Entries at indoor time trials started at $25 in Boston this winter. I really didn’t want to spend my hard earned cash just to get a W/kg score seeing as I have a trainer and power meter of my own. Yet for some reason I still signed up. Must have been the lack of competition during these winter months that made me pull the trigger. And it’s been an extra long off season. Or maybe it’s because all the triathletes sign up for these things months ahead of time which made me rush to make a decision. Anyways, it’s been a while since I’ve written about anything, so I’ll back up a bit for a lengthy and potentially (likely?) very boring post.
Last July when I got sick my weight dropped from 170 to 150. In October I started recovering and swelled to 180 lbs with water weight and looked like the Michelin Man. I did a few cross races, but dang those were miserable. The water weight dropped steadily as my digestive track came back to normal. After training consistently for a few months now my weight is down to 165 lbs. My legs don’t seem quite as muscular as I remember them being and I suspect I’m still carrying a few additional pounds of water weight. Still, 165 lbs is a good end of the season racing weight for me and it’s February now. It’s like someone pushed a reset button on my body and I’m starting from scratch.
So low weight, check. How about the watts? During training I like to have every pedal stroke metered if possible. Not that I’m freaking out about being plus or minus 5 watts in January, but I do like to compare numbers from year to year. One would think I should have a pretty good idea of where my watts should be.
But no, last Wednesday I discovered that my stupid overpriced power meter was off. I’d been suspicious about its accuracy for a few weeks because my progress was too great. Torque offset calibration had been OK at the start of the rides, but this time I checked it at the end of warmup and it was off. How off? I’m really not sure exactly but after correcting files in Excel it seemed like it could have been 20 or 30% too high. That’s pretty bad. Turns out it wasn’t just recent data either. Workouts as far back as early 2008 were out of calibration. That yellow computer on my handlebars was basically just a random number generator. I should have taken more care in learning to check the stupid calibration. How many people do you think ride around with power meters that are out of whack?
The weekend of the indoor time trial arrived and something really weird happened: it got super ridiculously nice out. Obviously I needed to ride, a lot. Because riding outside in nice weather is fun. Or maybe because I needed an excuse on Sunday why my watts were so terrible. On Saturday it was 50 out by mid-afternoon and it felt like I was going in early by stopping after 4 hours. On Sunday my start time wasn’t until 2:20, just enough time to get 70 miles in before hand. Who rests for an indoor time trial when it’s that nice out anyways?
I got to Landry’s about 45 minutes early, changed, put on my trainer tire, and weighed in. 167 lbs with clothes. I was 185 with clothes last year at Harpoon. That was really high for me, but still, that’s quite a difference.
There was absolutely no need to warm up at this point but everyone else was doing it so I thought hey why not. Landry’s had a pretty cool trainer setup in their back garage. Actually, I didn’t really warm up. It was more just sitting on my bike moving my little pedals at about 80 watts thinking about how much my legs hurt and how stupid it was that I was here. Wah, wah wah. Like Jonny Bold would say, race like men should race.
By the way, the Landry’s staff was incredible putting this on. As soon as I walked in the front door, someone immediately took my bike to the garage and set it up on a trainer for me. When it came time to race, another person took my bike from the back garage to the race area. I wasn’t sure whether to feel pro or like a complete noob that can’t handle his own bike, but either way it was nice.
As for the race, what can I say? I sat on a trainer and pedaled as hard as I could. Actually, I took it kind of easy for the first 5 minutes and after that it was hard. More or less just steady cruise control all the way. I don’t really remember breathing all that hard but oh boy did my legs hurt. I think the computrainer said I averaged right around 300W for the ~17:15 it took for me to finish. That was way better than I expected.
My teammate Landen won the heat in about 16:50, but we were all well back of the wining time of the day: 14:55. And because I know he will ctrl-F my race report just to search for his name, Dave Chiu blew himself to pieces by drinking Pellegrino during the race. Nice job Dave!
In hindsight was it worth $25? Yep. After the race there were pastries, bread, coffee, and beer… for free! Actually I suppose there was nothing stopping you from having this before the race. Richard Fries was entertaining as always calling the heats and the music was blasting like I was in a nightclub. The heckling doesn’t get much better either. And somehow I got a good workout in there so it was all guilt free.
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