Wells Ave 3/16 - B Race

First race of the season today. After a good amount of alpine ski racing this winter and not a whole lot of time on the trainer (<5 hours per week), I was eager to see how my legs would hold up. Alpine ski racing is like doing 30-60 second intervals, which is probably the opposite of what is ideal for the off-season. I had a fear that I would get owned in the early season races.

I splurged and picked up a powertap back in November. Thank you Ebay for the $700 price tag (brand new 2.4 wired built on an open pro rim). I also picked up a copy of trainingpeaks WKO+. No more processing Garmin Edge data to estimate power in my own Excel workbook, exciting stuff. Anywho, now I have some more content for the blog.

It was cold out this morning, 35F and a 30% chance of snow. My fingers were frozen pretty much all day, feet weren't much better. The C race was going when I arrived at Wells, and not a very big field. It looked like six guys had exploded the field apart. I was happy to learn that they were going to run separate B and A races. I think we had a field of 40 or so, the A's looked like they had even more (60?). Pretty sweet turnout all things considered.

The B race felt slow right from the start, always nice. My perceived effort was low to moderate for most of the race, and the PT data pretty much said the same. Average HR was 171 and average power was 194W, which is comfortably below my threshold values. In addition, a prime lap that got my HR up to 194 was surprisingly easy to recover from. Looking back at last year's performances average HR's ran upwards of 185 and HR's of 194 would pretty much end a race for me. I was very pleased with my fitness given my sub-par winter training.

The pace lifted up significantly for the half way prime ($10/$5!). Coming up the hill on turn 2 a Quad Cycle rider attacked hard. This was the first real attack of the race and no one responded at all. I was boxed in about 12-15 deep, and never had a real shot. I think I rolled through about 6th, and the Quad Cycle guy just managed to hold off the field.

The prime bell rang with 11 to go, and an IBC racer that I recognized attacked up the side. I jumped up to his wheel and I thought 1 or 2 other may have too. I pulled through on the back stretch thinking we had a group of 4, but by turn 3 it was just me. Not sure how big of a gap I had, but I thought it was probably ~30m so I put my head down and kept at it. Three or four people caught me about 50m before line, bummer. A solo flyer is not my usual tactic but it sure was fun.

We were averaging about 24 mph when things got mixed up with traffic at about 10 to go. The police officer that was directing traffic was not stopping cars when the peloton was coming. We got stuck behind a line of traffic and most of the field sat up, yet one racer attacked off the front and around the traffic. On the next three laps or so the field ran into the same problems with traffic. We were going 18mph at times and I averaged 100 watts almost every lap from 10 to 5 to go. The solo flyer stayed out of sight for the rest of the race, although the word in the field was that he had been pulled, but who knows.

With two to go a larger rider came around me. This was the guy who's wheel I wanted for the finish. I hopped on and fought other riders off to hold it. On turn 3 of the final lap we were annoyingly far back in the field, probably at least half way back. A rider on with Zipp404's came around the side running silky smooth, so I bailed on my big guy and swapped wheels. Coming out of turn 4 I had been pulled up to 15th wheel or so, but my 404 guy was blowing up. I came around a lot earlier than I had planned and went for it with a long sprint, ~800W average for 15s. I couldn't catch the leaders and I think I finished in 7th, maybe 15m back. A pretty pleasing result for me, and I think with a little luck or better positioning I could have been right there with the leaders.

After the race I rode home at a good pace to do some sweet spot training. Riding hard and long is my favorite type of training, and this season I plan to do a lot more of it. Looking back at last season I did far too much interval training, and certainly not enough training after races. Pleasing results help motivation for this type of training after races, the challenge as the season goes on will be to find motivation after bad races.

My first big race of the season will be the Battenkill-Roubaix up in Salem, NY on April 19.