Phil Gaimon's Full Circle Moment on Mauna Kea

While most of us were still banging out winter miles on the trainer, Phil Gaimon was in Hawaii doing what he does best: going uphill extremely fast. After taking the Haleakala KOM last year, Phil returned to the island this January to re-take the coveted Mauna Kea KOM. We had so many questions about what the kind of preparation, fueling, and execution this massive effort requires, and what comes next. Enjoy!

Below is the transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity:

Hello and welcome everyone, I'm Matt Denis with First Endurance and I'm joined today by Phil Gaimon, former World Tour cyclist, current YouTube star, and KOM mercenary. He's also newly 40 and the sole holder of the famous Mauna Kea segment on Hawaii, which is what we're going to be talking about today. Phil, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Matt. 

Absolutely. I want to start before the beginning with your preparation phase. We're big at First Endurance on this idea of whatever you're going to do, do it well. So whether your goals are a World Tour podium, a big result at a Life Time Grand Prix, a bike packing trip, or just a PR on the segment outside your house, those goals are worthy of professional support and a professional level of attention to detail. I think that you're the perfect ambassador for that idea because at a base level, what you've been doing with your YouTube career is bringing a World Tour level of fitness to chasing Strava segments, and you're also, along with that, bringing World Tour attention to detail and a World Tour level of ambition. So for something like this, which is a huge effort, for people who are unfamiliar, Mauna Kea is 50 miles, it's a 4.5 hour effort, you're going from sea level up to 14,000 feet, and you're crossing through different climates, how far out are you deciding on a date and how does it affect your preparation across training, heat adaption, that kind of thing?

Yeah, it's definitely a climb that you can't just show up and hope for the best. But really, because it's so long, Mauna Kea is just an endurance ride. Last year I did Haleakala on Maui around the same time of year, and on Hawaii, weather is a big part of it, but it's kind of the same weather year round over there, other than it can snow at the top, which is a real kicker. But basically this time of year, like November and December, that's my endurance training period. I still kind of live on that pro arc for no reason whatsoever other than inertia. Other than that, there's no reason for me to do that arc, but that's what I do. So I do my endurance riding in November, December, and then January will be my long climb goal. After that, I'll sharpen it and focus on shorter climbs. So the prep for this effort was endurance training, sweet spot, and a lot of long, hard zone two hours. And in a perfect world, I would try to adapt to the elevation because it is so high at the end, but the thing is, no one's adapted to 13,000 feet at the top, and you're only at 7,000 for like an hour. So I actually don't know if it's valuable. I've never been able to do altitude training because I'm not going to Big Bear in the winter, and I'm not sure how beneficial it is, how much it matters for just a few hours total that you're over 7,000 feet. Because by the top you’re in no man's land; no one's breathing.

Are you doing anything heat-related in order to adapt to the different climates you're going to encounter on the climb?

Yeah, that's the new thing, and I think the heat adaptation does a lot of, or at least some of, what altitude does, or there's a Venn diagram there. I just do that year round: we have a sauna that I got for my wife because she likes the sauna, and then I'm like, oops, benefits. So I'm in there, too. There's room for two. 

That's terrific. It's one of those win-wins: everybody gets some benefit. And then what about nutrition? Does anything change, or do you eat fairly disciplined all year? Are you eating more? Are you getting a little more in on the bike, trying to gut train for the amount of carbs you're going to consume on the day of the effort itself?

Yeah, definitely. I would do one big sweet spot/endurance ride per week and try to do 4,000, 5,000 kilojoules. That was how I set up my build. And for that one, I'm pounding the First Endurance EFS high-carb, and the gels, and just trying to basically simulate the calorie expenditure and the fueling for that day. But it's also kind of the same as always. I know how much I can do per hour on the day. The nice thing about my situation is it's very predictable, very controlled. I go back to the car and ask my wife Emily for a bottle every 45 minutes and I just do that over and over.

Perfect. So it does sound like you are trying to replicate the effort of the climb in training in a pretty specific way, as opposed to just building the engine that you know is going to be required on the day of?

Yeah, absolutely. In Malibu, the only difference is I have to coast because there are some flat miles and downhills in my training. So you're not doing a perfect simulation, but I'll go out in Malibu and do five-hour rides, 10,000 feet of climbing, and I am stopping for a coffee. But yeah, for the most part, that's the simulation I'm looking at trying to do. I knew it would be about 4,500 to 5,000 kilojoules in 4.5 hours. So that's what I was building toward in the sweet spot and endurance training.

And you've had the same coach, Frank, for a long time, correct?

Forever, yeah, since 2014.

You know enough, obviously, that if you needed to, you could coach yourself up to this type of effort. What do you see as the main benefit of working with Frank for something like this? I think for a lot of elite athletes like yourself the primary benefit of a coach is they can put the brakes on you and keep you from overdoing it. Or is he a sounding board, or are you still learning new things from him all the time?

All the above. I’m still learning from him because he's still learning, too. For instance, we weren't eating carbs when I raced. It was 200 calories per hour. This always drives me nuts because this was not that long ago. Ten years ago when I was still World Tour, I always performed well on the old First Endurance flasks. When they sponsored Bissell, it was just a flask of gel. That was my best year because I was just pounding those all the time.

Right.

Then I go to a different team and they're like, okay, you're capped at 200 calories in your bottle and here's your ham and cheese panini in the feed zone. And I just did what I was told and didn't realize that I was probably sacrificing my own performance. Honestly, I assumed they knew better because they were World Tour, and that might be better for some guys back then. But yeah, sugar and carbs are absolutely good fuel and somehow Ironman figured it out before the World Tour did, but here we are. Frank has guided that. He's definitely a sounding board where I'm like, okay, what should the next six weeks look like volume-wise? The day before the thing, I'm looking at the last two times I attempted Mauna Kea, which involved a lot of walking, and I told Frank sort of roughly what week I was planning to perform and leading into it, we were sort of looking at, here's my last time at Mauna Kea, here's Haleakala, which was a good example, that was a little over a year ago, and significantly shorter, but also just a long endurance ride, so that one I think I averaged like 300, and so Mauna Kea is like, alright, let's see if we can do 300 to this point. So he helped me sort of set my power targets and my goals. And also, sanity checks are always good. Accountability. Yeah, he keeps me motivated.

Absolutely. You mentioned the power targets, and it's tough because there's such a wild change in weather conditions and elevation over the course of this. I imagine you're not just picking out a number. You averaged 270 watts for f4.5 hours, but my guess is it doesn't look like a flat line at 270. How much are you breaking the climb up and picking out different power targets for different segments of the climb?

I definitely knew it was going to go down because your threshold does. I set my threshold at, say, 380 at the bottom, at sea level. And then we're talking 330 by 7,000 feet and giant question marks at 12, 13, and 14. But I think at some point, I don't have to stare at the power meter. I sort of just knew if this is what 300 watts felt like at the bottom, at 7,000 it’s going to be more like 270 in the middle, and then it just feels like all hell by the end.

At least by the end, you can kind of turn off that pacing brain a little bit and just say maybe you're emptying the tank here for the last 30 minutes, or whatever it is. 

Right, that's exactly right. The end of it is just, it doesn't matter what I'm doing anymore. We're trying to get to the top.

That's right. You might not even know where you are at that point. It's, you know, one foot in front of the other.

Right, right. At the very end you've done the pavement part on the highway, you've done the dirt part, and it's paved for the last, it ends up being like half an hour and it's super steep, but like the last hundred meters it wraps around, but there's also a left turn. Like I almost missed the turn. I was about to turn left after 4:25:00 of suffering and just ruin the whole segment. Yeah, that's where the brain's at.

Yeah. And I mean really more like six and a half of suffering, right? Because you tried to do it a first time and ran into some issues at the Visitor’s Center.

Right. Right. That's another thing with timing: you can have the day you plan to do it, but if God says no, then the answer is no. So there's a lot of times, especially with this one, like the conditions up there are crazy. You can get wild winds. So kind of my recommendation and my experience is go there, plan, you know, for, I was there for six days, which gave me enough time for two attempts. Or if I had to just bail on the first one, you're stalking the weather forecast like, alright, today is the day.

So obviously you need to make travel arrangements and you're there for a week, but you haven't picked out a day specifically when you show up. You're more watching conditions and seeing when might be a clean day to do it.

Yeah, because there's so much logistics, I had two days of support booked and kind of those two days were blocked out. But I was there long enough that it was going to be flexible. And it's just fingers crossed you don't have, you know, it doesn't rain the day you were planning or whatever, but something like this, the odds are really good that it's going to get messy at some point. I've learned that from just doing it a few times now.

So you were prepared for this. Was there anything that you changed during the second attempt where maybe this was a bit of a blessing in disguise? Like maybe I went out a bit too hot there and I should back it off or I should do something a little differently?

The only thing that was different was, it was funny because my pace was exactly the same, but by the part where I turned around, I was two minutes slower on the day I actually finished. But my power was identical. It was just the wind, and really it just all comes down to the last two hours anyway, so I didn't care. But the only thing I did different was using ice socks because it was hotter than I expected at the bottom. And it wasn't crazy hot, but it's just like if you can keep yourself cool for the first two hours, that’s probably worth something by the end.

100%. And speaking about fuel, are you trying to hit a certain amount of carbs per hour? Do you like to break it up between gels and drink? How do you do that?

I should know the carb math, but I don't. So it was the EFS high-carb, three scoops in one bottle. Then I didn't want to litter out there, so I just squeezed a bunch of the Liquid Shots into flasks. So I would have a bottle every 45 minutes and a flask every 45 minutes. That's a lot of carbs, for sure, because I think it was like probably the equivalent of three or four shots in each of those.

Yeah, the bottle with three scoops would be 90 grams of carbs as well. So you're looking at, you know, maybe 150 to 180 per hour. So big fueling. I mean, this is obviously a long, long effort, but I think it might still surprise some people to learn just how much is going into fueling the engine.

Yeah, that sounds right. I assume it's similar to what folks do during Ironman. One thing that is also nice about Strava versus racing is that you can control exactly how much you get and when. It's not like crap, I gotta go back to the car and the race is splitting up. It's a nice controlled environment, especially with a support car. 

Yeah, exactly. Because it's a controlled environment and because this is such a long climb, I mean, it’s 4.5 hours, so are you psychologically, from a pacing perspective, are you trying to stay really locked in the entire time, or are you looking in places, especially maybe early on, knowing that you've got this big emotional lift of the gravel and the steep finish, are you trying to hit a bit of a flow state and tune out a little bit, focus on other stuff, take in your surroundings?

I'm definitely focused on the effort, but there's also, I don't know, the effort just doesn't take that much focus, I guess. Part of it, when I'm doing all these things, the priority is filming it. So I'm also directing the follow car and going back like to make sure you get this shot, make sure you get that shot. Or I have a little chest camera, and I’ll go okay, I have to make sure I get that view. And I'm thinking about what I'm gonna say in the video in the voiceover after the fact. I'm thinking like, okay, let's mention, you know, this turn here is important, or the headwind was strong here. Let’s make sure I get the flag that's pinning me against the wall. So I'm checking boxes in my head of what needs to be filmed. Or there's a lot of goats on the side of the road up there, so I made sure I got some goat content. 

Everybody loves goats. And I imagine this helps the time go by a little bit faster so that you don't get in that kind of spiral of just watching the power meter and watching seconds tick by.

Yeah, there's definitely no denying how much time there is left. So you can't distract me from that, but it's nice how daunting it is, because you know it's just so backloaded on that climb. It's just so much harder once you get to 8,000 feet and the dirt section and the steep part and the altitude. So it's all about staying kind of relaxed and keeping within yourself, knowing there's a lot left. Even after the dirt, there's a lot left. So it's just all about holding back. I listen to music when I ride, or a podcast, I like my brain to be occupied, but during a KOM I don't, so I guess that must be a flow state because I can't tell you what went on for 4.5 hours. 

Yeah, you kind of meditate your way up the volcano. Is there an element of this climb that's maybe underrated in its difficulty? I mean, people always talk about the gravel, and if you don't bring– I mean, even when you did it the first time without a gravel bike, you have to walk there. The steep bit at the end, everybody knows about, but what are the sort of underrated elements of this climb that make it so difficult?

I mean, I think you kind of just hit it. The first time I did it I talked to Alex Candelario. He and I were never teammates, but I raced with him a lot and he was doing guided tours then. So he was giving me advice when I went out there, and I was on Garmin Sharp then, that was my last year World Tour. And he was like, dude, you're gonna need  a gravel bike or a mountain bike for that dirt section. I remember thinking like, fuck off Cando, I'm World Tour, I don't need that shit. Like I'm gonna be fine, I  have 28c tires on my road bike, disc brakes. I can ride anything, you don't know how good I am, etc,  and then fast forward to me definitely walking a lot. And I think even when I was doing the tire selection for this one, I thought 35c should be fine, and then at the last minute I was like, let's just put the 45’s on. And I still had to walk a little bit. Actually, in the Strava comments and just conversation on Instagram with the video, someone commented that it doesn't qualify for a KOM if you had to walk. And I replied like, actually, I don't think anyone's ever made it up here without walking. Like, I'm pretty sure. And two guys announced that they had, and I believe them. I'm sure it can be done if you get a good day and the dirt is packed or whatever. But I guess to answer your question, you can't underestimate just how wide the tires need to be, how easy the gearing needs to be, because you're at 16%, 17%, and it's sandy.

Yeah, so that's what I was gonna ask: is the main thing there just the depth of the sand we're talking about?

Yeah, you just have to respect that there is nothing for your back tire to grip at that gradient when it's that loose. Yeah, and honestly like it might be faster to walk. It's definitely steep enough that you can't stand, you're not out of the saddle on a lot of the gravel bit. I thought I was going to make it through, and then like literally the last, I could see the pavement, the last bit I had to unclip. And also, again, you're at 12,000 feet, it's hard to concentrate, it's hard to pick a line. There was one spot where I grabbed a bottle from the car and just from that little bit of my arm being off, I kind of swerved off into the deeper part and had to save it. It's hard to explain how dumb you get at altitude.

You don't need to explain it to me. I've been there, you know, when you're at 190 BPM, your brain really turns off. And I would actually take, I guess, a different tack from the YouTube comment. I would say that it makes the KOM maybe more impressive because you'd obviously ride it if you could. You're being forced to do something slower for a couple of minutes or however long it is.

Yeah, the Strava purists are going to Strava purist. And there's also a debate if you switch bikes, it's not allowed. Or someone said, “you got a support car and that's against the rules.” It's like, at some point it gets to, if you didn't build a raft and sail to Hawaii under your own paddling, it doesn't qualify.

Exactly. We're getting into the territory of the old Tour de France riders being DQ'd for welding their bike back together mid-stage because somebody was working the bellows for them.

Right. But yeah, I do go with Strava’s rule of not being allowed to motor pace. So you can draft in a 60-person peloton, which is more effective than motor pacing, but per Strava's rules, and I don't know where they even publish this, I know you're not allowed to motor pace, which I agree with. I also refuse to draft. That's the line that I've done, because it's just slippery slopes trying to get someone to pace me on these, anyway. And then, if you're drafting, what are you trying to prove? What exactly is the point of any of this? I'm not here to get KOMs. I'm here to do my best and tell a story. And I don't need to bring in a domestique for that. Instead, it’s here’s a pure benchmark time that you can compare with yours on any climate that you see me on the leaderboard.

On the supplement front, you mentioned that it was a miracle you did not get sick on the other side of this. And I imagine that's kind of, it's a result of the big training block leading into it, plus the stress of the trip and multiple efforts. Do you put that mostly down to MultiV-Pro?

I mean, it's impossible to know with any of this stuff, but there was like a consistent pattern in my early- to mid-20s when I was racing where I'd have a big training block that builds up to a peak, a race, and after every race, without fail, I would be sick for four days and it wouldn't be like, you know, a flu. It was just run down. It would just be like kind of cold symptoms, but I would have three or four of those every year. And then when I joined Bissell, that was the first I worked with First Endurance, and that was the first time I could afford a multivitamin. But I was taking the Multi-V, and at the end of the year, someone was just like, do those work? And I was like, I don't know, wait, I haven't gotten sick this year. It was just weird like, hang on a second, I guess they do. And so since then I've been religious about taking them. I obviously can't prove that that’s what fixed it, but I'm not changing it. So I've been a religious First Endurance user since then. I also loaded the Optygen leading into the effort. I don't use that one year round, but do a two or three week build. So once I had my tickets booked, I started doing four caps of those every day. And then I went back off of it. But yeah, I was still incredibly run down: there's no way to leave Kona that's not a red eye. I'm carrying two bikes and dragging my wife's bike. I'm trying to destroy my body every which way. Oh, and it was my birthday. So I got hammered with my friends the night I got back, and still managed to not get sick. I didn't feel good. You know, let's put it that way. I wasn't training my best the next week, but I was not sniffling and coughing.

Nothing a few extra naps can't fix.

Right.

You mentioned in your video, or I at least got a sense of this being a full circle moment, an important KOM to you. You're tackling it on your 40th birthday, and it kind of felt like, I mean, if the World Tour is the first chapter of your career, and this is the second, do you feel like the second chapter is kind of closed with achieving this goal? Or is it going to be kind of business as usual still this year?

It's definitely like a meaningful mark in whatever the chapters are. Mauna Kea, just to summarize for folks, it was the first climb I did. Well, it was my last day being in the World Tour when I did it. So that was sort of an emotional day regardless, and a good way to go out, and not intentional, but it was like, it wasn't my idea. I was just like, yeah, this is new. Okay, why not? And then halfway up I was like, this is actually special and deserving of wherever I'm at in my weird life. And then it sort of inspired opened the doors to still being a pro without being on a team. I didn't intentionally do it, but that's what I learned over the next 10 years, so I always wanted to give that climb the video it deserved and a proper effort, since I hadn't been able to do it with the right bike, with the right preparation, all that kind of stuff. I'm 40, so I'm not as fast. I would have gone faster having the correct gear 10 years ago, but this is my best that I can do now. And I for sure emptied the tank and did all the preparation and logistics right. But as far as a new chapter, I'm not gonna quit and get fat. I think the next chapter for me, I'm still gonna be my best, whatever that is, whatever that looks like. And I think the next chapter for me, if my last 10 years was showing that you can be a pro without being on a team, moving forward it'll be you can be a pro without being fast, without being world class, being your best, whatever that is. So that's the chapter I'll be forced to try and place as I get older.

Hey, as a 38 year old, I'm fully sympathetic to the fact that you have to start shifting the goalposts on yourself.

Yeah, my power output will never be as good as it was yesterday. And that's something that's not fun to accept or deal with. Yeah, that'll be the next chapter for me, I think. When I do Mount Washington Hill Climb, it's a good example because it's a race, but they're not all racers. It's people who are locals, and this is the goal, and they do it every year. Because when you're a pro, you compare yourself to pros. But when you're in the real world, when you're on Strava, you think man, I smashed that KOM and you look down like 45 seconds, and that's a dentist, you know? And then you look down Mount Washington, like, yeah, I won, I set a new record or whatever. And that guy did it 45 minutes slower, but he's 65. And that's the next step. That's the real endurance: people who can do something another 20 years on top of where I'm at. I’m far more impressed by that than I would be someone who goes two or three seconds past my time tomorrow.

Do you imagine that the types of KOMs you're hunting for change as you turn 40? You probably are keeping that aerobic efficiency maybe a little bit better than your your top end or your Vo2. Do you see yourself going for more of these longer, more diesel-y KOMs as a result of age?

Yes and no. I guess it's not as a result of age, it's just as a result of what's interesting. So, you know, going for a three-minute climb, there's not much story to tell. I guess the beginning of my Worst Retirement Ever stuff, people wanted to see what time I could do or a pro could do on their local climb. So I went to Lookout Mountain in Denver, got that KOM, and there were a lot of those. I just did that for all the major segments, and now I've done all those. The benchmarks have been set, and explained, and in a lot of cases surpassed. So now it's kind of the exploration of finding a climb that's interesting, that has a story to it. And those are going to be longer. I'm looking at like, Mauna Kea is the longest climb in the world, it's the hardest climb in the world that we know of. But there's some weird stuff in South America where I don't know how high it is, I don't know what the pavement situation is, I'm on Google Earth trying to see is this one even safe? Is it all 18-wheelers through long tunnels?

Yeah, I've seen footage from Letras in Colombia: cool-looking climb, but it also looks absolutely harrowing from a traffic perspective.

I’ve actually done Letras. That one's not bad. The one that's harrowing for traffic is Patios, right outside of Bogota. And that one's shorter. I got the KOM on that even though I had to put a foot down because there was like an 18-wheeler that cut me off. That was the beginning of 2020, but in the pandemic that became every Colombian pro’s thing, so now Nairo Quintana has it or something.

Well, and according to the purists, you did put a foot down, so yours never counted.

That's right, yeah, because I had to hike-a-bike. But on that, you're just breathing motorcycle fumes and they don't have catalytic converters down there. There was a truck protest. So that was a different kind of story and adventure. Yeah, there's a whole world of other stuff; I'm going to have to pivot away from, look how many watts I can do. I could still put the heart rate and the music and the power, and I'm doing 450 watts for a while and that looks impressive to everyone but me. That's still in me for a couple more years, but yeah, I’m gonna have to go back to the drawing board. I'm looking at places like South America, Mexico, Asia, Africa. I've never been to Africa.

Yeah, and I already think I see you laying the groundwork for some of this transition, too. I mean, you were an English major back in undergrad, and there is definitely a storytelling element that I think you're bringing some more of into the more recent videos, whether it's, you know, cultural stuff about wherever you happen to be, or a narrative, for instance, like about Mauna Kea, when you're doing it on your last day as a pro and then coming back on your 40th birthday, and you even bring a little botany into it with your wife, right? So that's kind of what prompted this question, because it does look like you're sort of diversifying the channel a little bit in a way that is really quite compelling. 

I would love to. It'd be a much easier edit if it was just, here's me at the bottom, here's some voiceover, here's what it felt like, here's how I paced. But I'm not a pro anymore, I don't even find that interesting. And I do want to talk about the culture, and I do want people to know about the food. And so I've always wanted it to be more Anthony Bourdain, more like, here's what this place is like, here's what these people are like, here's a funny interview. And it's fun, too. I guess it's funny and humbling to see how some of my favorite videos are the ones that people do not click on. I'm just like, this was so funny, I wrote this out, I got these really cool shots of me and two buddies touring. One of my favorite videos, I did a video with Phil Rosenthal, the Everybody Loves Raymond creator, and he brought me to his favorite restaurant and we had a cookie. And he's super funny, obviously. He has a Netflix show now, so he was super funny and the video was fun, and we actually had somebody shooting it, and nobody clicked on it. And I mean, you know, it got some views, it did fine, but for my channel it was bad. Whereas I could just go over to a hill you haven't heard of and do 450 Watts the whole way up it, and it's five minutes from my house, and I got the chest cam on, and that's going to do better. So it's like, well, all right. The good news is I can do both.

Yeah, I guess there's a little bit of market pressure in there. I mean, personally, and for us at First Endurance, we love the new direction and are here for whatever pivot you're making. We're just glad to be associated with the journey wherever it goes.

Yeah, I appreciate that. There's still going to be performance and sweat. Even if I'm going much slower up Mauna Kea on my 60th birthday.

Yeah, it never gets easier, you just go a little slower as you get older, right? Well, I don't want to take up too much of your time. Thank you again so much for joining us and talking through some of this stuff with us. It was really informative for me, and hopefully for everybody else as well. Take care.

Of course, thanks for the support. I always say First Endurance is my longest running sponsor, and there's been some back and forth, because when you're a pro you don't get to decide. But after that year on Bissell, I'm on Garmin Sharp and here's your new sponsors and your new whatever. And under the table, Mike Fogarty would always just send me some of the Multi-V. And when I retired and I was like, well, I was supposed to get a job, but that didn’t happen. So every month I was like, man, I need to find a new sponsor for whatever the heck I'm doing just to get me through to when my job starts, which it never did. But First Endurance was the first one I called. And he was like, yeah, I don't know what this is, but sure, I'm in. And yeah, I'm glad to have made it pay off for all of us, but especially the ones who take a gamble. I appreciate it.

Appreciate you. Cheers, Phil.

Thanks.