Aug 06 2008
L-l-l-l-l-arch!!!
Had a decent weekend. Spent Saturday out on Sauvies Island. Not riding but berry picking and hanging out on Rachel’s dad’s boat. Pretty nice, low-key sort of day.
Sunday was OUCH. Got myself and the bike ready and headed out to Corbett. I must have done may math all wrong because I figured out a little too late that I was running behind.
As a side note, tt’s a small goal of mine to make sure that I get a decent warm-up in before races this year. I had a nice 40′ set all ready to go:
- 15′ easy spin
- 10′ gradual build from tempo to TT pace
- 3′ easy spin
- 5′ at TT pace
- 3′ easy spin
- 1′ hard, high cadence
- 2′ easy spin.
My start time was at 33:00. I found myself sitting in the porta-potties when the first rider went off. Crap (literally). I need to get moving.
Jog back to the car. Do some quick math to cut the warm up short a bit and start spinning. This doesn’t feel good. It was a little chilly but after the first 10 minutes, the sweat was starting to run and things were improving. I stopped the warm-up at 26 minutes in, figuring I had a 2 or 3 minutes to get over there.
Mmmmm, nope. I got over there at 36:30. So they just sent me off.
I don’t do many time trials but from my understanding a big part of doing them well is avoiding the temptation to go out too hard, too fast. I had a decent idea of where I’d set my power at for the full hour or so. So I got in that range and just set to work.
There’s not really all that much that’s exciting about time trials. You ride hard until you cross the line. And for OUCH, you go up. And up. And up.
About 2/3 of the way through, the batteries on the head unit went out. By then I was about 40 minutes into the race so I knew what level of effort it would take to finish out. Plus, I thought, it’s never a bad idea to just unplug once in a while.
Since I started 4 minutes late, I was out of the range of the 4/5 group and solidly in the middle of the 3’s and the 1/2’s. I passed a couple 3’s pretty early on and got passed by a 1/2 shortly after that. The rest of the race was fairly quiet.
Finished up at the top and kind of spun around. I felt decent. Exhausted but not totally spent. Checked the time: around 1:11, which I’m assuming included the 4′ dipshit penalty I assessed myself. so realistically I finished the climb around 1:07. Pretty good.
As a side, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why more ‘crossers aren’t in this race. It’s an hour long at just at or over your threshold. It’s uphill so there’s a little more muscular strength involved as opposed to just tucking in and spinning. If nothing else, it helped set my 60 minute threshold power in a race environment.
Not much else to say about the race. I downloaded what was left of my data and have adjusted my workout ranges for the next few weeks. I’d like to get 1 or 2 PIRs in before they shut down for the year. This week is a little busy but hopefully next Mon. or Tues. We’ll see.