Eagle, ID — I didn’t feel much better than yesterday when I woke up today. My legs were still feeling heavy, but at least my resting HR was down a bit. Ted picked me up and we drove out to the Blacks Creek exit. The wind was blowing like crazy. I think it was stronger than when I came out this past Wednesday. It was also overcast and cold. The only good thing about the weather was that it wasn’t raining or snowing. We setup our trainers on the leeward side of Ted’s minivan to warmup. When I started spinning at an easy pace, things were fine. But the minute I increased my effort, my legs immediately started burning. When I did a push at threshold, it felt awful. I was able to hold it but it burned. I knew at that point this TT would be a sufferfest.
After a 25-minute warm-up, we decided that was good enough and headed over to the start line. They were using a chip timing system so just one of us had to wear the chip on our ankle. To start, we just had to roll over the sensor mat on the grournd. Since Ted tends to go out too hard, I led it out for the start. I slowly brought us up to speed. With the kicking tailwind, that meant about 30MPH! The course was a 15-mile out and back that we did twice. On the way out we had a tailwind, with a slight cross effect. At one point Ted complained that his watts were too high when I was pulling. Then I showed him where to be to get the best draft. It was only a couple feet back from my front wheel and too the right. So the draftee needed to be more to the side of, rather than behind, the lead rider. Once we figured that out we were cruising. We were consistently hitting 32-34MPH.
My legs hurt, but the speed was worth it. After seven miles we got to the turn around. There was a moment of confusion since there wasn’t a course marshal out there so Ted wasn’t sure it was the turnaround. I figured it was since I saw the 1KM to go sign. Once we turned around we hit that headwind like a brick wall! I was in my small ring the whole way back and we were crawling at 16-17MPH at times. It seemed that 20-30 second pulls on the front were about all we could do before losing speed or wattage, regardless of how much rest we got in the draft. I even toyed with the idea of asking Ted if he wanted to quit after our fist “lap”, but I kept that thought to myself. Later, it turns out that Ted had the same idea. But we stuck it out and got to the Start/Finish for our second lap. I timed our first lap at 40:38.
The second time on the tailwind section I felt better, but coming back felt the same…awful! We grinded to the line and I recorded a time of 40:02 for our second lap. That was one tough TT! We decided to wait until we got home to spin out and just packed up the car and checked the results on the way out. With the chip timing, they had results up by the time we left. Since most of these timing systems are optimized for running events, the results format was very confusing. At first we thought our time was 1:30, which would have been really pathetic. Then Jeff, the race director explained it to us and we were actually 4th, with a time of 1:20:27. We were kind of disappointed since we were hoping for better. But we both came into this TT not rested. Plus I’m on a training plan that doesn’t have me peaking until mid-April.
Either way it was a great FT (functional threshold) workout. It was also good to do a low-key event like this as the first local race. Should lessen the pre-race jitters for next week. We also got to chat with some of the other racers. Chris A. was there on his super-scooter acting as a for-profit support vehicle. He had a couple wheels on the back of it and he even has it rigged to hold a bike if needed. Not many of the local races have nuetral support…I’m sure during the heat of a race someone would agree to pay a pretty penny for a fresh wheel Chris provides. Great business idea!
When I got home I was wasted and just ate some food and then took a nap. When I awoke I was really groggy. I think I napped too long. I usually don’t take naps because of that, and even when I try to keep it to 20 minutes, I still get groggy. I forced myself to get on the trainer and ride the PowerCranks for exactly 1:01 to meet my planned 19 hours this week. It was tough, even while watching Tour videos, but I got it done then ate a big dinner. Another tough Build 1 week and I’m feeling it!
Full Results (.PDF)
Registration List (helpful since the results don’t have team rider names)