Charlie Baker Time Trial, 6/3

I’m on a rest week here after Killington and the only intensity I have planned was the CBTT. Only 4 more weeks until Fitchburg, so might as well work on the TT position. Hopefully 2 TT workouts per week until then will have me dialed in.

Based on my recent results and power, I think my position has some sort of magical aeroness to it. I would not expect 3.5 W/kg LT efforts to yield very good results for a cat3, but somehow they’re not bad. This has me almost a little afraid to make any big adjustments, even though I haven’t even had this bike on a trainer even once to do a proper fitting.

That being said I did lower my saddle by ~0.75cm for last night. At KSR the saddle height was set based on the assumption that I’d be doing most of my pedaling on the nose of the saddle. If I pushed back on the seat the saddle height was obviously too high. It irritated me feeling locked into that one position. I think this is just a sign that I need to spend more time on the bike.

This week I once again targeted 285W for average power. I checked the PT computer several times in the first few minutes to make sure I wasn’t going too hard, but went by feel after the 5 minute mark. How is it that 300W feels so easy early on and so hard at the end?

Not one mile into the course I see Dave Chiu doing a 180 up the road. He said he was doing tempo intervals tonight and not racing. Sure enough, I pass him and suddenly I have someone sucking my wheel for the next 20 minutes… sweet! At first I thought, is he on my wheel? I can’t tell… That soon changed to: must… keep… pedaling… hard…. And as the pain built and built it progressed to: must drop this joker on the next hill! Dave, next time you need to bring a flip camera or something so my readers can have a youtube clip of my backside to watch for 20 minutes.

I finished in 23:08 officially, with 270W AP and 279W NP. My estimated time at standard weather conditions is 22:55, which is actually faster than last week’s 22:58. If you could deal with the heat last week, the low air density and favorable wind conditions sure made it fast.

Obviously the higher NP (and AP) should result in a faster time, but 3 seconds faster doesn’t seem like much. My estimated CdA last week was 0.228 (236W to go 40 kph) which is pretty darn slippery for someone 6’1” 74kg on a relatively low budget. This week it seemed to have slipped slightly to 0.235 (243W to go 40 kph). This could be due to my handlebars not slipping during the race, which lowered my forearms but also my elbows and shoulders. It could also be due to my slightly lower saddle position, which opened up my chest slightly. There really wasn’t anything about this week’s position that would have been faster, other than maybe a conscious effort to keep my head in the right position, so this isn’t totally unexpected.

By not looking at the power meter I was a lot more variable in my output. As you can see in Figure 1, even early on I was resting on downhills at 200W while punching the uphills at closer to 350W. The slope of the trend line in Figure 3 is 1472 which is a lot higher than the typical 1000-1200 values I usually see. Was it faster? I’m not sure. It did make my VI (NP ÷ AP) a lot higher than I usually see in a TT. VI is also affected by poor pacing, but this week appeared to be pretty typical in that respect. Maybe I need to start making a number to quantify this.

I thought that the lower saddle position felt a lot more comfortable, so I was disappointed when I finished and saw the AP only at 270W. I thought it would be closer to 280W, especially with Nacho drafting and heckling me (with his MIND, he didn't actually say anything) the entire time. The one other factor I haven’t mentioned, because it’s borderline inappropriate, is the lack of skin on my saddle area. I also ran out of chamois cream tonight, so that was an area of extreme discomfort. Maybe I’ll get some magical watts when that heals.