Mtnracer

Off-the-bat, I’m poor at time-trialing. Most mountain bikers are poor at time trialing, with a few exceptions, but I am especially poor. Four years ago, when I was able to get top-3 in every road race I entered, I could barely get top-20 in a time trial, and that was with disc wheels, aero-helmets, skin suits, the whole number. So, when I lined up on Thursday for the Prologue to the Willamette Stage Race, I was intimidated, to say the least. I had dug up some old profile aerostrykes out of a cabinet in my garage, and only cruised two rest days on them.

I got in a nice solid warm up. I started warming up about 50 minutes before my start time, knowing that I had to get a good sweaty knee-lube going before I could hammer in a nice effort.

At the start line I spoke with a couple of the other races around me – mostly to reduce my jitters, and also to not act like the “lone ranger” which is the role I so often take in large competitions (cycling, poker, chess, caber tossing).

The guy behind me was from Vancouver, BC, and had come down with a whole team of Red Truck guys…I didn’t realize how fast they were until the next day, but I definitely envied the aero setup he had.

Off-the-gun I got in a good wind-up, settled into the aero bars alright, and worked into a motoring rhythm. The first right hand turn was only after perhaps 1/4 mile, and I stupidly thought I could take it the whole way while pedaling and in the aero bars. Holy crap that was stupid! I caught my inside pedal on the pavement, and completely kicked out my real wheel around the turn. I was unstable (to say the least) in my aero bars, and not having my rear wheel on the ground. Luckily, my mountain bike savviness saved me, and I was able to pull out of it without crashing.

The near-crash really set my hard pounding and my nerves ablaze. And, what do I do when I panic? I slam it into a big gear and pedal along at a real slow cadence to slow down my respiration. Mind you, this is my natural tendency, not a good one for racing, but something I think my body does to bring itself back to some sort of normal stasis. It is awful hard to gauge your effort level when your body is stressing from external factors, and you are using force as a maximizing factor. I will try and explain better:

• Force = gear, hill, or otherwise required output by your legs strength wise.
• Speed = cadence – how fast you are able to repeat the force.

The mistake that I made in the prologue was that I shifted into one of my biggest gears and then tried to pedal it as fast as I could (60-70RPMs). My heart was pounding and my nerves were attentive, but for the wrong reason – I narrowly avoided a crash, and so was still reacting to that. If I had instead used speed as a maximizing factor – pedaling 105RPMs in the biggest gear I can push, for example – I would have had a lot less fluctuation in perceived exertion, and probably done a bit better.

Regardless, I finished third-to-last with a time of: 9:58.6, 1:56.93 down from the leader. Wow! quite a loss for a prologue – looks like I will be aiming for a good stage for the rest of the race. If I calculated this right, my average speed was 24.66MPH over 6.6k/4.1miles, and the winner averaged 30.69MPH – wow! Looks like I have some room for improvement – (hehe) to say the least!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under Racing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.