Working Man's Stage Race - Stage 1

I'd been looking forward to this time trial all season. The course is flat and has lots of turns, so if any TT would suit me well, this would be it. I got a new stem with a 30 degree drop and I was excited to be in a more comfortable and faster (hopefully) position.

Unfortunately this race was pretty much over for me before I even started. About 20 minute before the start my rear tire randomly went flat. No idea why. The wheel was my Powertap training wheel with a disc cover, and the tube was probably at least 1000 miles old, maybe even 2000, so I guess it was time. Anyways, this left me with the decision of trying to fix the flat or using my backup wheel. Given that I had 20 minutes, I tried to repair it. This required more work than usual because I had to take off my disc cover to inflate the tube. I was keeping a close eye on the clock and headed over to the start what I thought was 3 minutes early. My cell phone time must have been much slower than the official start time, because I wasn’t even close. I am number 833 and 838 was going off when I got to the start. I think I started behind number 839, but looking at the results that doesn’t make much sense to me. Who knows.

To make matters worse I must’ve messed up my Powertap somehow when making the quick tire repair. It lost all signals and shut off some time around the start. I’ve become too reliant on using that thing for pacing and I started off way too fast. It came on and off through the race, and my heart rate stayed within the 187-190 bpm range, super high. On the long flat after the KOM downhill I puked in my mouth. At least the effort was there.

My official time was 18:28.64 (which is based on my scheduled start time), and I have no idea what my real time was. This puts me in 39^th (4^th to last), so there goes any hope of a G.C. result. I’d love to know what my actual time was just for the sake of knowing, but I can’t tell based on the Powertap data because there is a large deadband in the data. I thought I’d be able to figure out based on the results, but those don’t make sense to me either. Tough day, on to the next.