Today, most of the Intermountain Orthopaedics elite team and a few “guests” headed out from Reed Cycle to pre-ride the Chicken Dinner road race course. This course is new for this year, thought it uses some roads we’ve raced on in prior events. There was a strong SSE wind today and it seemed that the further south we went, the stronger the wind was! I had to do some creative maneuvering times to avoid the tumbleweeds again!

We all headed out together, but after 30 minutes I decided to drop off the group and ride at my own pace. My plan was to ride a steady tempo to the course, do a lap near threshold, then ride back at tempo. Since the ride was going to be about four hours, I didn’t want to blow myself in the first hour. Once I was on my own I settled into a nice 250-watt pace. I got to the course and stopped to take off my skull cap. I probably overdressed since we headed out at 8:00 AM. Then I started on the course and the wind was crazy! When I made the right on Ross Lane, it was a screaming tailwind, so I wasn’t really able to get my power up. On the downhills I easily spun-out my 53×12. On the flats I tried to put the power down, but my legs were feeling tired, so it was more like upper tempo.

Then I finally got to the final climbs. I was already familiar with the first one from the Tour of Eagle a few years ago. But on this course, we’d make a right turn on Perch. Perch had a nice, curvy downhill, but as I was descending, I could look up and see what was to come…the monster climb! It was steeper and longer than the one on Deer Flat. This is definitely going to be one tough race! Climbing into a headwind is never fun, and today all I had was my 39×23! I made it to the top and tried to push it to the point on the course where I started. I timed myself at a pathetically slow 45 minutes for the 14.5 mile loop.

After that I just rode tempo for a while. Since I had passed the rest of the group while they were taking a break, they finally caught up to me a little while later. I decided I didn’t want to be out in this wind too much longer so I joined in the rotation. When we headed north, we had a screaming tailwind, which was fun. But as we progressed eastward we’d have a strong crosswind which necessitated an echelon or two. When I got back home, I clocked just under four hours and about 80.2 miles. Definitely a tough day in the saddle!