Sucking Wheels Sucks

Yesterday's Team Time Trial was rather disappointing for me even though we did a quite respectible time that was good for 5th place in the Cat. 1,2,3 category and less than a minute out of 3rd. The disappointing part was that I was feeling like crap. I guess the road trip up to Iowa and associated off-the-bike time had more of an effect than I expected. The TTT was only about 32 mi. - three laps of a loop mostly along the Mississippi River. I felt OK for the first lap, but when we hit the headwind section on the second lap I just didn't have any power at all. I was on Robin's wheel most of the time and he would take these long pulls into the wind at 28 or 29 mph. By the second lap, I was struggling just to hang onto his wheel and could only manage about 30 pedal strokes after coming around for my pull before my speed would drop a couple of mph. The last lap was pure torture and I was reduced to taking very short pulls and sucking wheel a lot, so I was feeling pretty disappointed that I couldn't really contribute much. I mean, usually I'm the smallest rider on the team, so I always feel strong in Team Time Trials since I get a better draft and therefore more recovery than the rest of the team. Our team consisted of three Masters riders and Branden, who upgraded to Cat. 3 just a couple of weeks ago. Our group of Robin, Rick, Branden and myself was very, very smooth and I think that if I had been in better shape we could have easily finished 15-30 seconds faster - even more if Branden hadn't been riding his regular road bike without even aero-bars (long story there...). Still, we were in good company in the final results, averaging around 26.2 mph with a top speed just over 31, which was pretty good considering the heat and wind, and we easily beat both of the NBO teams, although one of them had a crash that must have cost them a couple of minutes. I think we lost a bit of time on the second lap when we let it drop down to about 24 for quite a while.

So I get up this morning determined to get back to my regular training routine and, of course, it's raining. It seems that there's always some sort of conspiracy involving the weather and my life that screws up my training routine around this time of year. I had decided after the criterium championships where I had ridden myself well into the ground, that I would take it easy the next week, which I did. But then we had to drive up to Iowa City the next week, which meant three full days off the bike and two short easy days, so instead of the usual 200 miles or so during the week, I did all of 50, none of which was at race intensity. Not that it wasn't a nice trip. I really enjoyed it, actually. I just guess I should have been a little more compuslive about riding while I was there. The older I get, the faster I lose fitness. I guess by the time I'm 60 I'll have to be riding three times a day just to stay in shape!!