Catching Up...

Ok so I am officially a bad blogger. It’s hard to keep up with the updates, especially when your life is as busy yet boring as mine.

Lately, we have been preparing for Masters Nationals coming up the first and second weeks of July. I have been particularly working on my TT.

Last week was the monthly Lowes Motor Speedway TT in Charlotte. Back in May I rode the 10 mile course in 20:37, about 29.5 MPH average. This time, after a month of threshold work under my belt, I had the ambitious goal of breaking 20:00 (30 MPH). I calculated the lap times, (it’s a 7 lap race around the race track) that I would need to do to hit my goal.

I had a good start the first 2 laps and was right on my mark, but I was seriously hurting from the pace. Laps 3 and 4 I lost about 5 seconds off of my target pace, laps 5-6 I continued to decline, and by the time I started the last lap I was about 30 seconds behind the pace and basically imploded.

I ended up rolling in with a 20:34, only 3 seconds faster than last month. I was pretty discouraged to say the least and I sulked the whole ride home. The next morning I downloaded my power file from the TT and dissected the ride. I found that my average power for the first 2 laps was about 120% of my threshold, then with each lap my average power declined and by the end of the ride my average power was below threshold! Compared to last months TT, my power was about 20 watts lower for the entire ride.

I was instantly kicking myself and reciting 100 times the three sacred rules of the time trial: DON’T GO OUT TO HARD, DON’T GO OUT TO HARD, DON’T GO OUT TO HARD. Had I rode more conservatively, I would have started out right at threshold power and slowly inched up the pace and hammered the last 2 laps. I would have ended up with a much faster ride. Sure I improved my time due to the crazy effort on the first two laps, but I could have been much better, maybe around 20:10 or so if I had rode smarter.

The moral of the story is that you must always stay in control, gauge your efforts based on the length of the TT, and ride your own race. This is especially important when riders are starting at 1 minute intervals and you may be tempted to chase down your minute man. Ride your own race, within yourself, only you can feel the best pace for you and you’ll know when you are going to hard. Of course, HR monitors and especially power meters are an excellent indication, provided you are well aware of your threshold numbers.

Tomorrow is the NC State TT Championships; I plan on racing both the 30-34 and the Pro 1,2 races so it will be a hard day, 80K of time trialing with what looks like only a 20 minute break between the 2 races. Ill try to get a report up on how it went next week.