After a day of travel on Monday and a short recovery ride Tuesday, I felt I was ready for a real ride come Wednesday. I went out and did a couple efforts plus some sprints. They felt good, and it was definitely nice to be riding in much less humid weather, but I wasn’t expecting any great power readings. After I downloaded my PowerTap data I was surprised to find I broke three of my CP’s: 5, 12 and 30 seconds. I only broke my bests for this year, I still have yet to break my all-time bests, but I am only a few percentage points off in most of those (as pictured…I’ve purposely hidden the actual values as that info is confidential ;-). I think if I actually tapered to do CP testing or raced with the PowerTap more often, I would have broken a few of my all-time bests by now. I definitely would have loved to of had power data from the Pro/1/2 crit I did last Saturday!

Then on Thursday, I went out in the morning for a short tempo ride. I felt really good from the start so I decided to keep the effort up for a whole hour. I was riding my race bike so I didn’t have my PowerTap but anytime I looked down at the speedo I was doing around 24-26mph! I thought to myself, “That can’t be right, the speedo must be set wrong.” That’s because it didn’t feel that hard. But when I finished the ride I noticed I clocked a time of 51:29 which is about 3 minutes faster than I’ve ever done that ride…and that was with a small detour which made it longer than usual!

Today I went out with Ted and did an even shorter, but faster ride. I met Ted at Reeds, then we headed out to ride at race-pace, as if we were were in a break or a two-person TT. I told him to start on State St, but I didn’t make it clear that I meant after we get off Old State St by the west side of the bypass. So without much of a warm-up, Ted ramps it up to 31mph! I was thinking to myself, “What the @#$^ is he doing?!” When he finally signaled me to pull through, I told him to ease up as that was definitely more than a time trial pace. I think he was probably putting out 600 watts but neither of us had our PowerTaps today. We then settled into a 26-27mph rotation and kept it up for most of the loop. I didn’t feel as good today as I did yesterday, but I still felt I was able to lay the power down. Ted seems to have good short-term power right now. So in addition to my decent long-term power, I think we both have a chance at doing well tomorrow, depending on how the race unfolds.