her unconventional preparatory lead-up or ‘road to’ Bolivia’s National Cycling Championships in Santa Cruz, 3rd – 5th May 2024. A challenging pursuit and test of patience and optimism, this mission is up there with my biggest manifestations of “where there’s a will there’s a way”. I hope that by describing this story it serves as an entertaining and inspiring read!

Intro
Floren writes … My road to Bolivian Champs has felt like a video game, coming up against quirky challenges and completing them stage by stage or level by level. The game was a race against time for making a full race-ready recovery following a recent tonsillectomy operation. Like an engaging Mario-kart racecourse, a parcours of unique logistical, administrative and immunological obstacles presented themselves to me. And as I write this, I’ve just reached Level 4 out of 5 to game completion; I’m 80% towards achieving my goal of getting myself onto the Bolivian National Champs start-line (i.e. Level 5), all kicking off in five days’ time.

So what was Level 4? Getting myself to Bolivia in the first place.
And I’ve made it! I’m sat writing in the hot and humid region of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, with my bike and cycling kit all intact after a five-stage 29 hour-long journey door to door. This is WAY further than I expected to be several weeks ago so I’m over the moon. All that is left is to stay safe and healthy before the races start. My races at the Bolivian Champs will be the 100 km Women’s elite Road Race (RR) this Saturday 4th May and the 20 km Individual Time-Trial (TT) the day before (described in order of personal priority not chronology).

Before we dive into the details of the previously completed levels of this game, Levels 1-4, I’ll provide some background to this whole Bolivian Champs mission.

Travelling to Bolivia with my bike + 35kg of donated cycling kit

Background
Since starting training with my coach Dr Tom Kirk (Custom Cycle Coaching) last October 2023, our eyes have been set on the 2024 Bolivian National Road Race Champs, where my goal was (and still is) to podium. A medal at the Nationals would significantly boost my chances for Bolivian National team selection and be a great boost to my cycling results palmares for attracting future UCI Continental teams. The major obstacle for making it to my Champs (besides the finances) has been tonsilitis, a recurring problem I’ve had to manage since catching covid 2 years ago.

Tonsilitis side-lined me for most of last year and it was impossible to string together consecutive weeks of training. It got to the point where I was on antibiotics for more weeks than off them and the slightest exposure to anything or a couple of bad night’s sleep would flare up an infection. I’d been waiting for a tonsillectomy (surgical removal of tonsils) for 17-months and I joked about my operation date being scheduled right before my Bolivian Champs, and well, that’s exactly what happened! Well, 6 weeks’ prior on the 20th March.

Long-term justification for a tonsillectomy: I need to stop getting tonsilitis if I’m serious about 1) becoming a professional cyclist and 2) not leading the life of a solitary hermit crab caught on the line of inevitable illness.

Short-term justification for the tonsillectomy: professional cyclist Richard “Richie” Carapaz toed the line and then won Ecuador’s National Road Champs 8 weeks after his tonsillectomy in 2023. Putting our vast circumstantial differences aside, if a fellow Latino can do it in eight weeks, so could I? (± 2 weeks).

– The stakes: time available for making a full race-ready recovery? 6 weeks.
– Risks associated? Many. Experiences to gain? Innumerable amounts.

Road to Bolivian Champs Levels 1-4
I’ve made a visual timeline to supplement the main stages and training milestones across the 6 weeks between the tonsillectomy date and lining up for the races in Bolivia (Figure A).

Timeline Figure A – Click to see a larger version of this graphic

Level 1: Tonsillectomy operation
My #NoMoreTonsils operation took place at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and many thanks to their incredible surgeons, nurses and staff, the operation went smoothly. There were no post-operative complications and three weeks later my GP confirmed my throat had fully healed. Vamosss!
On we went to Level 2.

Level 2: Recovering from a tonsillectomy
Recovery phase 1: the first two weeks post-op – I won’t go into too many details here as parts are a bit grim, but I do want to provide an insight into post-operation expectations for athletes as this information was very scarce for me! Expect serious post-op fatigue (and delayed onset of fatigue) induced by things like walking around the block for 10 mins. This subsided for me after 3-4 days, so have faith! You’ll get through >2 kg of ice-cubes during your first week.

Take electrolytes and put your ego aside and drink liquids through a straw for the first week. Black coffee and bananas are too acidic to eat (sorry cyclists). You can and should eat real unblended food from the get-go – but keep it all cold and have loads of patience. Yes, it will hurt, but it’s worth it trust me! The worst, most painful days begin around day 4 but are over by day 7, this is mentally challenging, but will enhance your pain-tolerance for future competitions.

In case the pain gets too much, here’s a homemade Huel recipe: oats, banana, soy yoghurt, milled flax seeds, soy/almond milk, honey, pinch of salt and cinnamon, ice cubes. Keep the speaking, loud noises and stressful situations to a minimum for the first two (or more) weeks as these things really strain your throat!?! Find a source of personal inspiration to keep up-beat and focused, and a friend who’s already been through a tonsillectomy as an adult for tips and reassurance (thanks so much Jonny!).

Homemade Huel.

Recovery phase II: getting back to some cycling
See figure A for a visual dated timeline of how my coach Tom and I managed this. The most important metric to be guided by was my heart rate (HR), based off a freshly determined HR range from resting to max: 33 bpm -195 bpm (an amusement at the hospital).

The incremental training plan went like this:
• Easy short turbos (HR 100–120 bpm)
• Easy short outside rides (average HR 120-135 bpm, max capped at 140 bpm)
• Easy turbos + heat training (riding indoors in long-sleeve layers and no cooling fan, max HR 140 bpm)
• Easy longer outside rides (max 3 h duration; average HR 125-135 bpm, max capped at 160 bpm)
• Riding to feel outside with a few short bits of higher intensity (max HR 160-170 bpm)
• 1h Chaingang (average HR 147 bpm, max 186 bpm)
• 1h Crit race (average HR 169 bpm, max 184 bpm)
• 1h spins with some neuromuscular sprints thrown in
• Riding to feel outside ft. pushing it up a familiar hill (reaching a max HR of 180 bpm)
• Local heat acclimatization in Santa Cruz, Bolivia for 6 days prior to the Champs

My average weekly hours of cycling varied from 6 – 12 h, half-of what my best weeks pre-op were, while my long rides were capped at 3 h. Due to a few instances of lingering fatigue/feeling-run-down my opportunities for completing sessions (where HR could repeatedly hit VO2 max) were unfortunately missed. But I did manage to complete 2 x confidence-boosting race-specific higher intensity rides: a Cowley Condors chaingang (maintaining a continuous high speed like a team time-trial) and a local Dalton Crit race (1 hour of racing around a 3km closed circuit). There was also a 1 x 7.5-minute push up that Portbury Lane hill in Bristol during a solo ride-to-feel the week before flying out. These three tests served as my green light for Bolivian Champs and now I’m curious to see if this less-conventional post-op/pre-Champs preparation has been sufficient to still feel competitive at Bolivian Champs.

Confidence-boosting successful podium-placing race outing with my FTP teammate Laura.  Photo: “Jeremy J-Dog Allenn”

Level 3: UCI License Nationality swap
UCI = Union Cycliste Internationale = the worldwide governing body for cycling, which issues you a license to race. You can only compete and score at the National Champs of the country stated on your license. Thanks to my British mum and Bolivian father, I have dual nationality between the UK and Bolivia and until recently my UCI License was British.

Level 3 required I gambled on swapping my UCI Nationality to Bolivian in the hope I could recover for Bolivian Champs in 6 weeks’ time, early May. This swap would eliminate my future participation in a British National Cycling Champs, so if I wasn’t race-ready by then, I’d have lost my opportunity to race as British in the 2024 British National Cycling Champs. Given how these Champs were scheduled for late June, this would have been a far safer, lower pressure, WAY cheaper option (and where I’d also have had a full squad of teammates from my club FTP Racing as support).

To complicate the gamble further, the window for making this decision was narrow and depended upon knowing three pieces of information: firstly, the application processing time for the UCI License Nationality swap (~2 working weeks), secondly, the entry deadline for Bolivian Champs requiring my new Bolivian UCI License (~19th April) and lastly, and most unpredictable and subjective of all, the time needed for making a judgement on whether I would be robust enough (health and immunity-wise) to race by early May. Tonsils are our first line of immune defence and whilst they were malfunctioning in my case, how robust would my new immune system sin tonsils be? How long would it take my body to recover and readjust to the change?

I worked out I had until the 5th April for committing to swapping my UCI Nationality to Bolivian. This gave me just over two weeks post-op to judge my body’s future capacity for being race-ready for Bolivian Champs. Lol. April the 5th came, and despite being weeks away from trying any form of higher intensity training I was feeling especially optimistic that day and applied for a Nationality swap; vamosss! The UCI processed my application rapidísimo and elated, I celebrated (over WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger) the completion of Level 3 with my UK and Bolivian team of supporters! Now onto Level 4…

Level 4: Getting to Bolivia

This started with a strategic trip to Oxford to see my bike-fitter Alec Leslie (above), Pannekoek Café & Bike-fitting. I needed Alec’s help setting up a pair of very much needed, highly anticipated (first ever) cycling shoes of the brand Lake (model CX301; bright yellow in colour). Whilst there, Alec also managed to convert my Redchilli roadbike into an actually comfortable (!) TT-machine to give me the chance of racing the Individual Time Trial as well as the Road Race in Bolivia. Thanks to Alec’s help, as well as his encouragement and that of my coach Tom’s, this is now the plan! Doubling our chances for #ProjectPodium.

After seeing that my body responded convincingly to the aforementioned higher intensity training two week’s out from the Champs, I then had just six days to find, book and get onto all the necessary modes of transport to make it to Santa Cruz. To make my trip to Bolivia more meaningful I decided to try and collect as much donated cycling kit as possible so I could distribute this first batch in person (the beginnings of a separate project I’m developing called #KitDropBolivia).

With no direct flights UK-Bolivia, ever, the travel logistics and associated costs (£1600) are crazy and if it wasn’t for generous and supportive friends and family who literally lent me the money, I wouldn’t have managed this penultimate hurdle. Having once foregone what then became my only invite to race on the track (athletics) for Bolivia at a GP in Buenos Aires in 2018 I was determined to not let a lack of funds rule me out on this occasion. Besides, this mission could really pay off!

Preparing for Level 5 and beyond
So that was my lead up to Bolivian Champs until right now. I’ve got a few more days before me to finally breathe, relax and locally acclimatise to the >30-degree heat in Santa Cruz and complete Level 5 by getting to the startline. This means it’s also time to finally consider my race day expectations.

My insights from last year’s guest appearance at Bolivian Champs in the Potosí region (where I was placed 9th at 3500 m altitude before being pulled off the course by the ‘broom wagon’ with 10 km to go) suggest there are 5 to 8 beastly #BoliviansOnBikes to beat. Having not raced them since a year ago, nor seen them finish, it’s impossible to know what form they’re in, what their strengths are and whether any new strong women will be racing this year’s edition. The racecourse is pancake flat, very exposed and totally un-technical; imagine an airport runway, or a Dalton Barracks 100 km Crit race without actually doing a loop. This, along with the rare lack of altitude for a Bolivian National Championships were decisive factors in deciding whether this was all worth the gamble/money/efforts for making it here. Oh but this year, unlike the last, I’ll actually be on my own bike!

Acknowledgements
• My coach Tom for his invaluable guidance, optimism and reasoning, believing in my ability to recover and still be competitive and for keeping Mission Bolivian Champs alive if ever I doubted it.
• My fave duo of Alec and Sarah for putting me up in Oxford for the tonsillectomy and for all their indispensable support pre and post op right up until flying to Bolivia.
• Pannekoek Café & Bike-fitting for setting up all of my race kit for #ProjectPodium
• Jonny ‘JSW’ for tips and encouragement for the tonsillectomy (pre and post-op expectations)
• Bike workshops Bomber Bikeworks (Bristol) & Summertown Cycles (Oxford) for bike parts & revisions
• My FTP Racing team (led by Billy Olivier) & Oxfordshire Youth Cycling (led by Jake Backus) for kit donations for Bolivian cyclists #KitDropBolivia
• Friends and family for all your support and belief!
• NHS and John Radcliffe Hospital for the smoothest operation I could have possibly hoped for.

Photos: Cycling shoes & roadbike TT-bike kit set-up.

 

 

Send your results as well as club, team & event news here

Other Results on VeloUK (including reports containing results)

Other News on VeloUK

Tags: