Another hot night at the CBTT. 85°F come race time. Wind was calm, and if I could keep the power good, I expected it would be a fast night. As long as I could stand the heat of course.
That was a big if though. I’ve felt lousy the past couple of weeks. My most recent cycle of antibiotics really hit me hard, but at least it finally took out whatever kind of infection I had. Oddly, it left my leg and foot swollen, and my doctor says I should just wear compression tights. Beats me. Hopefully I’ll start having a bit more energy sooner than later.
Fitness has really gone down since KSR. I’m kind of at the point where I download my power files but don’t log them. It’s too painful seeing your weekly volume numbers at 75% of where you’d like them. Once I start feeling like I’m crushing it again I’ll have to log it all. This is far from the ideal leadup to Longsjo.
On a much more positive note, I think I mostly fixed a major shifting issue on my De Rosa TT bike. For KSR I had sort of a makeshift solution with an external cable running all the way from the shifter to the rear derailleur. The internal routing had some weird sort of slop in it. As the cable tension increases, something internally compresses which means the derailleur doesn’t move and no shifty shifty. Argh!
It’s been a while since I’ve read setup directions for a rear derailleur so I don’t know if this is “right”, but normally I just shift into the 11T, pull the cable tight, and lock it down. Takes 2 seconds.
Ended up doing the entirely opposite approach with the TT bike. I forced the rear derailleur into the easy gear (big cog) position, then took a pair of pliers and tightened the living heck out of the cable before locking it down. The idea was to compress whatever is moving around internally. It took a few tries, I had to ask Erica for help because I didn’t have enough hands, and I still had to back the fine adjustment dial way out after locking it down, but I think I created enough cable tension to compress whatever slop there is inside the frame.
And it KIND OF works! Sure, there are plenty of times where I shift up or down and nothing happens, but if that happens I just shift again and it’s all good. I had this problem with the externally routed housing solution so I think I’m just going to go with it. Maybe it’ll get broken in over time. If nothing else I’m happy that it looks like a normal bike now. TT bikes look FAST.
So yeah, this is a race report, because I did a race. Well the bike setup and lead up to the race is about the most interesting part because my Powertap went way out of calibration for some reason and I got bad data. I averaged 84 watts! At least I hope that’s incorrect… Kind of annoying because I just shelled out $300 to Saris to get this thing overhauled.
I probably went out too hard. I glimpsed down a time or two after accelerating up to speed to make sure I wasn’t doing 400W or something (which seem to happen all the time). It read two hundred and something so I thought I was all good. That might have been a legit reading but I don’t know. Who cares. What I do know was that I hurt pretty early on. It’s a TT though so it’s supposed to hurt. I looked down again around 5 minutes in and I was doing 120W. Sweet. Time to go by feel.
Gary Jas-ican’tspellit started a minute behind me and passed me just after the Carlisle rotary. He ended up going sub-21 so that makes sense but it was still frustrating at the time. My split at the rotary was low 10’s, which is right on target, and I generally thought my speed was decent so who cares what the watts were.
I always seem to blow up around that stair step hill on Monument Road at the town line about 15 minutes in. That’s where it starts to hurt really really badly anyways. Keeping my speed over that hill always sends me into the red enough that I’m backing way off on the gradual downhills that follow. One of these days I might want it badly enough that I keep pedaling hard here. Today was not that day and I was slowwwwwwwww.
It was probably a good thing I didn’t have a power meter because I’m sure I was barely pedaling. It was like I was TRYING to go slow by the time I crested that final hill. You really need to power over the top to get your speed up again but I pretty much sat up instead. No fight in me. I gotta get this feeling lousy thing out of my head so I want to go fast again.
I finished in 23:22, 25.0 mph. Slowest time of the year but that’s still 16 seconds than my best time in 2009. Hooray aero gear! At least I have that going for me. There’s no way my average was above 260W today (3.56w/kg).
One other thing I totally forgot about until now. I forgot to bring a water bottle with me today! Keep in mind it was 85 out and I wore a long sleeve skin suit. Boy was I thirsty Good thing there’s a water fountain at the restrooms. I wonder if anyone thought it was weird that I kept pulling off to go to the bathrooms before the race?
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