I've done the DR 6 times and have coached it for the last 5 years (before this year) as head coach for TNT's death ride program. It is a great ride. You really need to work on longer endurance rides. Being able to do 2 back to back rides is great, but try putting together a longer single day.

All of the training rides I used for TNT over the years have generally worked out to 100 feet per mile elevation gain (I think that's right) - in other words, for an 80 mile ride, 8000 feet elevation gain; 90 mile ride 9000 feet elevation gain.

I'm happy to share links to some of my training rides if you like.

I'm not doing DR this year, and the next few weeks are taken up with build and recovery for (and doing )the Terrible Two. So I can't join you for a ride, but am happy to offer encouragement, ride strategy and training routes. We had a pretty amazing 5 pass completion percentage while I was working on the DR program.

Endurance pace is key, FWIW. You're not going to "win" the ride on Monitor, but you sure can lose it there.