Trial by Time

The Time Trial is often called the "Race of Truth." Some riders, myself included, have less-flattering names for it. Like trips to the dentist, time trials are things that I make myself do now and then. Rather than glorious victory, I tend to strive for mere adequacy. Sometimes, as Adam Osborne used to say, "Adequacy is sufficient." Nowadays it seems that adequacy demands sub-hour times for a standard 40k TT like today's. The results from the TT are at http://www.gnofn.org/~nobc/2004/lams_tt_r.htm.

I can remember being quite pleased with TT times of 1:07. Then again, I can remember wool shorts with leather chamois. Nasty, those things were, but I digress. Today it is hard to take a time trial seriously if you aren’t equipped with the latest time-trial frame, $3,000 wheelset, carbon-fiber aero-bars, TT helmet and snazzy shoe-covers. In my case, I clip on a set of aero-bars I inherited from a rider who retired from racing, remove my water-bottle cages (purely for psychological reasons), put on my 20-year-old skinsuit, and prepare for an hour of painful mental warfare. With a fairly serious headwind blowing down the outbound leg of the course, it was going to be a long way to the turnaround. Here’s the play-by-play:

• Matt counts me down from 10 seconds in French (I think I did that to him earlier this year when I was the starter for the Tour de La). ... trois, deux, un - and I take off. I try to take off at a medium pace, but the first time I look at the computer it reads 27. Let's see. 27 mph into a headwind for the next 20k? "I don't think so."
• Half a mile in and I’m at 26 mph and starting to go anaerobic. I gradually drop it down to 25 to see how long I can hold that.
• I look up and see that I’m about to catch my minute-man. WTF? I’m only 2 miles in, and I’m not going that fast.
• By 5 mi. I’ve finally started to settle in and am holding around 24 – 24.5 mph., which I know from experience is about the bare minimum, but it is hurting.
• About half-way out I come to the boat launch area where there are fewer trees alongside the road and the wind hits me in the face like a bag of cement. My speed drops to 23 and I shift down a cog to the 53x16. I can see my 2-minute man just up the road and my 3-minute man a bit farther up.
• The wind eases a bit and I get back into the 24 mph range and am rolling pretty well, but it’s been so long since I’ve done one of these blasted things that I am very unsure how hard I can afford to go without blowing up. Every now and then I slow down one mph or so for a little recovery. Not really a good idea, as it turned out, but I pass two more riders before the turnaround.
• I make my usual fast and clean turnaround. I realize this is my favorite part of the TT – you know, the part that is most like a Crit! Figures.
• I’m immediately disappointed because the tailwind isn’t as nice as I had been expecting (it never is), but I find that I can handle 27-28 most of the way back, with a few surges up to 30 or so.
• I pass a bunch of the women and a few bicycle tourists who have wandered onto the closed TT course, and pick my way through herds of gigantic black and yellow crickets having insect sex in the middle of the road.
• Finally, I can see the finish from about a kilometer out and I gut out a long stretch at about 29 mph to finish. I don’t feel too bad, and already I’m realizing that I probably could have gone a bit faster. I end up with a 59:05, which will suffice to prevent any major embarrassment, but isn’t going to look too great next to all the 56s and 57s that I know the Real ™ time trialists are going to turn in, not to mention the 54:10 that 40+ Frank M ends up doing. I think my 40k PR is a high 57, though, so I can't really be very disappointed.

After I finish, there are still a lot of riders who haven’t even started yet, and I notice that nobody is entering results yet (I had made an Excel workbook for results the night before when one of the organizers called and didn’t have anything to use). Well, they’ve made some crucial organizational mistakes results-wise and I see it’s going to become a problem, so I head down to the finish line and get the complete results sheets for the masters, waiting around a few minutes for the last few of the old guys to finish. We enter all of that into the computer and wait, and wait, and don’t get the rest of the results, basically all of the non-age-graded riders,until the last riders come in. Then the generator supplying electricity for my old dead-battery laptop runs out of gas!! Meanshile, riders are gathering around the results table looking over our shoulders and wondering what’s taking so long. Robin heads off to get more gas, and I tell Todd he’d better start doing the senior results by hand, which he does. We finally get the generator working again and the results out (man, we REALLY needed a printer!!) before the mob turns angry on us.
I hustle home and immediately hit the road for Florida – dried salt still on my face – and spend the next three hours in the car plugged into the inverter putting the senior results into the spreadsheet and building the results web page.
Still, it was a great event with probably the best turnout for a time trial ever in La/Ms, and I get the results up on the website around 7 pm when I arrive at Sandestin. And then, finally, a SHOWER!!!