Mike's Bike Blog

After a 1 week rain delay yesterday brought an end to the RunFar Time Trial. The conditions seemed perfect, low wind and NOT 104 degrees. The night before I readied my bike by replacing the front tire with a new tire and put on my 11x23 cassette. I was a little worried that I might have sabotaged my race with my lunch. It's not very often that my wife and my paths align during the day for us to meet for lunch, but yesterday such alignment did occur. I very rarely eat out but this would be one special occasion and what do you do on a special occasion, you eat Indian buffet of course. As we left the Indian Palace I was well under the "roll me out" limit so I felt somewhat good that I hadn't over done it. I kept telling myself that the extra calories would come in handy during the race, but knew deep down I was just kidding myself for we all know that carbo loading is somewhat a myth (the time carbohydrate consumption is valuable is 0-60 minutes after a workout i.e. recovery. That's when the glycogen synthase enzyme which controls glycogen storage is most active. Any excess food you eat leading up to the race is going to be passed through the bowels.)

When I got to the veloway I did 3 warm up laps and was quite pleased with the way my legs felt and didn't have any stomach issues so I was as ready as I'd ever be. I rolled up to the start and let it fly. On first 2 miles I thought I might have went out a little too hard so tried to stay around 300 watts for miles 2-4. It's hard to say if this helped, but on paper it looks like it hurt me in the long run. For this 2nd stretch was my slowest time split, my average speed dropped to 21.6 mph, but I did average 299 watts. The time split for this section was 5:32. Looking back at it I rode all the other sections soundly and if I had not had pulled up here I could have crushed my previous personal best time on the course. Actually there's something else that affected my time in this section that might have been more of a factor than my pacing. As I approached the turnaround point I caught 2 other riders and had to slow down to 9 mph well before I would have as I made the turn onto 1826. I caught the 2nd rider right at the turn forcing me to slow again and maneuver around a 3rd rider on the other turn back onto 45. This is what probably cost me the most time on this section.

In the end I beat my previous best time by almost 10 seconds with a time of 19:47 (previous best time was 19:56.6). This last TT I finally held the power that I knew I could hold for 20 minutes. All other times I would try for 300 watts but failed on all other attempts, which left me scratching my head as I've held 295-300 in other 20 minute efforts while doing FTP intervals.

I really like Time Trials and had a kick in the pants doing the RunFar TT's and I already can't wait till next spring when they resume. Next year I'll be shooting for an average speed of 25+ mph. It sure would be nice to have the full time trial set up, dedicated TT bike, aero helmet, skin suit and the booties. I also wish the RunFar results would distinguish TT set up riders versus those riders that do the time trial Eddy Merckx style (regular road bike, helmet and no fancy aero nothing). It would be nice to see how I stack up to the others doing the TT Merckx style.

Here's the breakdown of my efforts this season (Best time splits are in green):