The Longest 100 Meters

So, this is the synopsis.

I flew out to San Diego last week to get some good work done. I got that done, and am glad I did. I think it was important work to get underway and sets the USMC air traffic control community up for greater success and training in the future. Ok… that being said.

I loved riding on Camp Pendleton. What great roads and HUMUNGOUS road shoulders. I did some fantastic 2×20’s on the road bike on Monday and thought, man … this rocks. Interval 1, avg 342, normalized 349. (sweeping downhill I wasn’t sure what was around the corner - no need to run in to a tank!). Second interval was coming back on the same roads and rock solid, avg 349, normalized 350. Easy enough, but only 90 minutes on the bike.

The plan was to get in 2½ hours on Tuesday, but that fell through when a fire on base trashed the traffic flow and I didn’t get on the bike until almost 6pm. I got a 90 minute hard tempo ride in. Hoped to get to Palomar Wed night, but still out of work to late to make it. Wed and Thursday were basically both a wash with nothing better than 90 minutes of recovery rides. Friday was set to fly out, so no riding. Flew in to Chicago Friday on time, and left Chicago Friday some 4 hours late. Landed in DCA at almost 2am Sat morning, home around 4am Sat morning. In bed at 4:30am, and up at 9am to get to the race. EXHAUSTED.

So… in performance management chart speak, I went from CTL of 125 to a CTL of 116, a nice tapered TSB of ~-5 (ideally aiming for about +8-10 for stage 1 of ToWC), to a TSB of 39.89 - totally overrested. I knew this was happening so I didn’t even look at power files all week in San Diego.

Stage 1: Nice road race, fun course and eye bleeding power climbs. First few laps felt fine and the “jump” in the legs was there for the climbs. Even when Matt and company turned the screws on Lap 4 at a steady pace, I was good. Unfortunately even when the break looked like it could have gone, two of our 6 sat up and blew that. If I was going to be in a break on Saturday (or Sunday, really), it needed to be one that I didn’t have to attack really hard to get in - and I hoped this would have been in.

Lap 6 in the tailwind section, an NCVC fella was going backwards through the pack and rather than go backwards on his wheel, I avoided left to let him go by. Moto-ref saw me cross yellow line and relegated me back to the back. Nice - so.. well.. me and Lance go to the rear in absolutely the wrong time. Yeah, the point where Sacawa & Co took the bridging group I wanted to be in. Climb 1 - ouch. Pace was blazing on the descent through the intersection. Climb 2 - did I mention I was over-rested? Yeah… no snap for climb two and I am pretty sure I saw stars. Rusty caught up at the top and super-motivated me to finish the stage instead of collapsing right there so I pushed through. WAY down on the GC @ 26th. Time for home and bed.

Stage 2: TT
The good news is my position makes up for everything I lack in freshness. I did a solid job pacing what I thought was the best case for me. I eased on the descents so I could give it full gas in the TT position on the climbs. The tailwind outbound allowed you to basically take the climb to the turn around out of the saddle, so I did. Marc Warner blitzed the course, nice job there. I squeezed a second place - and contrary to results being 30 seconds skewed for at least the whole Cat 3 field (not sure how early the “slide” happened, but it seems pretty consistent to what people thought they finished in and what was posted) - I finished in 27:28. (Power files don’t lie) 2nd in the TT took me from 26th to 6th on the GC. Even though I did 2×20’s at 350 5 days prior, was WAY lower than that for the TT - unacceptably way lower. I can only dream at how much faster my TT would have been at 340-350 watts.

Stage 3: Crit
3 seconds separated 6, 7, and 8. We needed to make some bonus seconds if I wanted to get to 5th. Rusty and I worked out the details pre-race and just didn’t execute cleanly. I need to do a better job communicating pre/mid race with the teammates and I think we’ll make some serious headway.

About 8 or 9 minutes into the race I nailed that nice pothole/manhole on the descent. It pushed the bars forward which tightened the rear brakes. It also slid the rear wheel slightly out of the derailleur hanger. I figured this out after I took the turn to the start finish line and the chain wouldn’t settle in anything smaller than the 53×13. So for two more laps I was doing some serious mashing to stay with the field. This wasn’t going to work so I pulled into the pit, explained I needed to reskewer the wheel, but they gave me a fresh wheel anyway. I took that and hopped back in.

For all the talk about this course I’d heard before the race, I didn’t think it was nearly as dangerous as I was thinking it was going to be. In fact, this was by far one of the most fun crit courses I’ve done around here. It certainly beats the Ephrata “four corner turn left” course hands down.

Marc Simpson gobbled up the early bonus seconds to slide forward but I managed to keep Lance behind me for the bulk of the race and held on for 7th in the GC. Absolutely awesome course and really fun crit.

End of the day, I came home, went to bed and slept for 10 hours last night. Bed early again tonight and back to the training routine. Me and the TT bike are going to get crazy acquainted over the next two months to see if I can sort out my issues there.

Thanks to the guys on the team for the support. We’ve got some serious racing to get done the rest of the summer and I look forward to better legs than I had this weekend. This was an awesome stage race.

Anyway… I was gonna post some charts and numbers and stuff, but my MS Excel is really ticking me off, so I shall digress.

Ride hard, ride lots!
VW

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Everything. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.