Well, that’s it. The season is officially over. The road racing season was over with a Turkey Day double up for fun racing. The plan that day was to race hard, be a factor, get in some moves and have fun. That was accomplished. With that in the bag, I rolled to my final event of the season.
Couple months ago, I ponied up to do the bike leg of the Chesapeake Man Ultra Triathlon. (It’s not a “sanctioned” Ironman, but it’s an Ironman distance). When I heard about it, I thought - sure, I can turn in 4 hr 30 min for 112 miles, why not? After the fall Church Creek and Millersburg TT, I did some reassessment and figured I’d be pretty stoked to be under 5 hrs for that distance and made 4 hr 45 min as my goal.
That sort of distance was going to be new on the TT bike. It’s not really something I felt comfortable pacing solely off power. Fortunately, I’m really comfortable on a bike out at that time so I just knew what I could hold power wise, and planned to pace more based on speed. As it came out, I blew that pacing plan too - just like I have in every TT I’ve done this year. This time it worked in my favor though.
The team swimmer got out of the water and put me on the bike in about 15-18th, I’d guess. There were a handful more swimmers out of the water first, but they were doing the swim only. So off I rolled. I settled in quick and got out on a short 15ish mile spur that you have to complete before heading out onto the two laps of the course. I was flying by folks pretty fast, comfortable over the 40kph mark for a while. I counted 10 riders in front of me at the turn around there and started counting as I went.
From that point, it was nothing exciting. Spin, spin, spin, pass someone. Before got to the 65 mile mark I was down to one rider out in front by ~2 minutes. I passed him about 10 miles later and pretty quickly pulled away from him.
The power file shows me really starting to suffer as I rolled into about the 3 hr 45 min mark. Cadence started to get choppy with a lot more stops/starts in pedaling. By that point things like bumps in the road were starting to kick into my shoulders. A good stretch of ~10 miles of straight on head wind followed by another 3-4 miles of absolutely horrendous road conditions were no fun.
Those cruddy road conditions were followed up with some stretches of really great roads - except the tide had rolled in over the road in 3 low spots, so had to slow down to a crawl to get through that. As a road cyclist, I’m also a little more used to good clean water bottle hand offs, but bless the volunteers that were out there on the road - you couldn’t take any chances and roll fast through the feed zones or you were not going to get a bottle. It was much better off slowing to a crawl and making sure you got a bottle and a banana, otherwise you were going to suffer soon.
On the good notes - there was really pretty good organization. Things moved along well, there was tons of schwag to go around and the roads were well monitored and policed. It looked like the community was really out in force in some places - especially when I got to my second lap and I was rolling along passing folks that were still on their first lap. My first lap got awfully lonely for about 2 hrs, not seeing anyone but the locals mowing their lawns.
Final result: My bike time, 112 miles - 4 hrs 33 min 8 sec. Avg speed 39.6 kph from chip mat (off the bike) to chip mat (off the bike).
Powertap shows 4 hr 32 min and change with an avg speed of 39.6 kph. My first 3 hrs were over the 40 kph range, and I had two separate (non-overlapping) 42 kph hours. From ~3 hr 15 min to 4 hrs was the worst at 37.5 kph.
This helped our team to a total time of just over 9 hours to win the relay category by over 2 hrs, and the fastest time of the day overall as well. Pretty stoked with my bike time as well. It’s the fastest bike
time they’ve had on this course in the 5 yrs they’ve been running the event for any individual or combination of relays. A little disappointed after the fact that I didn’t get under the 4 hr 30 min mark. But I’ll admit to being pretty stinking spent at the end of the day.
And with that, the season ends. 2 weeks of some serious long miles for fun before rolling into two weeks completely off the bike. Then, we start looking at the 2010 plan.
